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BEL-AIR

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Iowans Sue to Stop Dakota Access PIpeline

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Whitewashing Hollywood Roles

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You took me as safe
That was your first mistake
Who said I was safe

The other night I watched the Oscars
And the roster of the only yellow men were all statues
We a quarter of the population
There’s a room of fuckin’ 1 percenters laughing at you
Fuck a bamboo ceiling, guess I gotta play the villain
ODB up at the Grammys on the mic
Like “Wu-Tang is for the children!”
Bruce Jenner is woman
OJ was acquitted
Kim K is a hero
The sky is the limit, any minute now
They gonna let an Asian brotha’ get a lead role
Shots fired I'm a reload, never saw this side of Chino
He was always quiet keeping to himself
Never messed with anybody else
That's the Jonathan that we know

Seems so safe, till one day things go cray
I swear if things don’t change
My actions can’t be blamed, (STAND UP!)
And now you gotta duck!
You know you never gave a fuck!
I came to get my cut! (fuck you, pay me)
You know I never gave a fuck!

I ain't never heard of none y’all fools
I can do whatever every one of y’all do
If I never get a chance
You might see the homie show up on the 5 o’ clock news
You ain't never seen a yellow boy wild’n yellow boy shinin’ , Sound the alarm I got news
Go ahead and pro-file em’ I ain't pro-violence
Shhhhh, silence is how yellow boys move
Its been the same ol’ thang, I swear the game don’t change
What you talking bout there ain't no space
Guess i gotta go and make more space
You know I’m cool as a motherfucker
Chillin’ in the cut hella quiet with the loud pack
Since I’m a cool motherfucker
You think everything is safe till I ask you where the safe at!

Seems so safe, till one day things go cray
I swear if things don’t change
My actions can’t be blamed, (STAND UP!)
And now you gotta duck!
You know you never gave a fuck!
I came to get my cut! (fuck you, pay me)
You know I never gave a fuck!

You took me as safe
That was your first mistake
Who said I was safe

Mother Jones on Trump and Violence. Words may hurt him.

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Hollywood Whitewashing: Last Week Tonight, Feb2016

MilkmanDan says...

"Automatically ok"? Not necessarily. But in cases where it makes sense, at a stretch even "plot sense" for the character to be there; yeah, I think that is OK.

The Last Samurai isn't a documentary. But, the general historical justification for Tom Cruise's character being in Japan is pretty much valid. Meiji was interested in the West -- clothes, technology, weapons, and military. He actually did hire Westerners to train his army, although from what I read it sounds like they were German, French, and Italian rather than American. Still, the movie portrays the general situation/setting with at least *decent* broad-strokes historical accuracy. LOADS of movies deviate from even this degree of historical accuracy *way* more without drawing complaints; particularly if their main purpose is entertainment and not education / documentary.

Your hypothetical reverse movie makes some valid criticisms. Even though it would have been historically possible for a Westerner to be in Japan at the time -- even to be involved with training a Western-style military -- it would be unlikely for such a person to get captured, run into a Shogun that speaks English, become a badass (or at least passable) samurai warrior, and end up playing a major role in politics and significantly influencing Emperor Meiji.

My defense against those criticisms is that, for me at least, the movie is entertaining; which is kinda the point. Your "Union Samurai" movie might be equally entertaining and therefore given an equal pass on historical inaccuracies by me.

The whole characters as a "lens through which the audience can appreciate a culture/history outside their own" issue is (slightly) more weighty to me. I don't think those are often necessary, but I don't feel like my intelligence is being insulted if the movie maker feels that they are in order to sell tickets.

I love the Chinese historical novel "Three Kingdoms". A few years ago, John Wu made the movie "Red Cliff", mostly about one particular battle in the historical period portrayed in that book. For the Chinese audience, Wu made the movie in two parts, summed up about four and a half hours long. For the US / West, he made a version trimmed to just over two hours. Why? Because he (and a team of market researchers, I'm sure) knew that very few Westerners would go to see a 4+ hour long movie, entirely in Mandarin Chinese (with subtitles), about a piece of Chinese history from ~1800 years ago that very few in the West have ever heard of or know anything about.

I think the full 4+ hour long movie is great. In my personal top 10 favorite movies of all time, ahead of most Hollywood stuff. But I also understand that there's no way that movie would appeal to all but a tiny, tiny fraction of Western viewers in that full-on 4+ hour format. But, even though I personally think the cut-down 2 hour "US" version is drastically inferior to the full cut, I am glad that he made it because it gives a suitably accurate introduction to the subject matter to more people in the West (just like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Dynasty Warriors" videogames do), and makes that tiny, tiny fraction of Western people that know anything about it a little less tiny. While being entertaining along the way.

For other movies, sometimes the best way that a filmmaker can sell a movie to an audience that otherwise might not accept it (at least in large enough numbers to justify the production costs) may be to insert one of these "lens" characters for the audience to identify with. I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with that. It might not work for movies that are taking a more hardline approach to historical / contextual accuracy (ie., if Tom Cruise showed up in "Red Cliff" in circa 200AD China), but outside of those situations, if that is what the studio thinks it will take to sell tickets... Cool.

The Last Samurai is, like @ChaosEngine said, a movie primarily about an outsider learning a new culture (and accepting his own past). He serves as that lens character, but actually the hows and whys of his character arc are the main points of interest in the movie, at least to me.

I'm sure that an awesome, historically accurate movie could be made dealing with young Emperor Meiji, Takamori (who Katsumoto seems to be based on in The Last Samurai), and the influence of modernization on Japanese culture at the time. It could be made with no Western "lens" character, no overt influence by any particular individual Westerner, and be entirely in Japanese. But that movie wouldn't be The Last Samurai, wouldn't be attempting to serve the same purpose as The Last Samurai, and very likely wouldn't sell as many tickets (in the US) as The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise!) did. That wouldn't make it a worse movie, just an apple instead of an orange.

Babymech said:

Wait what? Is it automatically ok if the skewed / whitewashed role is written into the script? You do know that this kind of skew doesn't come about by the kkk kidnapping black actors at gunpoint in the middle of filming and replacing them with white ones?

If a Japanese director were to make a movie about the civil war, but chose to make it about a Japanese fighter who comes to the US, becomes the most kickass soldier of the Union, makes personal friends with Lincoln, and convinces him to stay the course on emancipation... that would be pretty weird, even if the argument went that this was the only way a Japanese audience could identify with this obscure historic time.

the nerdwriter-louis ck is a moral detective

gorillaman

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You're right with me up to the point we reach the kinds of censorship you happen to support.

What's the penalty for incurring the ire of the social justice elite? Well, only that you'll be branded a sexist or whatever by the entire gaming media, perhaps have your Twitter account banned or your videos taken down from YouTube, or maybe you'll just be arrested on false charges of harassment. It's a storm that a strong individual might weather, but from which any company will steer away automatically. Of course it's censorship.

Games are being censored (they came for the japanese bikini simulators and I said nothing...); social media is being censored: Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia and any number of even less reputable sites are being censored - all in response to social justice histrionics. This crybaby, zero-offence, closed-minded, closed-mouthed malaise is damaging to our culture: damaging to art, to academia, to journalism. And if you acknowledge the need for open expression, you will oppose it.

"There is more than one way to burn a book," wrote Ray Bradbury of interest groups taking offence, "...each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever." You don't recognise any of this?

Yes, 'critics just don't have the talent to create' is a tired old fallacy and I regret echoing it, but there I was thinking particularly of the likes of Wu and Quinn: loathsome reptiles and degenerates whose own creative efforts are so miserably inept that to garner sales, patreon donations, and fraudulently positive reviews they resort to pretending themselves the brave minority voices raised against the misogynistic, LGBT-phobic, uni-racial establishment - in an industry that has never actually had any of those problems.

As for Anita Sarkeesian; that liar, mountebank, fascist collaborator, and 21st century Jack Thompson; that professional victim and demagogue who harnesses manufactured outrage for profit; or in the most generous possible light, that half-educated nincompoop who somehow rode a tide of hysterical activists-without-a-cause to a broadcast platform for her worthless, narcissistic rambling:
It isn't the fact of her fuck-witted critique to which the gaming community so righteously objects but the baffling inaccuracies and outright slanders therein, her self-promotion via false claims of harassment, her attacks on artistic expression and internet freedom.

And these are exactly the kind of sub-intellectual trash who will presume, against all standards of rectitude and conscience, to instruct their betters on what kind of jokes they're allowed to tell.

You never cede an inch to these fucking people. That's how you get Mary Whitehouse, or the Comics Code Authority, or McCarthy, or the FCC, the BBFC, the OFLC, the IWF.

ChaosEngine

said:

I was right with you up to this point. I'm going to give you a the benefit of the doubt and assume that was a typo rather than a pointless antisemetic tangent and address the point directly.

Criticism of a piece of art does not equal desire to suppress or censor that art. I thought Twilight was a fucking awful piece of writing; and yeah, part of that was because of the horrendously misogynistic abstenience promoting bollocks. Would I ban it? Fuck no.

Sarkeesian and her ilk 100% have the right to criticise lazy sexism in video games, and they don't have to "have the skill to make themselves" to criticise it.

There's a difference between dictation and criticism.