The Batman (2022)

 I took a trip back to the US to visit friends and family, and one of the entertainment options on my flight was The Batman. Of the people I know who have similar taste as me, most of them said it was good, and I figured I could plug my headphones in and watch it before it was time for me to nap. (My number-one transatlantic flight tip is "sleep as much as you can," and I stand by that.)

The plot was basically any old Batman movie, with villains and Dick Gordon and Alfred and bat-gadgets and all that shit. Bats has to figure out who's targeting prominent politicians and police folks and why, and the villain (Riddler) leaves him clues at every murder scene. He's also trying to help Selina Kyle find her friend, without letting her know he's Bruce Wayne. (not-a-spoiler: The Gotham PD is corrupt.)

What makes it different is a couple things. First, Bruce Wayne is clinically depressed. He has stopped giving a shit about basically everything except being a vigilante. Alfred tries to help him out of it, with limited success. You might think this would make for a bad/boring/whatever Bats movie, but it adds to the noir ambience. Robert Pattinson is a better actor than a lot of people give him credit for, and he really made Bruce a haggard vigilante who had no more fucks to give.

Second, and I think most importantly, the film explicitly depicts what happens when you get a vigilante going around: more vigilantes. The film shows how easy it is for someone (Riddler) to radicalize a group of disaffected white men over the internet. It's the alt-right/Jan6/Q conspiracy milieu in clear text, on screen. When Bruce realizes the role he played in this, he has a moment of crisis.

Normally I complain about how movies these days are all grey and dark, but I think in this case it worked. The noir ambience and all. (I do miss bright color in film, though. Bring back the gaudy colors of Pacific Rim!)

Anyway, I liked it and would like to watch it again on a bigger screen.

In which I express my disdain for the idea of a Loki movie and enrage half the internet

I've seen calls across the web, like this one, for a standalone Loki movie. I am not on board with that at all.

Don't get me wrong: I think Tom Hiddleston is a great actor, and Loki is a very interesting, complicated villain. However, I'm going to argue that we don't need Yet Another Marvel Movie About A (White) Dude.

According to wikipedia, these are the solo Marvel movies made since 1998, including movies currently in production/planning.

1998 Blade
2002 Blade II
Spider-Man
2003 Daredevil
Hulk
2004 The Punisher
Spider-Man 2
Blade: Trinity
2005 Elektra
2007 Ghost Rider
Spider-Man 3
2008 Iron Man
The Incredible Hulk
Punisher: War Zone
2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine
2010 Iron Man 2
2011 Thor
Captain America: The First Avenger
2012 Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
The Amazing Spider-Man Columbia Pictures
2013 Iron Man 3
The Wolverine
Thor: The Dark World
2014 Captain America: The Winter Soldier
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
2015 Ant-Man

That's 26 solo hero movies, only one of which stars a female hero (Elektra, 2005, which was reportedly a terrible movie). Twenty-five male-led superhero franchise movies. Twenty-five. If we just stick to the Avengers, there are nine. And is anyone seriously excited about an Ant-Man movie, starring serious asshole Hank Pym?

I get it. People love Loki because he's a giant woobie and Hiddles is cute and ridiculously talented. That doesn't earn him male-led movie number twenty-six.

The first page I linked to has links to petitions for a Loki movie and for a female-led superhero movie. The Loki petition currently (11:51 am 11/16) has 35,526 signatures. The female-led one? 275, and the hero on the cover is Sif.

Forty percent of the CIA's operatives are women. Black Widow is popular, though not as popular as Woobie-Destroyer-of-Worlds-Loki. A post which asks tumblr users to reblog if they think Black Widow should have a solo movie only has 3462 notes. This post, in which someone imagines a Black Widow trailer hijacking a "Loki" trailer has 29,500 notes, but humorous posts get a lot of notes on tumblr.

One popular reading of Joss Whedon's "The Avengers" was that it's Black Widow's movie, because she basically carries the story. If an ensemble movie starring a team of five (white) dudes and a lady (plus Coulson and Fury and Hill, but they're not The Avengers) is the best we can hope for a female hero movie, that is bullshit.

It's 2013. Movie studios no longer have the excuse that female-led action movies don't appeal to a broad audience (read: 18-25-year-old white males, who aren't even the biggest movie-going demographic, but that's another rant altogether). Strictly speaking, Sigourney Weaver (Alien) and Linda Hamilton (Terminator) proved them wrong back in the 80s, but this little movie about a girl named Katniss Everdeen, maybe you heard of it? The sequel's coming out this week? Yeah. And there are more. (Hanna. Oh god that movie.)

So why the fuck NOT have a Black Widow solo movie, where she's leaving the KGB and coming to work for SHIELD? Give me Natalia Romanova or Natasha Romanoff, spying, kicking ass, infiltrating, and being a goddamn HBIC. Or, if Hollywood requires a man in action movies because of bullshit reasons, I would settle for Clint and Natasha being snarky and competent, spying and kicking ass together. Or even a "when Natasha met Clint and they had to learn to trust each other and work together" movie. And they never sleep together, because god can't we just have a movie about a man and a woman who are friends but not lovers?

There has been a massive discussion about inclusivity in media (comics, movies, novels, games) and in fandom, and how fandom isn't welcoming to people who aren't (straight) white men. Supporting Yet Another Movie About A (white) Dude does not promote inclusivity, does not welcome women into fandom.

Yes, I certainly enjoy looking at Chris Hemsworth's biceps and Chris Evans' pecs, and I can't deny that attractive male actors are a draw. But I don't want to BE Thor or BE Steve Rogers. They aren't characters I can identify with.

When I see Scarlett Johansson on screen as Black Widow, I see a character I could fantasize about being. I've said that I want to be Black Widow when I grow up. I can identify with her. In Iron Man 2, she's patronized. (and this version has even better commentary.) She's probably had to put up with a lot of that shit in her life, as a relatively diminutive woman.

So, in conclusion, women also watch action movies for escapism, and you should support a female-led MCU film (especially if it's Black Widow) before a Loki movie.

Movie review: Offside

Offside, 2006. Directed by Jafar Panahi.

Iranian director Panahi is rather controversial at home, where he is currently serving a six-year jail sentence for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” and is banned for making movies for twenty years.

Offside is a movie about women living in Tehran who want to watch the Iranian national team play Bahrain in the final match of the 2006 World Cup qualifiers in mid-2005. Women aren't allowed to go to stadiums, because there are men there, and these men may swear or curse in manners that will harm women's delicate sensibilities.

It starts with one girl, wearing a ball cap, loose fitting clothing, and an Iranian flag around her shoulders like a scarf, riding a bus to Azadi Stadium. She buys a ticket from a scalper and joins the queue to get in, where she is pulled aside and taken to a holding area above the outer rings of the stands, to wait for the Vice Squad to pick them up.

There are other girls and young women there, all of whom just want to watch their national team qualify for the World Cup. The film focuses on them and how they relate to each other and the Army guys guarding them. Several times, they get one of the guards to narrate the action on the pitch.

The tone is comedic, the dark humor you use when the situation you're in is so ludicrous but you can't do anything about it, because, as he says in the interview that's one of the extras on the DVD, all you can do is laugh at the absurdity.

The movie isn't much about soccer (you only see a few moments of the game, and that on a TV screen in the background), but more a social commentary on restrictions in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is why the official censors aren't very keen on it.

I recommend this movie, even if you're not a soccer fan. If you are a soccer fan, I highly recommend it.

Movie review: Space Battleship Yamato (2010 live action)

I imprinted on Leiji Matsumoto's works at a very early age. I was about 5 (we only had HBO for a year), and I was watching the cartoons they showed one day. There was a kid, a space train, and this woman with long blonde hair, which was all I could remember about it until I found a VHS (remember those?) of Galaxy Express 999 at Suncoast (remember them?) when I was in college. Those were the days when you had to pay extra for the "collector's edition," which was Japanese audio with subtitles, because those letters were really expensive.

Back in the 80s, Matsumoto's other main work, Space Battleship Yamato, was dubbed into English and shown on American TV as Star Blazers, renaming ace pilot Kodai Susumu to Derek Wildstar. (I almost put Rick Hunter there, but that's what Ichijou Hikaru ended up as in Robotech, the US adaptation of Macross.) This fan site has plot summaries.

Last December, the live action movie was released in theaters, starring quite a few famous Japanese actors like Kimura Takuya (from the J-drama and movie Hero, about a lawyer, among other things). They made a few changes, notably making Dr Sado, of the bottle of sake and large orange cat, a woman, making it a little less of a sausage-fest. Still, there are only three named women on the Yamato: Sado, Mori Yuki, and the one whose name I forget but who's one of the Black Tigers.

It's the year 2199, and about five years ago, meteor bombs started hitting the Earth, making the surface too irradiated to live on and sending people underground to try to eke out a living. Humanity is fighting off Gamilas attacks, and everything they do, the Gamilas adapt to counter them. Captain Okita is leading an assault/defense force at Mars, and the Gamilan fleet is too strong for their weaponry. Kodai Mamoru, captain of the Yukikaze, uses his ship as a shield to allow Okita to escape and take the news to Earth.

Kodai Susumu is a scavenger. He goes out looking for metal to take to the military. While he's out scavenging, a strange object falls from the sky and knocks off his protective gear. He picks it up and mysteriously survives the deadly radiation levels. At the same time, Okita's ship returns. He takes the object to the military, and they examine it and find coordinates for planet Iscandar, where the Gamilas come from, and blueprints for a warp engine and a powerful weapon, the wave motion gun.

The leader of the military decides to send the Yamato out to Iscandar to find a decontamination device, which would allow people to move back to the surface, and Kodai joins up again. He'd been an ace pilot at the time of the initial Gamilan attacks, but he left after a personal tragedy. He is angry at Okita, because he believes Okita sacrificed his brother in order to escape. He meets up with his old buddies, the Black Tigers.

The name for the ship wasn't chosen at random. The Yamato was a WW2 battleship that was sent on a mission to defend Okinawa until it was destroyed, to give the Japanese people a last hope (as Kodai explains in a speech at the end). Pasting from wikipedia, Yamato's symbolic might was such that some Japanese citizens held the belief that their country could never fall as long as the ship was able to fight. The word Yamato also carries significance in Japan as a poetic name for the country and remains as a metaphor for the end of the empire.

While they're in transit, they're repeatedly attacked by Gamilan forces, and when they eventually make it to Iscandar, they find something unexpected. I won't spoil the ending, but I saw it coming, because I've seen the old anime movies.

At times, it's goofy. I couldn't help but laugh at the Star Trek-like "the bridge is shaking, everybody lean to the right and look like you're hanging on" effects, but the CG was really nice. I couldn't figure out why they made a land assault at Iscandar rather than stay in their nice ships, other than to allow for heroism and sacrifice. The zero-g-love scene made me giggle (mainly because it put this song in my head). But it's based on one of the classics of science fiction anime, and even as it changes and updates a few things (like the Gamilans being energy beings (they're still blue, though) and the Cosmo Zero having something like a Valkyrie's Gerwalk mode, probably just because it looks cool), it's still the story Matsumoto wrote at its core.

It's worth seeing, if you know how to get hold of it. There's no word yet of an English release.

Con, movie, book

I went to Gaylaxicon @ Outlantacon two weekends ago. A friend drove here from Boston, then we drove down to Atlanta together. The con is small, but it was fun, and I ate way too much in the consuite. Every other time I went up to get some food, there was cake or cookies or chocolate, and, well. I love those things. Saved me from spending much money, though. (The hotel's restaurant was good and delightfully inexpensive. A room service omelet was only $6.)

This weekend I went to a tai chi push hands workshop at one of my teachers' home. It's in a very rural area, and he's got this pavilion (looks like a carport for the roof with nice wood flooring and roll-down sides) set up. He's a former Marine, and one of his children is in the service, so his entire house is full of USMC and other military paraphernalia as well as Chinese and tai chi-related things. It's kind of surreal. Anyway, the workshop was cool, and there may be future Saturday seminars, but they tend to be in the morning, and Saturday mornings are bad for me, because that's when we go grocery shopping. (And from August-May, there's Bundesliga football...) So I may start going to the Monday night push hands class, since my Tuesday class is going on hiatus for summer.

I'm literary chair for a new convention here in Chapel Hill, and I have a guest of honor, which is exciting. Once she signs the contract (I'm not in charge of that end of things, just of figuring out whom to invite, panels, and the like) and it's on our website, I'll be sharing the heck out of it. I persuaded Ben to be on staff, too, and he's the comics/media chair. I'll promote more later :)

We went to see Thor Friday night. I enjoyed it! Lots of people have said they didn't like it, or were underwhelmed, or whatever, but I had a great time watching this piece of blond beefcake with a cheeky grin being hilarious alongside Natalie Portman and her cute assistant. Kenneth Branagh directed it, and he's known for his Shakespeare movies. If you view Thor as Shakespeare in modern English, the movie makes a lot more sense.

I've agreed to review a book for Bull Spec. It's Germline by TC McCarthy. It's dense and gritty, told by a protagonist who's not a very nice guy but you kind of like him anyway. If the cover shown there and the blurb on that blog post make it look like the kind of book you'd like, you probably will. I really like that cover. I'm looking forward to the second book, and I'm only halfway through the first!

I won't be able to post that review here, but I'll let you know when that issue of Bull Spec is available. Also, props to the author, because in the extras section at the back of the ARC, they ask who his favorite authors are, and he breaks it down by country, including Russia and Kazakhstan. I couldn't even name a Kazakh author if you asked, and my Russian knowledge is limited to the big 19th century guys, Nabokov, and Sergey Lukanyenko (Night Watch).

Movie review: Hanna

After yesterday's review of something I didn't like, I'll talk about something I did like.

I'd heard a little bit about this movie about a girl (Saoirse Ronan) who was raised in remote Finland to be a super killer, because as soon as Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) finds out, she'll stop at nothing until Hanna's dead. It got some good reviews, but the thing that made me perk up was that the last act was set in Berlin, including a frantic chase through the Spreepark. (There's a set of photos here accompanying an article about punks in the GDR. It's an interesting article, but only in German.)

So. It could have been a gratuitously violent flick like Kick-ass (the one about the little potty-mouthed killer superhero(?) girl, which I never saw) or anything in Quentin Tarantino's repertoire. There was definitely violence, I won't lie. The fight scenes are interestingly choreographed and set to music by the Chemical Brothers. There's also some spinning, dizzying cinematography, and the first time it was OK, but the second time it kind of dragged on.

Hanna has lived in the forest with her father (Eric Bana) her whole life. She's never met another person than Erik Heller, or heard music, or used a computer, or seen a car. She encounters people for the first time, and she doesn't quite know how to react to them. The scenes where Hanna's trying to figure out how people work are a delight, because they're realistic.

It's a good movie, not for the squeamish, and worth catching before it leaves theaters.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (part 1)

I've been a fan of Harry and his friends since about the time book 3 blew onto the scene. I saw Matthew Lewis (Neville) and the Phelps twins at Dragon*Con (the latter twice), and I spent Release Day reading the books. There were some parts of book 7 (the epilogue, especially) that bothered me, and some of the writing doesn't stand up to critical re-reading (dropped plot points, illogical plot points), but damned if Jo Rowling can't tell a story that makes you turn the pages.

The first two films, mostly light-hearted fare about Harry being introduced to the Wizarding World and Hogwarts, were directed by Chris Columbus (Home Alone). The third, Prisoner of Azkaban, was directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The beginnings of the menace come into play here, and as such, and with Cuarón's hand, the movie gets a little darker. I liked it a lot better than the first two, quite honestly. The fourth, Goblet of Fire, was directed by Mike Newell, and it continues the darkening trend, as the book did. In GoF, the first actual death occurs, and Harry seems to realize for the first time what the stakes are and that his and his friends' lives are actually in danger.

Since the fifth film, Order of the Phoenix, David Yates has been at the helm. This has improved the consistency in style between the films, which is a good thing. The darkness increases; bad and worse things start to happen, and movie six, Half-Blood Prince, ends with evil prevailing. (I believe a lot of important plot-related things were cut from the movie, most likely in service of time constraints. Occlumency, and Harry's being crap at it, is the main one.)

The Deathly Hallows continues the tendency toward darkness, and Harry knows the stakes. As in the book, he tries to leave without his friends, but they won't let him go by himself.

The crisis at the center of the story should be familiar to anyone who's heard about World War II. Lord Voldemort takes over the Ministry of Magic (through his minions, of course; he remains hidden) and institutes policies to purify the Wizarding World of "mudbloods" and "Muggle-borns." There are propaganda pamphlets about what to do when Muggles attack, done in a style that will ring bells in a lot of people's minds. I thought that was a very effective choice of design.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione spend the movie alone, out in the wilds of England, where they don't know if their friends and family are safe. We only see Neville once, and it's on the train to Hogwarts, when the Death Eaters search for Harry, and he stands up, far removed from the timid Neville of book 1, and says, "He's not here." We see Draco a couple of times; the Malfoys are long-standing members of the Death Eaters, though not at present in Voldemort's best graces.

The kids have grown up.

It ends, as you'd expect from a two-part film, on a cliffhanger, one which spells certain doom for our heroes. The second movie, opening in July, will see Harry and co going back to society and fighting in the battle for Hogwarts.

This is entirely selfish of me, I know, but I want to read about Neville Longbottom and his underground, anti-Ministry group at Hogwarts. Neville, who started the series as a dumpy, doughy, timid -- terrified -- kid, developed a lot more confidence over the series, and he became the centerpiece of the anti-Voldemort society. I want to read that. I want to read more about the implications of the police state and the 'blood trials.' Rowling only gives us flashes of those, through Harry's encounters with them. Fair enough that she does; it's her story, her world.

It's an idea I'd love to see explored, even only in fanfiction.

Vacation, editing, and a rejection

First, the rejection. I wrote a piece of flash fiction (a story under 1000 words) earlier this year, and I submitted it in March. I got periodic updates, saying that my story had made it past the first and second cut, which was pretty awesome, really. I finally got the note saying it had been rejected the other day. But the feedback in the letter was fairly positive -- most of the 8 reviewers liked it, and one said it was among their favorites. So my spirit isn't crushed, though I'd (obviously) have preferred for them to buy it. Ah well. I'll look at revising it a bit and send it to a couple more places, after I'm done editing this stupid novella.

Nice segue. So, I'd finished the first draft last I mentioned it. Then while I was sitting on it for a couple weeks, I started hating the second half. I asked my beta readers, and they agreed that it was pretty weak. So I floundered a bit, trying to figure out WTF to do with the 13K words at the end, since I don't have much time to rewrite them before the submission closes. One of my betas gave me an idea that I thought would save me a ton of rewriting, but I was wrong. So I've basically rewritten 10K words or so since Tuesday morning. I would like to die now, plz. (Not really.) The story is stronger, I think, and I hope I can get it edited into publishable format before ... the 10th. With 2 planned vacations in the middle and a 2-day orientation (unpaid, boo) for another potential temp placement. And get the synopsis done and write a decent query letter.

Shoot me? I guess I can spend some time synopsizing on Delta next weekend. Though both my flights are at shitty times as far as consciousness goes: 6:30 am out and a red-eye back from Oregon. Bleh.

Look there. It's another segue. So I'm going to Oregon next weekend for a family get-together thing on my MIL's side. Should be interesting, though I had enough of Oregon during my residency, TYVM. At least summer shouldn't involve constant rain. Ugh. Then the weekend after that, I'm heading to the beach with the anime club. Based on past experience, I'll have No Time to work on writing. At all. But I hope to get the stupid thing sent out before we go.

So, I'm trying to decide whether to take two of my favorite movies with me. They're both brilliant, but neither is particularly happy. German movies tend not to be.

One is Gegen die Wand, a movie by Fatih Akin about two Turks living in Germany and how they react to being there. The male lead, Cahit, has excised everything Turkish from his life, while the female lead, Sibel, chafes under her parents' strict traditionality. I saw it while I was living in Oregon, and it was a beautiful sucker punch to the gut.

The other is The Lives of Others, which won an Oscar the other year for best foreign language film. It's about a playwright living in East Berlin in 1985 or so and the Stasi agent assigned to spy on him. It's a fairly authentic portrayal of life in the DDR (with a bit of artistic license, of course), according to people who lived there. Folk singer Wolf Biermann said that the tale matched part of his own life. (He had quite a file in the Stasi's archive.)

I don't know if there'd be an audience for them out there, or even anything to watch DVDs on in the rental house. The second movie has a happier ending, in a way, but there's still a heaping spoonful of tragedy. One thing I remember from living in Germany is the person who said, "You Americans, always with the happy ending." I have to say, she may have had a point.

On a happier note, have a Tarkan video. See why I'm obsessing?

My letter to MANAA

Dear MANAA,

I am writing to express my support for your efforts regarding the whitewashing of the Avatar: the Last Airbender movie. I'm saddened that Paramount doesn't see how discriminatory their casting call was, let alone the final casting.

I love Avatar because it's not a European-fantasy story, but draws from the diverse cultures of Asia. There are plenty of European-fantasy stories in existence, and it's disingenuous of Paramount to claim that they're "increasing diversity" by making the story about white people.

I'm Caucasian (and an adult), and I can identify with the leads in Avatar. They're real characters, *humans*, with goals and dreams and traumatic pasts. I can recognize my teenage self in Katara, in Zuko. I can feel Aang's pain at seeing his entire nation wiped out. Hollywood's belief that white people are the most important audience and that we won't like movies or shows with non-white (male) leads is appalling, and it contributes to the perpetuation of a non-diverse system.

The film Paramount is making isn't the Avatar I love. I won't be seeing it.

Thank you for your hard work on this issue, and I urge you not to give up.

Books I love; movie casting I don't

Wil Wheaton has been posting about books he loves on his blog, and I thought that sounded like a fun thing to do. So I'll start with mine in the next few days or weeks, because I want to read them again so they're fresh in my mind and I can explain better why I love them, rather than just gushing about how amazing they are. I think the first will be Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold, because, damn, I love that book. (Of course, picking it up will most likely result in the voracious consumption of every other Miles book, because they're sort of like that, to the detriment of my backlog of never-read books on my shelf.)

Back in December, I made a couple posts about the misguided, ill-conceived casting of the Avatar: the Last Airbender movie. ATLA is a damn good show, and I love it to pieces. However, I don't love the movie.

Filming has begun in Greenland, where I'm assuming they're doing Water Tribe scenes. This lovely photoessay depicts the Inuit culture, on which the Water Tribe was based. (See this photoessay for actual screenshots of the show and compare.) Take a good look at the kids they hired to play the people in those pictures. Tell me that there are no Asian or Pacific Islander or Native American/First Peoples actors in the entire United States & Canada who could fill these roles. Go ahead.

I think MANAA and East West Players would vigorously object. Reportedly, the casting calls read "Caucasian or any other ethnicity." If Hollywood were interested in casting Asian actors in this film, the call would have read "Asian or any other ethnicity." Once again, Hollywood defaults to "white."

By casting white actors in roles based on a variety of Asian cultures, Hollywood is saying once again that cultural appropriation and yellowface are OK.

MANAA has a blog, where they discuss portrayals of Asians in the media and popular culture.

Jesse McCartney: Total idiot?

Dear pathetic wanker:

You are not my Zuko. Your recent interview on the John & Jay show (more info here*) showed that you've clearly done a lot of research to learn about your character. You've even taught me a few things I didn't know about my favorite show.

For example, you taught me that Avatar is an anime that was huge in Asia, so they brought it over here for 3 seasons and showed it on Nickelodeon. Wow! I never knew that creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko were from Japan!

Thanks to Paramount's idiotic casting decisions, and the sheer idiocy of the two actors who've given interviews this week regarding the property, I've gone from guardedly optimistic to pissed off and outraged. Good job, Paramount. This fan had been considering seeing the movie if the trailer looked like MNS hadn't fucked it up too badly, but now even if you gave out talking Emo!Zuko figures and gave me free admission, I wouldn't set foot in the door.

Great job!

No love,
Pissed-off Avatar fan.

*If you don't want to listen, the reactions in the comments sum it up. There's a straight mp3 version linked in comments, and the relevant part starts about halfway through.

More Avatar: the Whitewashed Airbender links and things

Roundups
Glockgal
Lemon Water

Some individual links you should read
Angry Asian Man: A break-up of Sorts What does this casting choice say to me, the angry Asian man? It says that every time somebody speaks more slowly and loudly to me because they assume that English isn't my first tongue, they're right to do so, because I'm not normal. [...] It says that even though Konietzko and DiMartino took pains to articulate themes of diversity and multiculturalism, all their work was for naught, because people don't really want to look at people who look like me. It says that every time somebody thinks of me as the other, they're right, because I am.

We'll let the show speak for itself - an extensive set of screencaps depicting the rich Asian feel of the show.

The Last Airbender Gets a Cast What’s irritating here is not that these kids are mostly unknowns or had bit parts in retarded movies, but that they’re all whiter than Mormon Jesus. “Avatar” self-consciously created a world and characters from non-Western cultures, they being the source of philosophy and metaphysics the show drew upon. Shyamalan and Co., in taking us to honky-town, have stripped one of the more original elements of the story.

Sad, Racist, or Firebendingly Hillarious? Okay, okay. So, the uproar isn't that they cast white people. We are upset because this is one of the few movies where they could have cast diverse actors--but didn't.

Who do I have to blow to get some representation around here? I'm not the irrationally Angry Asian (Wo)man, I really don't care about picky knee-jerk stuff like Kung Fu Panda characters being voiced by white people, or Zhang Ziyi (and Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh) playing Japanese women, because I know people were being super finicky about 'em. But this? Ah.. yeah, all this tells me is that Asian actors are too Asian for the most Asian show on TV, soon to be on the big screen. Fan-fucking-tastic.

what we talk about when we talk about During our early Christmas dinner this weekend, the oldest of the nephews, who is 13, brought up the subject of the incredibly white child actors that had been picked for the film version. The three of them were confused and disappointed but unable to articulate exactly why. Then the youngest, all of 7 years old, asked me whether this meant that he couldn't be Aang when he played Avatar with his friends from now on. [seriously, this last sentence makes me cry.]

White Cast of ATLA Besides, it's not like Asians are lacking opportunities in Hollywood. It's not like we want those leading roles, right? There will always be work playing Chinese delivery boys, liquor store clerks, nail salon workers and Asian gangster thugs number 1 through 6. Thanks again, Hollywood!

Racefail Bingo Dead Bro Walking is a community dedicated to exploring portrayals of race in the media.

White Privilege: You're soaking in it!

There's a belief among the people who promulgate entertainment that people will only enjoy reading books/watching films/watching TV shows about people who look like them. Unfortunately, for these people, that means making the protagonists (straight) white men.

Women (half the population, after all!) and minorities are expected to sympathize with the white male protagonist and his (usually also white, male) buddies. Sometimes the buddies are women; sometimes they're minorities. But it's never their stories, only Mr Whiteguy's.

Imagine there's a popular kids' TV show about a group of (pre-)teens who come from a world which is based extensively in East Asian cultures, like China, Tibet, and Korea. Two of the main characters are siblings, who are drawn with a medium brown skin tone and whose culture is clearly Inuit-derived. Another main character is clearly based off of Buddhist monks. One of the nations in this world wears topknots to denote rank. There is extensive use of Chinese martial arts in their world.

Imagine a famous director, himself of Southeast Asian origin, wants to make a movie of this, and the creators give him the go-ahead. Imagine that this director casts every main character, including the 2 who are clearly depicted as darker skinned, with white teenagers.

You don't have to imagine too hard. This is the proposed cast for M. Night Shyamalan's Avatar: The Last Airbender movie.

Change the scenario slightly, and you get the SciFi channel's whitewashing of brilliant SF writer Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books. She purposefully wrote a fantasy where the main character was non-white and the villains are blond, blue-eyed white people. Then SciFi cast a white kid as the main character (and changed the entire story, but that's a rant for a different day.)

Ms. LeGuin:

I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had "violet eyes").

But when stories with people who aren't "honkies named Joe" are made into movies, the casting is full of honkies. Because it's OK to make people who aren't white males watch movies about people who aren't like them - we're supposed to identify with this character, who is the default and ideal in modern American society - but it's impossible for white males to identify with characters who aren't white males.

There seems to be some sort of cognitive dissonance at work here. Oh, wait. That's privilege.

Edited to add: A fan has made a convenient how-to post for letting Paramount know your displeasure here.

The Forbidden Kingdom

I went to see the new Jackie Chan & Jet Li movie with some friends last night. It was great fun! A quick summary:

+ The extended (5-minute? 10?) fight between Jackie Chan and Jet Li
+ Random white boy/kung-fu-movie nut not nearly as egregious as I'd feared
+ Jackie Chan using whiteboy as a weapon
+ Funny bits were REALLY funny (there was one scene I laughed really hard at, but now I can't remember it.)
+ Collin Chou's eye make-up. Also, his cloak.
- Only 1 Jackie vs Jet fight scene
- Plot still tenuous at best, but enjoyable nevertheless
- A bit of scenery chewing in the Jade Warlord's palace
- Frame plot set-up with nerdy whiteboy & gangsta thugs
+ I had to pee, so I missed the random white boy/Chinese girl romance scene

I'd watch it again, just for the Jackie & Jet fight scene. And Collin Chou's eye make-up.