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⌈ Secret Post #2134 ⌋

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I just saw this last night. It was decent. I enjoyed the story.

The blackface/whiteface/asianface was distracting as hell though. All implications aside, it was just so poorly done that there wasn't a hope in hell of anyone mistaking any of the characters for anything but "a white guy with hideous eye prosthetics" or "an Asian woman with dyed hair and contact lenses" etc. The male/female transitions are much better done. Can't Hollywood do better than this? Even if they needed to use CGI? How can it be that we can make Gollum look like a living, breathing creature and not make a white guy look anything at all like he's Asian?

It really distracted from the "we are all the same" and "race doesn't matter" message when it was so starkly obvious that all of these people were completely distinguishable as an "other" in a costume.

I wish they had the same characters throughout the different timelines but with different actors. I'm always so impressed when that is done well, and there's far fewer unfortunate implications with that method.

That would have been a great deal more expensive, though, especially since they insisted on having well-known actors for nearly every part.

Why couldn't they use ambiguous-looking mixed-race actors, I wondered. That could've worked well.

Probably the same reason they didn't use an ensemble cast of less-recognizable actors for each part - how many well-known people of mixed-race are there in Hollywood?

There's... ...Vin Diesel. And The Rock.

Wait, this sounds like a way better movie already ;p

Just to play devil's advocate, Halle Berry IS a well-known actress of mixed race. Her father was African-American and her mother was English and German.

I was under the understanding that that was considered "black" in the US, as Obama (who is also of mixed-race, with a white mother) is constantly referred to as "the first black president", not "the first mixed-race president".

The idea that a mixed-race individual is always, or even most of the time, identified only by their POC status troubles me, because it erases a part of their own history and heritage. It affects me personally as a person who is of mixed heritage--if I were to always identify as Asian and gloss over the whole half of my family who are white, it would be a dishonor to my mother and everything her family's been through. Barack Obama identifies as African American, but you can't deny that his mother's family holds a special place in his heart. I can't speak for Halle Berry because I don't know her relationship to her mother's family, but she may feel the same.

Popularly, she's African American, but at the very least, she's biologically of mixed heritage.

-if I were to always identify as Asian and gloss over the whole half of my family who are white, it would be a dishonor to my mother and everything her family's been through

I'm Asian/white as well, and I really empathize with this. This is exactly how I feel about how I identify myself. Also, I find where I live in Canada the 'one drop rule' isn't as prevalent and people don't expect you to choose between your various backgrounds.

identified only by their POC status troubles me, because it erases a part of their own history and heritage

It really depends on how they look, if you're leaning to looking more on the white side then it goes the other and people ignore you're other heritage. Also, people don't seem to take into account people who land perfectly in the middle, or who don't like either parent (like myself). We just get a lot of 'ooooh, what are you?'.

Edited 2012-11-06 01:52 (UTC)

'ooooh, what are you?'

Ugh, I get this soooooo much. Or people like to guess, like it's a fun game... I don't know why.

It is all dependent on how the person identifies. Barack Obama identifies as a black man, Halle Berry identifies as a woman of mixed descent.

It's funny, I had almost the opposite reaction. My brain just sort of retconned the visual oddness of the white-to-asian prosthetics as part of the genetic fuckery of Future Humanity, even though those characters weren't clones. Which actually dovetailed well with the Fabricants played by an actual Asian looking 'perfect' by comparison.

But the gender-flipped costumes threw me way off, because I've know a lot of trans people in various stages of transition, and I immediately mentally identified the cross-gender castings as trans characters. I kept being suprised that no one ever mention that, and wow how nice that they're just treating her like any other lady - oh wait, she's supposed to be cis?

Uh, okay, I guess I can suspend my disbelief a little more.