A petition against Hollywood’s war on human expression.

Dear Hollywood,

We miss faces.

Not flawless surfaces hovering above couture. Faces. The kind that wrinkle when confused, crease when amused, tremble when frightened and, on truly extravagant occasions, actually move during an emotional scene.

Cinema is built on expression. A raised eyebrow can replace a page of dialogue. A forehead is not a continuity error. Crow’s feet are not failed visual effects. Age is not a curse to be broken with a needle or erased in post-production.

Yet from The Devil Wears Prada 2 to Practical Magic 2, recent nostalgia sequels have made one thing painfully clear: Hollywood keeps asking audiences to feel deeply while showing them faces under strict instructions to reveal as little as possible.

Between injectables, fillers, digital de-aging and the industry’s general terror of looking human, the soundtrack is now doing half the acting.

The damage may be worse than AI. At least AI has the decency to look artificial.

We are not demanding that anyone “age gracefully” — that patronising phrase usually reserved for women while men are permitted to become “distinguished.”

We are asking an industry built on human emotion to stop treating evidence of human life as a production defect.

Let witches look ancient.

Let mothers look lived-in.

Let villains sneer.

Let comedians raise both eyebrows.

Let actors act from the hairline down.

No more faces smoother than the screenplay.

No more close-ups of emotional taxidermy.

No more tragic revelations communicated entirely by violins.

We want wrinkles, movement, imperfection and humanity.

We want immersion.

We want acting.

We want cinema.

Hollywood, give us back the moving face.

Signed,

Visa Run Orchestra

Songs. Stories. Places. And, when medically possible, facial expressions.