• FriendBesto@lemmy.ml
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        1 hour ago

        Take it easy man, we do not want to over stage Citizen Kane, here.

        Mr. Tan Suit would win best supporting actor, AND best costume design, by itself.

    • FriendBesto@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      The last Samurai is not played by Tom Cruise. He plays a guy who gets to know and grows to respect the last Samurai and Japanese culture.

      Ken Watanabe as Lord Moritsugu Katsumoto, he plays the eponymous “Last Samurai.”

      Clearly you have not even watched the damn movie. Or what is your point?

      But we are all good with a black woman playing the real life British Anne Boleyn?

      Man, can’t wait until we find out which white actor will play Barack Obama in his biopic. I mean, diversity is our strength.

      • TargaryenTKE@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        1-You had to actually watch the full movie to get any of that context

        2-It’s still Cruise’s face front and center on every piece of promotional art

        3-As much as I hate that this is true, the vast majority of people who saw that movie did not do so because they heard Ken Watanabe was in it

        • FriendBesto@lemmy.ml
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          1 hour ago
          1. Who is in the habit of starting to watch a movie and like, walk out half way? Most people watch movies from beginning to end. Like what are you saying? People are not supposed to know every plot beat or point in a movie if they have never watched it or read the script.

          Did you know that in the Avengers movie, they do not really or actually avenge anything? You would have to watch it to get that, I guess.

          1. Uh, so? It was an American production about an American fictitious character, starring one of the biggest, most recognised actors and movie draws of the last 35+ years. Fail to understand the point… Did you know that Japanese movies spotlight Japanese actors/characters on their covers even if the movie is set in the USA or Europe or deals with their culture? Is it incorrect when they do it?

          2. Why do you hate the fact that most Americans at the time did not know who Watanabe was? That’s nonsensical. It is not anyone’s job to know actors from other countries. Clearly, the biggest draw was Tom Cruise both in the USA and for the international market, he is still a huge draw, even today. I would say that most of the world did not know who Watanabe was, outside of Japan at that point. I would say that most people may not know who he is even today. Unless you point out the Last Samurai or the Godzilla or Batman movies first. Despite he being in tons of other projects, specially in Japan TV.

          Edit: Lots of Watanabe haters here.

            • FriendBesto@lemmy.ml
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              55 minutes ago

              Uh, it’s a free country and neither of us are paying for the server space. Albeit I do not know why you want to be such a white supremacist or focus on that. But c’est la vie. You do you, friend! No judgement.

              Maybe add a PIC of Watanabe. But if not, post a bunch more photos of Tom Cruise, his new movie is about to come out! More eyes on the ball, I say. Cheers!

      • GeeDubHayduke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 hours ago

        So, you missed the link…? Or, just lost your sense of humor in the war?

        ETA: when did i say that Tom Cruise was the last samurai…?

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        I have watched the movie. It shows a European in a role absolutely impossible in upper layers of Japanese society of that time.

  • Destide@feddit.uk
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    6 hours ago

    This is crazy, I mean Roberts is from the South and Tubman from the north, no one’s going to believe it!

  • x4740N@lemm.ee
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    6 hours ago

    The article led me down a rabbit hole leading to an article about the ghost in the shell movie adaptation promo meme generator being used to criticise the whitewashing in the movie adaptation

    Fuck whitewashing

    • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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      4 hours ago

      It’s such an insane story that I wonder what the other side of it is. It’s easy to imagine the guy just having got out of a meeting ten minutes earlier with “if you don’t get Julia Roberts into a movie by the end of the week, I’ll see you never work in this town again!” ringing in his ears.

    • wuzzlewoggle@feddit.org
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      9 hours ago

      So it was 30 years ago. I feel like, even though things are far from perfect now, nowadays a comment like this would draw quite a few more critical looks than back then.

        • wuzzlewoggle@feddit.org
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          3 hours ago

          Sure, but knowing how fucked something is and actually speaking out about it are two very different things.

      • qarbone@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        It was also 30 years closer to Harriet Tubman, in a time when black civil rights were not even as sanded smooth as they appear now.

      • zout@fedia.io
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        6 hours ago

        Why would you think that? I was around in 1994, and if anything, it got worse.

        • wuzzlewoggle@feddit.org
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          2 hours ago

          No, sorry. Go watch any sitcom from the nineties. There is a lot of stuff in there (racism, sexism, homophobia) that would cause a shitstorm these days.

          Maybe you lived in a progressive bubble back then (good for you) but as someone born in the nineties who grew up in the early 00s, I have to say, ignorance was a lot more tolerated back then, even in the 00s.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          Or Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

          Cleopatra was by ancestry mostly Greek. So I don’t get what you mean.

          Most of her subjects weren’t quite “black” either.

          Sorry for this interjection, but I hate wrong corrections, especially when they give up cute chains of thought like “queen of (hellenistic, that’s my own addition) Egypt -> Egypt’s in the African continent -> black”.

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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            2 hours ago

            Yeah, the thing a lot of people seem to miss is just how major of a geographic barrier the Sahara is. As a consequence, northern Africans weren’t generally very black for most of history.

        • doug@lemmy.today
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          7 hours ago

          Or Emma Stone in Aloha, or Max Minghella in The Social Network, or Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange.

    • myotheraccount@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      It is different, if color of skin is a relevant part of the context of the story. Having John Brown played by a black man would be equally misleading.

      For Anne Boleyn’s story on the other hand, racism did not play a part, because it wasn’t even invented yet.

      • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        39 minutes ago

        …ok hol’ up.

        racism did not play a part, because it wasn’t even invented yet.

        Racism wasn’t invented before 1536, the year she got beheaded? The Portuguese had already transported the first slave ship to Brazil 10yr earlier, even if we pretend there was complete racial harmony before the transatlantic slave trade began, which is an absolutely insane thing to pretend, that still started before her death. Not to mention the fact that racism (and slavery no less) has been around since long before “transatlantic” was even a concept.

        • myotheraccount@lemmy.world
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          30 minutes ago

          Slavery existed previously, and certainly xenophobia did. Those things are as old as time, nondoubt about it. But racism is something more specific: it’s an attempt to use pseudoscience to justify how you can simultaneously consider “all people are equal” (a core belief of the age of enlightenment) while also maintaining stark inequality and slavery (an economic reality of the time).

    • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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      2 hours ago

      Because people aren’t depicting Jesus as a white Caucasian male?

      If the skin colour isn’t relevant to the story, it doesn’t matter. If it is relevant, it does.

    • 🦄🦄🦄@feddit.org
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      2 hours ago

      White people were never opressed and there is no danger of erasing white people and their achievements from history, so yes, the reverse is very ok.

    • andros_rex@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 hours ago

      Fun story - I went to a troubled teen facility, and we had “group.” There was no actual qualifications required for the people running “group.”

      We watched Tyler Perry movies. (Also at one point Ip Man which is a goated film.) I learned the phrase “give head” or similar while watching How Did I Get Married. I was asked to think about the lessons that this movie could apply to my interpersonal relationships - I had never considered how the frequency of oral sex would decease after marriage.