From the comments, where a question is asked – and promptly answered:
Nope. https://t.co/FVOon2TJ4A
— The Critical Drinker (@TheCriticalDri2) July 20, 2023
Regarding which, John D replies,
Ah, but then those of a progressive inclination couldn’t piggy-back their Current Year politics onto someone else’s work, established over many decades. Plus, there’s lots of self-congratulatory subverting to be done. All that signalling about how antiquated and tiresome it is to have a white, male hero being daring and heroic. Because hey, nobody wants that.
The Screen Rant article, by Shaurya Thapa, is, it has to be said, not entirely persuasive. There’s some obligatory wittering about things from the past being “problematic” – among which, the fact that a film series about an iconic male character has always featured said male character:
Which does seem a bit like complaining that every season of the detective series Bosch features, among other things, a white, male detective named Harry Bosch.
But this is, we’re told, “the perfect time for a female Bond.”
A woman named James.
We’re also told, “A gendered spin on the character can open up more potential for exploring Bond’s individuality.” And this exploration of the character’s individuality will apparently be achieved by erasing a rather fundamental aspect of the character – his maleness – and replacing him with an entirely different person of a different sex.
Readers are invited to ponder whether similar transitions might enrich the character of, say, Miss Marple, who, via similar logic, could be depicted as male, and as always having been male. Thereby exploring her individuality. Answers on a postcard, please.
The recent, sex-swapped iteration of Doctor Who is invoked as a “positive example” on this front, as if Jodie Whittaker’s brief, unloved manifestation had been a rip-roaring success – despite the terrible writing and wildly unpopular retconning, both loudly derided by fans, and despite the subsequent, rapid death-spiral of viewing figures. Because boring and alienating much of your audience, and shrinking it dramatically, is a political triumph. A breath of “new life.”
Onwards and upwards!
Mr Thapa, by the way, has written over a thousand articles for Screen Rant. He claims many areas of expertise, and many “domains of knowledge,” including fact-checking. He also boasts of his “academic background,” details of which are, sadly, not divulged.
Related: “feminist” upset because no women appear in “Oppenheimer” for 20 minutes and there are not enough POCs, Vogue is upset that Oppenheimer’s wife and mistresses are not central to the plot; and the University of Pittsburgh goes completely off the rails.
OTOH, filmmakers can just make a movie that is generally historically accurate.
Next up, reboot of “Judgement at Nuermberg” doesn’t have enough women of POCs on either side of the bench.
I just hope that all this recurring talk of a female James Bond resurrects Cate Archer and No One Lives Forever from licensing hell.
That these weird, neurotic people have ever been taken seriously, about pretty much anything, by anyone, is quite remarkable.
I saw the trailer for Oppenheimer at the cinema last week, before watching the new Mission: Impossible film. It looked visually impressive in IMAX format. But then I remembered that I haven’t actually enjoyed any Christopher Nolan film I’ve ever seen. I’ve appreciated some interesting bits, and some clever bits, but the word enjoyed doesn’t seem quite right, for me.
At the 20 minute mark, a woman appears in Oppenheimer. Who is this femmo that gives away spoilers? Up to this point audiences would have been on the edge of their seats, awaiting the climatic moment.
…audiences would have been on the edge of their seats, awaiting the climatic moment.
Pun intended, I assume, although among the offended are the Indians.
A scathing attack on all of Hinduism, right. The best part of these days of modern times in which we live in is that no one ever overreacts to anything.
But this is the left’s thing. They don’t need to be convincing, to present rational ideas that stand up to the Socratic method. They just need to pump out volumes of mid-wit level material and present it in places where the average blathering know-nothing will see it, believing that they themselves are now “smarter” for reading it, and will repeat it sufficiently and to sufficient people such that when the lower-mid-wits and even upper-mid-wits encounter it the nod their heads sagely and say that everyone knows that.
Well, the Screen Rant article – and others like it – seem driven more by a fashionable and pretentious disdain of All Things White And Male than by any obvious benefit to cinema, or indeed to womankind. (Including, of course, all those women, noted upthread, who dislike the idea of a weepy and emasculated Bond, let alone the prospect of him being replaced by a novelty female copy.)
Likely. He was an otherwise quiet, mild mannered black guy of whom I really could not see in what way our specific department needed. It smelled like a make-work job. I suppose he could have had lots of background/behind the scenes work to do but the only direct contact I had with him in five or so years was the day I discovered that one of our “security” doors, one with the manual lock with only numbers 1-5 in the combination, opened no matter what combo you entered. While he did immediately address it, he certainly didn’t seem much concerned.
Movies: there were complaints that Dunkirk did not contain the proper quota of POC. Because of course, in 1940 Britain was 98% white and gratuitous black folks in the film would be historical nonsense. But actual history does not concern the Left–all must now be propaganda.
As to female heroes…men are reckless. Many of those reckless men die without notice. A few die (or even survive) doing something important and we call them heroes. The Spartans against the Persians for example. Under extreme circumstances such as the battle for Stalingrad, among the slaughtered there were some Russian female snipers, pilots, and tank drivers who were heroes–but it was a fight for survival.
Sort of like some sf stories I’ve read: A few interesting ideas, but wooden plots and cardboard characters that I couldn’t care about.
Well, there’s your problem. You expected entertainment.
Or something.
When you hand your country over to non-whites, then of course your popular culture and mythology is part of the package. What’s ours is yours, let there be no domain of life in which whites can say that something belongs to them and not to non-whites.
I’m sure evidence can be found against Fleming and Bond that they’re guilty of the crime of not thinking much of foreigners. Perhaps “not thinking much” in the sense of holding their abilities in low esteem. Certainly “not thinking much” in the sense that the stories are about the adventures and amours of Bond, and not about shoring up non-white ethnic self-esteem.
Now that we all have to set our moral compass by the ethnic resentments of non-whites, it’s not surprising to hear that they ethnically resent their people being depicted as spear carriers or local color or comic relief, and that they’re not going to let Bond fade away quietly as a raffish old man pinching the bottoms of his nurses – he has to be humiliated and defeated.
I think that one of the things that has to be acknowledged with all of this is that the move to recast traditional protagonists as being “differently raced” is that the actual intent isn’t equity, but subversive transgression.
If it was equity, then they’d be insisting on their own new stories with new characters. What they’re going for, instead, is the replacement of one race/ethnicity with another.
You will note that there ain’t nobody out there demanding that traditional characters of minority populations be replaced by their majority counterparts. Indeed, you try casting a white woman in a role that the idjit class thinks ought to go to, say, a woman of Japanese background, and you’re going to get excoriated.
Which is flatly, nuts. In the example I’m thinking of, the character design for Major Kusanagi was never that of an ethnically Japanese woman. Her appearance was clearly that of a Westerner of indeterminate origin, and ohbythebloodyway, she’s not even strictly human: Her body is an artificially built shell, apparently constructed so as to resemble that of a Westerner…
So, casting Scarlett Johannsen in her role as Major Kusanagi was not only justified, it was entirely within canon.
Which did not stop the usual suspects from ranting about “whitewashing”, as insane as that actually was.
But it’s interesting that the viewership went down with the first doc
As a Canadian, I had ready access to Doctor Who from the 3rd through 5th Doctors, and if I’m honest I always found the character foppish and fey. I liked Chris Ecceleston in the role for the exact same reason he was fired: he played it like a normal bloke who was taking the piss out of all the various pompous ideas and alien characters. I’m surprised to see the audience disliked him as much as the producers did, though.
The impersonal way that male Bond handles his sexual conquests, using sex as a tool? Yeah; the female version will do the same thing, but because we’re wired to see that far differently, it’s going to come over entirely differently.
Season 1 of The Americans, but don’t watch any of the later seasons.
I’m unaware of any series of action/adventure stories or books with female heroes who might serve as the basis of the movies.
There’s tons, but Hollywood no longer knows how to write sympathetic female characters. The French film La Femme Nikita, the Canadian-filmed TV adaptation (not the reboot), the aforementioned The Americans, even the first season of Covert Affairs.
The Stephanie Plum novels would make a great film franchise but Katherine Heigl killed it by being Linda Fiorentino-levels of horrible to everyone she worked with.
The problem, as it always is, is that audience demographics are key. Women don’t want to watch action movies, and the few that do don’t want to see women doing action hero antics. Some men do, but a strong, masculine action movie protagonist will appeal to many more men and women. ‘Twas always thus, and movie producers who forget that will produce bombs.
So, casting Scarlett Johannsen in her role as Major Kusanagi was not only justified, it was entirely within canon.
The Japanese, being in general racially chauvinistic, do not give a sh*t about this kind of baizuo BS.
Stop trying to find sense, logic or consistency in these arguments. They’re not intended to make sense. They’re intended to not make sense. The only goal of these arguments is destroy social cohesion and set various factions of Western society against each other.
This.