Hollywood needs to stop with the whitewashing vol. Exodus: Gods and Kings

zapatohead408 said:

Mister Friendly said:

The reason why people get upset with historical inaccuracies because eventually this film will make its way into education either formally or informally.

A kid or teenager sees the film and eventually believes that Ancient Egyptians looked like Christian Bale which is inaccurate

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Why the hell does it matter what color their skin was?

You dudes put too much emphasis on race.

I learned a many facts growing up through books/movies/discovery channel etc. I learned the facts, never once cared to know the skin color of a person... because it's unrelated.

So you're telling me if you found out every single pharaoh or high ranking Egyptian in Ancient Egypt was Wesley Snipes's color it would make a difference?

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airedweezy said:

There has to be famous egyptiin actors out there for these roles or you guys just want color or actual Egyptians?

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zapatohead408 said:

You dudes put too much emphasis on race.

 

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VICTOR PAGE said:

How about leaving the storylines alone?

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airedweezy said:

Then we'd have a thread why doesn't hollywood tell stories about minorities. Dam just enjoy the movie. I'm not complaining about guatemalans not getting any movies lets just all be happy

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Mister Friendly said:

Its a historical film!

The film should try to be somewhat historically accurate

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LuckyLuchiano said:

Its not our problem, you're a damn fool if you arent outraged if Hollywood ever made a movie about your country and it stared a buncha Christian Bale cats.

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airedweezy said:

Mel Gibson made a movie about the Mayans I ain't complain once tho but I did hear people outraged at the level of violence.

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LuckyLuchiano said:

did you read what you just put? Did Mel Gibson star in the flick?

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airedweezy said:

Yeah I read what I wrote I responded to what you said hollywood has made a movie of my people cast with Mayan ancestors. What I don't get is why many of the people here keep throwing out black actors and have yet to mention any egyption actors.


If you wanna do this movie right get egyption actors but most of the one I found who are famous are to light skinned for many of the posters here.

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airedweezy said:

Yeah I read what I wrote I responded to what you said hollywood has made a movie of my people cast with Mayan ancestors. What I don't get is why many of the people here keep throwing out black actors and have yet to mention any egyption actors.


If you wanna do this movie right get egyption actors but most of the one I found who are famous are to light skinned for many of the posters here.

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sharpshooter718 said:

Its always people who arent black telling us to calm down about these inaccurate portrayals of our history

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OnTheNephs said:

And as if the 400 years of Arab colonization somehow got rid of all the blackness in Egypt and made everybody olive skin now. Like what kind of dumbness is that? Believe what you want thou.

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LUCY: WHY I’M TIRED OF SEEING WHITE PEOPLE ON THE BIG SCREEN
http://oliviaacole.wordpress.com/20...red-of-seeing-white-people-on-the-big-screen/

I’m tired of seeing white people on the silver screen.

First, let me note that I am white. I am a white woman who goes to the theater to see probably a dozen films (if not more) in a given year, a white woman who readily consumes TV shows and series and often blogs/tweets about them. I love film. I love what Hollywood could be, but I must say that I don’t love what it is, and that is a machine generating story after story in which the audience is asked to root for a white (usually male) hero over and over and over (and over) again. I’m tired. I’m tired of directors pretending that white actors are the default and that people of color are a distraction when it comes to filmmaking. I’m tired of black women in Hollywood being relegated to roles of slaves and “the help” over and over again. I’m tired of films convincing themselves that they are taking on something fresh and new, the likes of which the world has never seen, but in actuality adhering to tired tropes and stereotypes.

One example that comes to mind is Avatar, a “groundbreaking” film about aliens and humanity, which, underneath it all, is the same old White Savior story. But more recently is Lucy, the film starring Scarlett Johansson in which a woman named Lucy evolves and is able to use 100% of her brain’s capacity after she unwittingly ingests a massive amount of drugs.

Lucy is about what humankind could be: it’s about possibilities. As Lucy’s brainpower grows stronger and the volume of knowledge she is able to access increases, she delivers monologues about how little humans understand about death, existence, and the universe, mediating on time and history. The film likes to think of itself as reimagining everything that we think we know about humanity, and presents to us their vision of what the most evolved woman on earth looks like:

A blonde white woman.

See, I just can’t get right with that.

You see, I was an anthropology major in high school and by the time I was 16 I’d learned all about Lucy (Australopithecus), the collection of bones found in Hadar and thought to have lived 3.2 million years ago, one of the oldest hominids we know of. Lucy the film doesn’t try to hide how cute they thought they were being by naming the supreme evolved being in their film “Lucy:” they show an ape-like creature crouched by a stream to illustrate just how far human beings have come, and say as much in the opening lines, depicting vast cities built up to show our progress. The original Lucy was not really an ape, though: she had small skull capacity like apes, but her skeleton shows she was bipedal and walked upright like humans. Hadar, by the way, is in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia.

So I guess what’s sticking in my craw is the assertion that while human life originated in Africa—a detail the film neatly skims over, placing the ape-like Lucy that Johansson sees in North America—somehow the way we imagine the most evolved human being is blonde and white. Even more, when Lucy gets surges of knowledge in the film, her eyes flash brightly blue. Because blue eyes, we all know, are the universal symbol of superiority, right?

How is it that in a film whose premise rests on the idea of reimagining the past, present, and future, we still end up with a blonde white woman with flashing blue eyes as the stand-in for what personifies evolution and supremely fulfilled human potential? At one point the Ape-like Lucy and Evolved Lucy meet face-to-face as Evolved Lucy does a bit of time-traveling. Their fingers touch, and we see them deliberately posed to mimic the famous Creation of Adam painting, and in that moment I saw what I suppose we were supposed to see: humanity at its beginning, and then humanity at its end, at its most perfect. Blonde, white, and blue-eyed.

I can’t accept that. I can’t accept that there was only one black woman in the entire film, who delivered one line and who we never saw again. I can’t accept that the bad guys were Asian and that although in China, Lucy’s roommate says, “I mean, who speaks Chinese? I don’t speak Chinese!” I can’t accept that in Hercules, which I also saw this weekend, there were no people of color except for Dwayne Johnson himself and his mixed-race wife, whose skin was almost alabaster. I can’t accept that she got maybe two lines and was then murdered. I can’t accept that the “primitive tribe” in Hercules consisted of dark-haired men painted heavily, blackish green, to give their skin (head-to-toe) a darker appearance, so the audience could easily differentiate between good and bad guys by the white vs. dark skin. I can’t accept that during the previews, Exodus: Gods and Kings, a story about Moses leading the Israelite slaves out of Egypt, where not a single person of color is represented, casts Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton to play Egyptians. I can’t accept that in the preview for Kingsman: The Secret Service, which takes place in London, features a cast of white boys and not a single person of Indian descent, which make up the largest non-white ethnic group in London. I can’t accept that in stories about the end of the world and the apocalypse, that somehow only white people survive. I can’t accept that while my daily life is filled with black and brown women, they are completely absent, erased, when I look at a TV or movie screen.

I can’t accept that. And I can’t accept that when we think about the potential of humankind and what our brains are capable of doing and thinking and feeling, that people of color would be absent from that imagining. I can’t accept that. And I won’t. I’m tired of seeing people that look like me crowding screens both big and small: I am not what the world looks like. Hollywood, stop whitewashing characters. Give us more films like this year’s Annie. I’m no Lucy: like everyone else I’m only using a tiny amount of my brain’s capacity. But you don’t need to be a superhuman logic-machine to see that Hollywood has a major problem with depicting people of color, and it’s time to actually reimagine what the world can and should be.

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ME662LL A said:

I thought I was half black, half white but we off that 

Now I'm half white, half egyptian   not srs

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sharpshooter718 said:

Its always people who arent black telling us to calm down about these inaccurate portrayals of our history.


I WAS PISSED OFF WHEN TOM CRIUSE WAS THE LAST SAMURAI

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