A tale of three films(ish)
I've seen three things recently where the attitude to race has been very noticeable.
One of the local churches has a monthly film night and this month it was The Blind Side. I suspect the book is much better - it's one of very few Michael Lewis books I haven't read, and the rest have been very good. By concentrating almost exclusively on the story of one person and the family that adopts him, this is one of the ultimate 'white saviour' films, urgh. Appropriately, Sandra Bullock won the 'best actress' Academy Award and Quinton Aaron didn't even get nominated.
La La Land has the whitest Los Angeles since the last film set there. There are some black musicians in it but they don't say much and if you see it, count how many other BME people get lines. (Also see how many people are smoking: I don't remember spotting any.)
The Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events gives it the space that the film version denied it and it's much better as a result. There's some padding, especially in the first couple of episodes (The Bad Beginning ones) and some foreshadowing that I don't remember from the early books, but I am really looking forward to the next series which has the best books (and, I hope, the third series completing the set).
Xanna's pointed out the way that it's Violet who's almost always holding Sunny - I think Klaus carries her twice, including once when he's hypnotised - but it's the casting that I found so striking: in both books and film, Mr Poe, the hopeless coughing banker is white. He's played by K. Todd Freeman here. In both books and film, Aunt Josephine, their guardian in The Wide Window is white. She's played by Alfre Woodard here. Even Uncle Monty, guardian in The Reptile Room, is played by Aasif Mandvi here.
Three 'motion picture stories'. Only one has gone out of its way to have diverse casting.
This entry was originally posted at http://lovingboth.dreamwidth.org/573645.html, because despite having a permanent account, I have had enough of LJ's current owners trying to be evil. Please comment there using OpenID -
have and if you have an LJ account, you can use it for your OpenID account. Or just join Dreamwidth! It only took a couple of minutes to copy all my entries here to there.
One of the local churches has a monthly film night and this month it was The Blind Side. I suspect the book is much better - it's one of very few Michael Lewis books I haven't read, and the rest have been very good. By concentrating almost exclusively on the story of one person and the family that adopts him, this is one of the ultimate 'white saviour' films, urgh. Appropriately, Sandra Bullock won the 'best actress' Academy Award and Quinton Aaron didn't even get nominated.
La La Land has the whitest Los Angeles since the last film set there. There are some black musicians in it but they don't say much and if you see it, count how many other BME people get lines. (Also see how many people are smoking: I don't remember spotting any.)
The Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events gives it the space that the film version denied it and it's much better as a result. There's some padding, especially in the first couple of episodes (The Bad Beginning ones) and some foreshadowing that I don't remember from the early books, but I am really looking forward to the next series which has the best books (and, I hope, the third series completing the set).
Xanna's pointed out the way that it's Violet who's almost always holding Sunny - I think Klaus carries her twice, including once when he's hypnotised - but it's the casting that I found so striking: in both books and film, Mr Poe, the hopeless coughing banker is white. He's played by K. Todd Freeman here. In both books and film, Aunt Josephine, their guardian in The Wide Window is white. She's played by Alfre Woodard here. Even Uncle Monty, guardian in The Reptile Room, is played by Aasif Mandvi here.
Three 'motion picture stories'. Only one has gone out of its way to have diverse casting.
This entry was originally posted at http://lovingboth.dreamwidth.org/573645.html, because despite having a permanent account, I have had enough of LJ's current owners trying to be evil. Please comment there using OpenID -
have and if you have an LJ account, you can use it for your OpenID account. Or just join Dreamwidth! It only took a couple of minutes to copy all my entries here to there.