TV/Movie News

[Jack the Stripper]

Will Smith is trying to get his career back on track after the oscars slapping incident.

[Charger]

Did his career really got affected by that little stunt that may or may not have been planned?

Sure he might not get invited to this years Oscars but then again the oscars have become such a liberal hollywood circle jerk anyways who really cares...

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

^^^
The Netflix film Fast and Loose has been delayed because of his actions, but I think Smith will come out of this in a year or two largely unaffected. Audiences soon forget... see Mel Gibson and Johnny Depp.

[Charger]

see Mel Gibson and Johnny Depp.

Well lets remember Johnny Depp was the ABUSED party...so he did nothing wrong.

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

^^^
Very true, but at the first trial he was found to be at fault and got dropped from some big films (Fantastic Beats 3 and the next Pirates sequel). He does seem to be working again, but I'm not sure they are big films.

I'm not expecting Amber Heard to be cast in anything any time soon.

[Charger]

I think Disney tried some sort of a half assed apology to Depp but I think he couldn't have been bothered.

Sadly the thing is women always get off the hook so much more easier so I'm sure Amber Turd will be smelling up the pot sooner than any of us want.

[Zzzptm]

Yeah, *any* court entanglement, either side of the law, and studios may want to stay clear so as to avoid "controversy."

[Charger]

Netflix trying to rewrite history in the name of woke...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65322821


I call it bullshit and so does the legendary egyptologist Zahi Hawass:
"This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black."
"Netflix is trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilisation is black."

But ofcourse the woke culture doesn't care a rats ass about facts...

[Zzzptm]

Had a longer post that I made a blog entry.

Comes down to a few key points:

1. Jada Pinkett-Smith is the executive producer of the project. She got the funding for it together, so she gets to call the shots.
2. While Cleopatra's likeness in sculpture is clearly that of a Classical Greek woman, this Netflix thing is a fictionalized docudrama. They could cast Lucy Liu or Nicole Kidman in the role and it would be just as ahistorical as it is right now.
3. If Shakespeare's rules were still in effect, a young man would be cast in the role of Cleopatra. How society has eroded to the point where we openly and commonly accept the idea of *women* in the acting profession! The very idea!
4. This one's a big one. There's a whole debate in Egypt and beyond about the ethnic makeup of ancient Egypt. In a world that itself has negative racial discrimination towards non-Whites, and in particular to those not of a Northwestern European origin, entire nations have been fighting PR battles for the last 200 years to "prove" that they're able to stand on the podium side-by-side with the Colonialist nations' populations. Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Turks, they've all fought against negative stereotypes. In the USA, Italians have fought against being classified as "Negroes" during Segregation. The Egyptians themselves have struggled with a non-White identity and many in that country want to insist that they're White, not like those "other people" on the other side of the desert.

Egyptology itself has faced a bulwark. As European nations in the 19th Century proceeded to carve up Africa and exploit its mineral, agricultural, and human resources, the idea of civilization emerging there and providing the foundation to Greek civilization was abhorrent to them. And yet, from early on, the connections between all those pyramids and temples and the Blacks of Africa were quite evident. The scholarly solution was to ignore the facts and pretend that Ancient Egyptians were Whites.

The Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop did a great deal of research to show the African origins of Egyptian civilization - one could start with the Egyptian name for their own land, which translates to "the Black Land" and their name for themselves, which translates to "the Black People." When Diop studied the melanin content of skin cells inside mummy wrappings, it was as high as that of Blacks in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Diop's research has met with shrill rebuttals from people who want to cling to the idea of a Whiter Egypt, be they Eurocentrics that can't condone the idea of European civilization being built upon a Black African foundation, as well as those who want to insist that Egypt itself is White, so that they can hope for some kind of adjacent equality with the Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and Turks. The thing about a fictionalized version of Cleopatra being Black or White runs a lot deeper than just a note of historical accuracy.

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

I know Gal Gadot is playing Cleopatra in a yet to be made film of the queen. Even though she's not Egyptian she at least comes from the general area (Israel). She is the biggest name the area has these days.

[Charger]

The big problem with this is that for years now the woke dummies have been crying about white people playing roles that haven't been historically accurate...but now that they're doing it, it is supposed to be okay....fuck that. The double standards for those people is ridiculous and it should be called out for what it is.

Gadot also got a lot of backlash for not being right for the role mostly by the woke crowd....it's just stupid.

[Zzzptm]

There's a difference between actual Civil Rights activism and people engaging in virtue-signaling activity. Actual activism is about overcoming barriers, formal and informal, that shouldn't be there. Virtue-signaling is about shouting and pointing and not actually engaging with any solution other than one that involves zero compromise.

I think the virtue-signaling over who plays Cleopatra is as pointless as the virtue-signaling about "wokeism" at M&Ms when the Green M&M character wore comfy shoes.

Now, the issue about casting is a real one. When white actors were chosen, time and time again, to perform in roles where they were made to look like a member of a non-white group, thereby denying work to actors who looked like who the white actor was attempting to portray, *that* was a clear sign of racial bias benefiting white actors and punishing nonwhite actors. In other cases, where race was not specified, many producers simply went with white actors because of inherent biases in their own choices.

In this particular case, there's no attempt to make the actress playing Cleopatra to look like she's Macedonian, so it's not wokeism at play. It's the producer making a conscious choice about what to fictionalize - the series is "Black Queens of Africa", after all, so if a queen is in the series, she's gonna be Black. If they follow up with "Black Queens of England", then Elizabeth I is going to look quite fictionalized in the end product. At the end of the day, Jada Pinkett-Smith wants to showcase actors who she feels deserve a chance to shine and, hopefully, get more work in the future - hopefully overcoming biases against them in the process. I see that as actual, positive activism.

Gadot's case involved critics beyond virtue-signaling-pro-Palestinian leftists. Her critics included a sizable contingent of virtue-signaling-pan-Arabist right-wingers. There are people who believe that Cleopatra was Black, and there are people who believe that Cleopatra was Arab. There are also people who believe Finland doesn't exist. At least the people who believe Finland doesn't exist don't have shrill shouters and pointers to spoil our day, so I tolerate them better. And I see the producers' decision to stand with her on the casting choice also as a positive form of activism.

[Vyn]

When Shelly Duvall is cast as Muhammad Ali in a movie-bio about him, then I'll stop looking askance at folks who hang their virtue out in such a way that they claim the casting in a mainstream big-budget film has fuck all to do with improving the lives of some marginalized group of people.

Those movies are made for one purpose, and that is to generate as much profit for the production company as possible. There is literally nothing else on the "objective chart". If eating rhino shit would make their profit number larger, they'd all be chowing down every chance they had.

The entertainment industry is smoke and mirrors - it's a fantasy being sold as art. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of legitimate examples of precisely that. But riding the fad de'jour and claiming moral superiority through film-making has a significant representation in that industry.

And propaganda - well, it's as effective as ever.

[Zzzptm]

"Hello, Vyn, I'm from the Lifetime Network, and we'd like to option that interesting boxing biopic idea of yours..."

[Charger]

In the end it's the same thing if someone would make a movie out of Barack Obama and decided to cast a white guy to the role...and oh boy the ammount of shit that would storm up...

But it is what it is...woke can do no wrong...

This is just one of those things that makes me want to boycot netflix even more...but Arnold's new show is on there too and that looks like a shitload of fun...goddamn.