OK. So celebrity and the oddities associated with it, has been a frequent topic on this blog. [See: Point Counterpoint: Licata & Teco on Fame, for example] However, after seeing Sex and the City 2, it dawns on me there is a golden rule about using famous faces in a film. Or perhaps there ought to be.
Famous faces populate Sex and the City 2 in a fun way through a number of cameo appearances by the likes of Liza Minelli, Tim Gunn and Miley Cyrus, all of whom appear as themselves. Then, in an odd and somewhat jarring twist, Penelope Cruz makes an equally brief cameo in a party scene playing... a character! Not herself, but a character. A character we never see again.
What's up with that?
Seems to me that an audience needs to know the ground rules and they need to know them pretty early on. Either the film is employing famous faces as eye candy and for the sheer fun of celebrity spotting and they're either playing themselves or they're playing unnamed "characters" that are nothing more than placeholders for themselves, or they should be fully integrated into the entire cast -- top to bottom -- playing roles, as in the Ocean's Eleven franchise, for example.
One particularly jarring use of a famous face was the recent guest appearance by Allison Janney in one of the final episodes of LOST, a show that distinguished itself in many ways, not least of which was its rigorous use of unknown actors in its casts. How then, were we to suddenly buy Janney as a woman from 120 A.D.? It just felt weird. I know I half expected Martin Sheen or Rob Lowe to pop out of the jungle any moment throughout that strangely off-kilter episode.
What do you think? Is it possible to use celebrity faces in film without part of our response to them being fueled by who we know them to be as stars? Cary Grant was always sort of Cary Grant, no matter what "character" he was playing. Are there examples of films that successfully incorporate celebrity cameos and celebrities playing actual roles in the same story? I can't think of any.
