Hey, Whitefolk! Paramount Thinks You're Racist

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Oh, boy—The Last Airbender comes out tomorrow!

Now I can properly boycott it!

I have a lot of issues with this movie—everything from “the effects look cheesy” to “why the hell are they making a movie trilogy out of a perfectly good TV show?”*—but I’d have been willing to go to it anyway.

Except for, y’know, the whole casting fiasco. That shit is not cool.

These are big damn issues, and I can’t really hope to cover them all. I want social change, justice, and respect for people who aren’t getting it—all very damn good, but to me ultimately abstract, reasons. However, I do have one self-centered and petty reason that's a lot closer to home, too, aside from all the Greater Good and the reasons posted in that link above:

I am simply insulted that they’d assume that I, a white woman, am so afraid of anybody who isn’t blazingly white that I would never deign to buy a ticket to a movie with such people in the leading roles.

Basically, in amidst all the much more problematic dismissals of people of color, they are also handing out insults to the very audience they do acknowledge exists: "Hey, there, white people! We're going to assume you'd be much too threatened to even consider a movie with Asian protagonists! Don't worry, we're siding with this imagined caricature of your racist ass on this one! Don't you feel better now?"

Not to mention the assumption that even if I am annoyed, I'd go see it anyway for pretty effects.

I think it’s terribly ironic that their cynical attempt to ensure that I spend money on this is the very reason I refuse to do so.

Anyway, I’m sticking with the cartoon, which may I remind you is one of the best TV shows ever made. In fact, I think I’ll watch some tomorrow—just out of pure spite. Fuck you, Paramount.


*Yes, I know: money.

Comments

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I admit, I rather liked the Sixth Sense, but I am willing to believe it was derived from something. (Enough so that a book I found on How To Survive A Horror Movie has a litmus test for you to try to see if you are really dead. I believe the suggestion was to take your pants off somewhere public.)

[westrider.livejournal.com]

As Warren Ellis pointed out a little while back, Bruce Willis has actually had a really strange, and quite interesting, film Career. Sixth Sense, 12 Monkeys, 5th Element (hey, I see a pattern here), a few others that aren't coming to mind right now, he's done plenty of stuff that's way off the "Die Hard" image that many people seem to have of him.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

5th Element isn't that far off of the Die Hard image, though. He plays a working shlub who's actually a hardcore ass-kicker. That's pure John McClane.

On the other hand, he was also in Pulp Fiction.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Willis himself wasn't so different, now that you mention it, but for some reason, the context of the rest of the movie gives it a very different feel to me.