I absolutely care about historical accuracy! That’s why that show depicting Rome in all white is so fucking dumb. It was a Mediterranean Empire, for fuck’s sake! It had people from all around the Mediterranean, even in the upper echelons. For instance, there were emperors from the Balkan and modern central Turkey.
But anyway, what matters more to me than the ethnicity or appearance of the characters is the faithful representation of social and political structures or technological restrictions. Race can play a part in this, but it’s hardly the only part and rarely the most important. Wealth, while often correlated with race, is generally the more significant factor.
For example: Arrows piercing plate like so much paper understates the power advantage between those who could afford proper protection and those who had to make do with textile armor. I don’t care if the guy inside that cuirass is white, black, green with purple dots or actually not a guy: an arrow slowed by friction hitting a sloped steel sheet at an angle is gonna slide off. I’d rather see an Asian female knight stride into battle with confidence and terrify lightly armoured peasants than have a male knight shot through the chestplate.
Ofc, they’re all white. Have you seen their marble busts? They’d choose black marble if they were black
Its even worse than that. They had a white voice actor when the cartoon character is black!
In Germany, Turk from Scrubs has the same voice actor as Howard from The Big Bang Theory.
In Denmark there was a bit of controversy when Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) was dubbed by a white actor. Not much though, since it’s a dumb controversy.
If only the Greeks could see us now
I always tell people like this that jesus was a short brown skinned jewish man and I take offense to white people portraying him in video and people portraying him as white in paintings too and I swear they would shoot me on the spot if we u.s. losers but we are canadian losers.
What about Lethal Weapon 5?
There’s always been race swapping in films. Just look at John Wayne portraying Genghis Khan.
Maybe we should ask Mongolians how they felt about John Wayne portraying Genghis Khan.
It’s totally fine when white people do it. /s
Am I allowed to be annoyed at race swapping if I’m consistent? If you’re going to make a movie about characters with a canon appearance, the actor should conform to that appearance.
If you’re making Romeo and Juliet, the actors should at least look Italian. Now, if you’re doing a full reimagining, that’s a different thing. If you’re making West Side Story, half your cast should look Puerto Rican. But if you’re just doing a straight telling of a story, especially a historical one, casting choices shouldn’t distract from the story.
Romeo and Juliet is a great example of why I think it’s fucking asinine to even care.
Specifically, if the actors need to look Italian, you will need to argue that an accurate telling of that story has never been accomplished.
Was it an accurate telling when Shakespeare himself was involved in the production? When the actors were exclusively pasty English men? Or was it only accurate after Shakespeare himself was dead and a translated production was performed in Italy by Italian men and women? Do the actors need to actually be 16 and 13? Or can maybe young looking adults be used? Should we go back to the original Italian spelling of their names or is anglicisation in this case ok?
Why does your suspension of disbelief only stop when the skin color changes? What even does an Italian look like? Rome was a commercial hub for centuries that saw settlers from all over the known world. Are they not Italian?
What’s even better is there’s a great opportunity to use subtext to tell a much deeper story with Romeo and Juliet specifically by making one of the families black, because the specific beef between the Montague’s and Capulet’s isn’t really discussed.
Sure, there are times when it’s important to get those details right. Specifically, when ethnicity is a central component to the story being told. Those stories aren’t very common, and almost certainly will be the ones you think of as exceptions to everything else I just said. Otherwise, bro, it’s a movie, everything about it is a lie.
Yeah, but then you’ve got the weirdos who don’t feel that way unless it’s a white character being cast differently and the other weirdos who think it’s only acceptable when it’s a white character being cast differently.
hey now! John Wayne always gave the colored folks roles they deserved! /s
This is the worst when the film is legitimately bad, too.
Like, we all pretty much agree Gods of Egypt was a bad movie, but it’s still got defenders because they think we’re mad about the Black God and not the whole entire cast of White Guys.
Even worse is Captain Marvel. It’s just a terrible non-plot without any character growth and intrigue, it’s the female version of Green Lantern 2011, but unlike Green Lantern we can’t all agree it’s a bad movie for all the same reasons.
You said Captain Marvel, I thought Wonder Woman. Same thing though. 😅
I do understand why many people react like that to criticism of something empowering though. If you’ve been oppressed, bullied and hurt for something forever you of course see it everywhere (because that’s where the source of pain usually is/was, fucking everywhere). I’m dealing with that shit myself, it takes serious energy not to immediately jump at people when they express anything that could be transphobic. After an awful day I might only realise later how I overinterpreted a situation.
Now of course there is a small but loud minority of performative “supporters” who completely misinterpret most criticism, verbally attack people on sight and are genuinely annoying for no good reason. That’s an absolute minority though, hard to distinguish from (bad-faith) trolls and just a menace to everyone. Unfortunately you generally can’t distinguish those on social media…
Movie studios go out of their way to amplify a few outspoken racists when people start trying to criticize movies on reasonable grounds. That’s why when all you can hear about a movie is that it’s “woke shit”, it’s because there’s nothing good about it.
Captain Marvel was genuinely just a bland and uninteresting character. Similar story with Rey.
Admittedly a lot of comic book characters are drawn as stoics which is hard to adapt to movie and TV without making them seem unemotional, like with Spawn, except in the Spawn movie we had Klown which more than made up for the lack of facial expression from Spawn.
A similar issue with Hellboy, except we had really good effects and the glorious voice of Ron Perlman to make it work.
I honestly think this was the strategy for The Little Mermaid. Casting Halle Bailey took all the attention off the fact that it was another soulless live-action remake of a Disney classic, and nobody wanted to criticize it because they were afraid of being lumped in with all the racist dipshits (not to mention all the free advertising they got from said racist dipshits’ angry xitter posts).
The musical sections were so off putting to me, idk how that movie got 90% on Rotten Tomatoes if not for vote manipulation.
I haven’t seen it myself, but the only song I’ve heard was an annoying song sung by an annoying character, and the whole song was about how annoying she is. I could only wonder, who is this song for? The whole point of it seemed to be as off-putting as possible.
I loved Captain Marvel! Maybe you need to stop expecting Shakespeare from capeshit?
It’s cool that you enjoyed it! But there’s no need to pretend that this is a binary choice. Guardians of the Galaxy is also capeshit with a stoic woman, yet IMO Gamorra is a much more interesting character than Captain Marvel.
I also liked many parts of the movie, but some other parts were big enough misses that I’m not really interested in rewatching.
IMO Gamorra is a much more interesting character than Captain Marvel.
Eh. Gamora is the love interest of a protagonist of the movie. (Arguably the main one in GoG, obviously but still.)
Captain Marvel is the protagonist of her movie.
Idk, I’ve seen GoG movies twice at least but I haven’t rewatched Captain Marvel… maybe it’s a good time. Thanks.
But yeah for the female characters from GoG i just find Nebula a far more interesting character. We actually see her develop and see her past and she’s not just a romantic interest (even when there’s hint of a bit of that perhaps), unlike Gamora. Gamora didn’t really have an arc imo, just disliking his “daddy” and then dying. And then coming back and being a bitch more or less. Dk, seems uninteresting to me.
Same. We had fun, and the music was great! Also young Samuel L. Jackson!
I feel like the people defending Captain Marvel should be more upset with how hamfisted its attempts at pandering are. Like playing “I’m just a girl” or having someone literally tell her to smile more followd by her saying “did you just ask me to smile more?”
Representation is important, but you have to put in some effort.
Honestly I am sad that telling people to smile more has become a cultural faux pas, I would like to be able to tell everyone to smile more if not for ourselves than for each other.
A good alternative is to find ways to make people smile instead :)
Fuck you. Don’t tell people to smile more; give them a reason to smile! Tell a joke! Be genuinely kind!
Poor Elon Musk. The casting choices on The Odyssey have deeply affected his big, sensitive heart. But you wouldn’t know it, due to his mature stoicism.
I mean, you expect he’d tweet up a storm, post after post after post after post after post after post after post after post after post after post after post after post after post after post over several days, making him look like some sort of whiny, tantrum-throwing white supremacist.
But, no. The control that selfless Titan of Industry has over his emotions is inspiring!
I just had a great idea. let’s make a mockumentary about Trump and all his supporters, but cast inversely instead.
let’s get a nice young black man that looks like Obama to play Trump, but we actually name the character something weird like President Donald Doofy but he still acts like Trump.
it’ll be the worlds best troll. all the advertisements will be “doofy” rambling on about how the movie is getting rave reviews and “the best” ratings better than that shitty “melabia or whatever” movie.
You’d have to have a palestinian epstein in that case and that’d be kinda weird.
The world’s best troll will be when this project gains a critical mass of publicity and Obama himself agrees to play the role of trump. Then several voice coaches would volunteer to help Obama perfectly reproduce Trump’s slurred speeches and memorable lines.
Or maybe it goes in the opposite direction, where he emphasizes his own trademark mannerisms in order to erase any similarity to Trump. He’d be wearing a tan suit, a blue tie, and be all "Look. Uhhh… Nothing bad… can happen! It uh, it can only good happen. But with Tylenol, don’t take it. Don’t take it!”
President Tuba
I do not, and have never, twittered. Nonetheless I have to assume you are being facetious, and that I am missing out on a veritable stream of rageposting nonsense from the 21st-century Midas of Feces.
Isn’t it twatted? (Or if not, then shouldn’t it be?)
Some people don’t want to let anyone else tell a story.
But sometimes its just racism.
Just ignore these losers. Clearly the big movie studios don’t care either, which must mean casting a black person does not affect ticket sales either.
Bridgerton probably gives these people seizures
The sentiment doesn’t really fit the character at all.
Donnie, no!
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Any actor should be able to play any role regardless of race or gender. Anything else is systemic discrimination.
“You can’t play shakespeare because you’re black!” screams the basement dwelling internet troll at the kenyan shakespeare society.
In principle I agree>!!<, but in practice it’s not clear cut.
The main one is some historic accuracy, I say some because the color of the skin doesn’t really matter for most things set in some time period or era where a race wasn’t particularly present.
The second one is just how it looks, we’ll see how well casting Snape for the new Harry Potter goes as it seems to be Harry’s father is bullying the weird black kid. Another one is the Artemis Fowl movie which cases a woman as leader for the Fairy unit, which undermines the actual accomplishment of Holly being the first to get here place as a woman. It’s not the end of the world, but it changes the tone and plot.
Probably not the end of the world, but these problems fall on the same line as other poor adaption/remake choices that actively hurt the story is try to tell. Not everyone can fit into a role in a story, and I don’t think that’s systematic discrimination. And I reiterate, it largely depends on the setting of the story. For most things, gener and race is not a big factor.
I see a lot of criticism of Western media which in my opinion is rooted in misogyny and racism. And it’s not even honest criticism it’s divisive culture war bullshit. Of course ragebait drives traffic but it’s reached a point where hate watching is a thing now, which is just sad.
I don’t agree.
In most modern movies it doesn’t matter because they are full of random stuff anyway. Multiverses, magic, history that never happened, and so on.
But if they were to make a movie about an african tribe of the 1800s based on real events I wouldn’t be able to take that movie seriously if half or all of them had pinkish-beige skin or any too obviously genetically impossible traits for the geological area and time the movie plays in.
Immersion sometimes also means accuracy.
Any knee-jerk blanket statements like yours are bad. Not as bad as the racist people who just want to find dumb reasons to exclude actors with skin colors darker than theirs, but still just not very smart.
Which is true for many here.
People really need to find the sweet spots between extremes, sheesh.
Well, movies based on comics are inherently also tied to a very visual canon. And, arguably, their whole point is putting those exact visuals on the big screen (for an audience that grew up reading the comics and now has money).
The way to get that right is to make characters and stories that look and feel exactly like the comics, but more and better. Only good change is when you fix something that was broken or janky.
Arguably the ww2 era worldviews and gender and US biases are good targets to fix, of course. But changing the visuals starkly will still be an obvious mistake. Especially when there’s actually nearly 100 years worth of stories and characters to pick and mix from and no reason you can’t add more.
Don’t break the fucking canon! And that includes the visuals.
Yea, that I can agree on too.
Changing established characters from something people already identify with breaks that connection and result in anger for obvious reasons.
So in that case, Americans can only play Americans, Brits can only play Brits etc.
It’s noticeable how this week’s russian psyop style Hollywood furore is over a black actress playing a fictional greek character not Americans and Brits playing fictional greek characters
People like you are the reason why I specifically chose the words: “Any too obviously genetically impossible traits”
Americans and brits do not look clearly different. Similar enough.
But you must have skipped that part of what I wrote or have just jumped to a knee-jerk answer after the first words?
Also: americans are a nation of immigrants. Except the few native Americans, so they can be realistically be played by a wild mix.
So from ur PoV, it would also then be fine if for example a white actor would play MLK in a movie about him?
I won’t be happy until a big Nigerian woman plays Sir Winston Churchill
He would just be a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude.
You’re implying that the next Black Panther could be played by Tom Cruise. I’m not sure I’d be happy about that.
I was thinking vanilla ice
But yeah
