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Very well put. I don't know how many scenes I've watched of actors gawking at empty space, while a CG "something" has hopped, leaped, skipped, danced, and backflipped over, past and around them...
In so many of these instances, it's so obvious that the marriage of actor and effect isn't really choreographed, and that a surprising amount of the visual effect's "action" is improvised, dreamed up and endlessly revised in post. When you see a scene that has been created in this process, the actor seems totally disconnected from the scene that is supposedly taking place.
Go back to the Harryhausen films, the older stuff, and you see that the visual effect's action--even though it was realized in post--was carefully choreographed from the start, and that the actors KNEW where the creature was and what, specifically, it was supposed to be doing. The actors were IN the scene. The scene consequently felt real. Actors have always "sold" effects to us, at least as much as the effects themselves did.
The problem isn't the new technology. CG is a cool tool, and on a good day, it's a part of the tool kit that's applied well, with a classical mindset.
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