|
I must say I agree with Macalaure and not with you, Mith. It is impossible to find a girl who everybody will think drop dead gorgeous. As Valier said, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are some women in the filming industry nowadays - like Angelina Jolie and Jessica Alba - who are considered to be the top beauties, but neither one of them could have made a convincing Arwen, I think. I wonder who you would have in mind. I personally think PJ was looking for the otherworldly quality instead of a regular beauty.
When you look at the modelling industry today (I am a fashion freak, I admit it) you see that models like Gemma Ward and Devon Aoki are scarily successful: all women who have something freaky or alienesque about them. Ten years ago, no fashion editor would have glanced at them twice. In the days of Yeats, Maud Gonne was considered the edge of beauty. When you look at her portrait with a modern eye, hardly anyone finds her so.
With such shifting views of what is beautiful and not, Arwen needed to be timeless. While in many eyes she may be ugly and while we cannot predict whether future generations will see her beauty or not, Liv Tyler does have this Elvish quality, the something not quite ordinary aura surrounding and that will remain.
Added to that, the people who do think she's gorgeous, think she's divine. There's hardly an in between. Some men will certainly freeze in midstep when seeing her walk by. Besides, isn't having such power freaky in itself?
Of course, I am totally prejudiced. But that's not the issue.
P.S. I cannot judge her acting skills. Blaming the director for that.
|