| Machina said: My view varies depending on the type of character and the surrounding context. Most of the time I don't think it should matter what race the actor is for the role and I feel like we should try to move towards colour blindness rather than colour fetishisation, but alas our social betters seem to want the opposite. One of the exceptions for me would be historical characters in docudrama productions - especially culturally significant ones - and that's partly why I think there was a bigger backlash to Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn(!) being black. That would be a good explanation for the cleopatra reception. Yet, in the other thread I mentioned in the op somebody brought the example of Jesus Christ - a very culturally significant guy. But one of the most famous and commercially successful movies about bible stuff, The Passion of the Christ, starred James Caviezel. And he is white. Jesus, assuming he existed, certainly was not. I think for this particular example, it is important to add, that Jesus was there for so long, he is such an icon, that many different ethnicities just swapped him to their race. For europeans and americans Jesus is white. But there was this funny scene in the movie 21 Jump Street with a korean church and an asian Jesus hanging from the cross. Perhaps it is really so. Can anybody confirm? And I would add, that James Caviezel looked close enough to pass as being from that region of the world. Than again, is it even more wrong to add make up and (potentially) prostetics to make him look more like Jesus would have looked? Sounds a lot like black face. But I did not mind James portreyal. I would mind black face though. That is just ridiculous. Just cast a black person at that point. -Perhaps whites and middle easterners are visually closer than whites and blacks. Therefore it is less of a deal to me when a white person wears "arab face" as opposed to black face. I don't really know what I should think about all of that. The bigger issue is I feel like the entertainment industry and Hollywood goes about its quota-based diversity efforts (read: pandering) the wrong way. Take something like Rings of Power. I'm not a huge LotR guy, but from what I gather, in Tolkien's lore the different groups of people are very homogeneous (makes sense for a fantasy setting with limited means of transportation), but there are vast regions populated by non-white races. Why not write the show so that one of the main storyline strands takes place in one or more of these regions, and/or focusing on characters from those other races? Same with Wheel of Time - the little isolated backwater village at the start is so diverse that it made me chuckle. They obviously casted via diversity checklist but without any thought or explanation as to how that would work within the world that had been created by someone much more talented than themselves. It's so low effort and, because of that, it breaks immersion. My thoughts exactly. Quotas are dumb. I think they will never make a project better but could make it worse. I think quotas could be necessary in a fundamentaly racist society. But such a society would be hard pressed to implement any sort of quotas anyway. I love the LotR moives. What a shame how poor Rings of Power turned out. What a waste of incredible source material. But race was the least of that shows problems I suppose. It really did feel like pandering. I'm much more familiar with Asimov's Foundation, because the original novel series is a favourite of mine. There's a lot of race (and gender) swapping for the show, but it's generally done better than the previous two examples and is worked into the series' universe rather than feeling completely divorced from it. Just a shame the 'adaptation' as a whole is an abomination. - Yeah, a japanese bullet train without an overwhelming majority of japanese people feels weird. |
Existing User Log In
New User Registration
Register for a free account to gain full access to the VGChartz Network and join our thriving community.
