The return of old-style props in movie making

I read this article about CGI in the Guardian the other day, and thought it was good.

I'm so tired of CGI in films - it really can spoil a movie for me. Take Star Wars for instance - I think CGI was one of the big reasons that the prequels felt more lifeless and generally not as good as the originals.

In the article, a guy called Rob Burman makes a couple of interesting points. First, real props add to the physical reality of a film, as actors can react naturally to them, and they just look less 'shiny' and more real, because they are. But also, anything that is 'too CGI' and unbelievable can actually take you out of the movie, which surely defeats some of the point of using it? As Burman says: "It can look utterly believable, but if what you're watching is beyond possibility, it's hard to suspend your disbelief." As movie-goers, we can now usually tell when something is computer-generated, and if it isn't physically there, the scene just seems less real.

And for me, believability and realism is very important, as I love to get lost in films, but that doesn't tend to happen very much these days. So many films of the past would possess nothing of the charm they do if they'd been made with CGI, and so I really hope that real props start to make a comeback sometime soon.