Other topic: People are really butt hurt about Idris Elba possibly being James Bond. It's TOTALLY because James Bond, the fictional character, is White and Scottish, NOT because Idris Elba is black you guys. Guys. Guise pls. Meanwhile an article asking Why Can't Link Be Black gets reposted and...well you can imagine how that went. Which is especially funny to me because Link is not only a fictional character, he's also a fictional character that gets REINCARNATED EVERY GAME. A game where pretty much the only dark skinned character IS THE FUCKING BAD GUY. And then there was that one time Doctor Who was almost Idris Elba and people flipped. Because, you know, an alien being can only turn into a White British Guy every time, as opposed to ANY OTHER HUMAN ON THE PLANET. If you can't tell I've been paying pretty close attention to Black representation in media and it's just like, there isn't any. How many young black actors are you currently aware of? Maybe four or five, tops? Literally the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the kid from Chronicle. Terms like SJW get thrown around like snowballs on a winter's day now. It has no meaning, like neckbeard or literally. It's used to shut down any conversation about representation. "If you want a black/girl/gay main character, go make your own game," meanwhile those minorities are unable to even BREACH areas of technological development. STEM white boys, the least persecuted people on the planet, are worried about their "safe space" getting raided by things they aren't used to and it's so scawy ya'll hold me and my inability to make a protagonist that isn't a grizzled white guy with an assault rifle. /rantover
Speaking as a fair-weather Jew: Everybody knows the Jews run Hollywood. Everybody also knows that the Jews are a bunch of avaricious opportunists, and if there was money to be made turning James Bond into a pedophile we'd do it. What, then, is the profit motive behind the lily-white casts of nearly all Hollywood movies these days? Something Hollywood doesn't want you to know is that the United States is now somewhere between 25% and 50% of their revenues. The rest of the world - primarily Asia, partly Europe - counts for the rest. And the rest of the world - primarily Asia, partly Europe - does not want to see black people. Unless it's Will Smith. No one is sure why, exactly, but Asian audiences are totally cool with Will Smith. Anybody else? fuggedaboudit. Is it racism if you can't profit off of black people, as opposed to racist because you don't like black people? I'd say yes. But no matter how colorblind the United States gets (and it doesn't look like it is, does it?), film will get whiter and whiter and whiter so long as Hollywood depends on large Asian markets to pay for its films. Effectively, a black James Bond loses half its revenue. A black James Bond effectively loses a third of its revenue if it doubles its US revenue... and Americans are more likely to watch Larry the Cable Guy as James Bond than Idris Elba. You see the worst places for black people to travel. Hollywood sees markets. Remember, Nintendo is Japanese. Yes, I'm saying America is less racist than you think because the rest of the world is MORE racist than you think, and I recognize that it's shitty. I'd totally watch Elba play Bond; I'd watch him play Thomas Jefferson. And that's the difference - there's an outside chance for blacks in American media for consumption by Americans and it's a chance worth striving for. That's how Annie ended up black: foreign markets give two shits about christmas movies and Annie is a purely American property with no international tail. But as American audiences pay less and less attention to gigantic blockbusters...
....well, let's just say Idris has less and less chance of headlining Transformers 7 or whatever.
Okay, so what I'm hearing is that Will Smith is going to be the next James Bond. What a bummer that this is the way the industry works, but what an even greater bummer that so much of the world is racist. I'd love to see him play Bond, I thought he was the most captivating actor in the Wire. Like flagamuffin, I didn't realize that Daniel Craig was done. While I'm all for Idris Elba taking up the mantel, it would seem Craig has some gas left in the tank, no? Also, people like Limbaugh seem to think James Bond is an actual historic figure and not a fictional character. They liken it to Idris playing Thomas Jefferson etc, when it's so, so, so very different. That said, Idris as Jefferson would be interesting.
Will Smith is much too expensive and much more likely to have an opinion. The Broccolis are legendarily cheap and iron-fisted. That's probably why Craig is getting the boot - now that they've built him into a movie star they have to pay him like one and treat him like one.
You see "asian." Asians see Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, etc. And believe it or not, Asian countries generally hate each other more than they hate the US. The Cantonese word for "foreigner" means both "foreign devil" and "Japanese." All others are "foreign devil, not Japanese." The Petronas Towers were finished a month ahead of schedule because the Malaysians gave one tower to a Japanese construction crew and the other to a Korean one. They then gave a 5% bonus to whoever finished first. Fights were common but both teams worked around the clock for six weeks straight to beat the other. So when a Japanese star is cast, you just lost China, Korea, Vietnam and Thailand. Cast a Thai star and you lost Japan, China and Korea. Cast a Chinese star and you lost Japan and Korea, etc.
It's fucked up, but I've seen evidence of it. Race is a whole other thing in Asia. A number of our Chinese friends and colleagues do not seem to be sensitive to racism at all in the way that I am used to. The role of race in Chinese culture is nothing like ours in the US. But, that said, many many Americans, white and black, are terribly racist against Chinese. The US market wouldn't be cool with a Chinese James Bond.
Which is a crying goddamn shame because an ethnic-Chinese Briton furthering The Queen's interests in a newly-repatriated Hong Kong is about the only possible relevant spy story you can tell that directly involves MI-6 as anything other than a tertiary appendage of the CIA/NSA/DIA. For that matter, Goldfinger was originally based on the PRC's Nazi gold-laundering and counterfeiting in Macau, credited by many with getting the nascent nation through the lean times shortly after Mao took over. The more I think about it, the more awesome a Chinese James Bond would be - all the places of far-east intrigue that Bond movies have always loved are all about Chinese interests - Kazakhstan, Thailand, North Korea, Japan, Nigeria... all major spheres of Chinese influence in the past ten years. Cinematic as fuck without even trying. Maybe they can get Keith Carradine to play.
I can't do anything but agree with you, and commiserate to the extent I can, being trans (but white). Especially in America, race is so institutionalized, and so connected to class. As a Canadian, I had no idea how bad it was until I came here to study. I'd never, in the flesh, heard someone described as a "nr" by someone with a mouthful of vitriol. A gay, asian man, no less. I was so gobsmacked i couldn't even respond. My friend Esther, a clarinet major, was pulled over for driving while black a while ago. She's from a relatively well off family, who bought her a Lexus. The cops had her out of the car, had her parents and the insurance company on the phone just to confirm that she really was who she said she was, the name on the registration. What the fuck, man? Trans people are 400 times more likely to be murdered than average in the US, and 12 of the 16 murders of trans people in america this year were trans women of colour, the most vulnerable and at risk group of trans people. Laverne Cox and Janet Mock might make it look good, but they are at risk every time they walk down the street, not just because of their gender identity, but because of their colour. I don't know what to do.
That's interesting. I hadn't heard that they're considering someone new for Bond. I think it's a shame, but that's because I really like Daniel Craig. If he wants out, the next one might as well be black or any other thing. (Although -- hypocrisy? I was very annoyed when that TV show made Sherlock's Watson a woman. I think there's a difference between changing a character's physical appearance and changing their gender. I'll have to think about it.) I think I'd prefer, on the balance, if James Bond was consistently cast as an actor that looks like his description in the original stories -- because I'm sort of conservative when it comes to literature being adapted to other forms -- but that is much less important than having strong black actors in Hollywood. And since, as you say, there aren't just a whole lot of classic roles for black men, race-bending is the solution. In a more perfect world, there would be plenty of black actors and plenty of books about black teens/young adults for them to bring to the screen. Maybe someday. EDIT: I googled and noticed that this was a Limbaugh thing. Dude, I know. But if you spend your life being angry at things Rush Limbaugh says ... did anyone else actually say this? Limbaugh is an idiot and it doesn't do much good to get worked up about the things he says. Course I'm sure a large number of people agree with him. Maybe ranting will help. But even thinking about Limbaugh is not constructive.
Strange. You were willing to accept Sickboy in New York as Holmes, but Lucy Liu was a bridge too far? Me, I'd be cool with whoever they want Watson to be... so long as it isn't Lucy Liu. I'd rather watch Ru Paul. You do realize that Team Broccoli ran out of Fleming novels with Living Daylights in '87, right? And that at one point James Bond was driving an invisible Aston Martin across a lake while a North Korean clone fired space lasers at him? Moonraker was written in 1955 - no space in it anywhere; the eponymous weapon was an upgraded Nazi V-2. Fleming himself barely outlived JFK; when he died, Vietnam was still a police action. Shit, when Fleming died the British could still pretend to be a geopolitical force. The notting hill riots were '58. There were maybe 20,000 black people in all of England. The Commonwealth Act of '62 ensured it'd stay that way. Despite 3 more similar acts since, there are now more than a million self-identified blacks in the UK, or two percent of the population. Seems almost as improbable as shooting down a pod full of poisonous orchids during re-entry, if you ask me. I'd say the UK has earned a black Bond.
The key thing about Bond is that he's cool, stylish and quintessentially male. Elba has proven himself to be all three, in so many ways, regardless of his philogenetic expression. I made this because Elba would be awesome.
The biggest boss in your video game was black too ;) Hahah no, just joking, I 100% agree with you. Tho black people are always badass even if they are evil in the media. Indians have it even worse with always being the lame store clerks... Never read it but stuff like Ms. Marvel really gives me hope it will change tho. Relevant Idea Channel video:
Speaking of Indians, it always blew my mind that The Last Airbender (there is no movie in Ba Sing Se, etc. etc.), a movie based on a show where the protagonists are presumably Inuit, and the antagonists based on the Japanese, flipped it around so that the protagonists were white, and the Fire Nation was fucking Indian. Especially weird considering who wrote the goddamn movie