Entry tags:

avatar, avatar: the last airbender, the last airbender

Well jeez louise - Jesse McCartney out (of the movie, not the closet) and Dev Patel in to play Zuko the Fire Nation prince.

I want to be happy and sit back and celebrate a little. No, really I WANT to. It's generally not in my nature to have such constant and consistent outrage. I wanna be like "Oh wow, a (very bizarre sort of) concession; nothing more for me to do here, look! I can finally shut up and stop bothering 'colourblind' (non-flist) people with my outrage!"

Yeah. I'm not shutting up. I'm still outraged.

There are sooooo many reasons why and as usual, jedifreac says it so much better than me:

Before you say, "No matter what we do, the fans will still complain, they are impossible to please" can I posit that it's REALLY hard for people to be pleased about flagrant discrimination? And that we probably shouldn't be?

Goddamn. The more I think about Jesse and his "scheduling conflict" the more pissed off I get at Paramount Pictures/Nickelodeon Films for pulling a fast one without acknowledging our protest.

Can you imagine - a TANNED Rathbone dressed all-fully Inuit next to an ACTUALLY BROWN Patel? I just. I. THE MIND BOGGLES. HOW DOES THIS MAKE ANY SENSE.

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Ironically, I finally did watch Slumdog Millionaire this weekend with the folks.


Slumdog Millionaire
No truly, I did enjoy it! It was filmed beautifully, I liked the characters and the way the story was told/progressed and the way it portrayed a certain reality of India - which is a major reason why I find it hard to watch much modern Bollywood flicks: they're usually all entertainment and zero substance.

It was a little surreal to watch it, especially because throughout the movie I kept remembering that it was a phenomenal success (in the non-East Asian world) and nominated for ten Oscars and all that. I kept wondering why? Why was it so successful? But I realized: the general plot tropes (brothers: one bad, one good, gangsters and The Girl) to be pretty standard movie-fare. This plot could be transplanted anywhere - New York, Cairo, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro...story was not dependent on the colour of the cast.

Avatar casting aside - I feel that Slumdog Millionaire is what the fabled 'colourblind casting' would look like. A generic plot, supplanted in City-with-Slums-and-Criminal-Underground-and-Corrupt-Police (ie ANY CITY!!!) So it was good - it was refreshing to watch what is essentially a Hollywood-style film, with Indian actors.


And how does it tie in to Avatar casting?
a) Dev Patel, ahahha! Okay okay.
b) The Last Airbender plot is indeed mired heavily in Asian influences. In this case, the story IS racially dependent.
c) Slumdog clearly shows that all-non white casts can be beloved by white audiences!
d) Casting Dev Patel isn't a concession, it's a token.



Aw man. Does this mean we need to come up with new slogans? ;D