Soundwave said:
Azuren said:
I like how when faced with explicit evidence of identity politics, your response is to regress to baiting me into a pedantic argument. It feels like vindication.
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Equality (or even the movement towards that) will always elicit the response of feeling oppressed by the privileged. You wanna hear someone whine and complain? Put them in 5 star hotels all their life and then ask them to stay in a 3 star hotel for a weekend and right on cue ...
Of course it's not "identity politics" when every character in a movie is white. That doesn't require any special explanation and everyone should just go with that. If a person is black in a major role or something other than the "norm" they must "explain" why they are there. Never mind how many actors of a different ethnicity in Hollywood have been black balled and locked out of roles for decades due to ridiculous casting policies.
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Good writing is the key. If you write a character good enough, the audience will accept that character. If not, then the audience sees nothing but studio-mandated casting. A good example is Lando in Star Wars. Nobody ever questioned why he was black. Nobody cared. They got a good actor in a well written role for a character who had a real purpose. Night of the Living Dead is another example. When Duane Jones was cast in the lead role, George Romero claimed that his skin color had nothing to do with the decision and it shows in the movie. He simply gave the best performance. Then there's Wesley Snipes in Blade. A lot of people who saw the movie didn't even know it was based on a comic book. People saw it and accepted Snipes in the role without question. That's because he was good. The Blade series even did well in places like China where movies with black leads often have a hard time performing.
Whenever an explanation has to be given as to why a person of a certain ethnicity is in a movie and it isn't essential to there overall plot, then that usually means that character was shoehorned by the studio and they originally weren't supposed to be there. Audiences nowadays catch on to this more than they did years ago, though I would argue the writing for such characters in movies have gotten worse which may be why people are catching on. Speaking of shoehorning and virtue signaling, the people who make the biggest deal out of any of this are the ones trying to push the identity politics. That's what distinguishes the identity politics from the creative process. All the movies I mentioned above had nothing to do with identity politics because the people who made those movies were focusing on making a quality product.
As for hiring practices from half a century ago, who cares? Most of the people who made those decisions died long ago. If I'm a filmmaker, what happened 50-60 years ago shouldn't have an impact who I want in my movies.
Last edited by Jon-Erich - on 28 May 2018
