...and when someone needs a makeover, i simply have to take over....

[myurbandream]

so! i received a startling education about acting and foreign roles, just now, as cait and i were talking about the deplorable lack of non-white people as main characters in the live-action avatar movie that's coming out. okay, so the whole fire nation is going to be the same race as dev patel, ie indian (disregarding the fact that the fire nation was modeled on japan, and china a little bit, cait adds). but they're the bad guys.

anyway, my education: http://vejiicakes.livejournal.com/254810.html conveniently linked here.

and here: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=99D263D1B8B2558D&search_query=the+slanted+screen

Comments

[pronker]

As a student of movies for some time now, I've read many such articles and your linked one was nicely produced. The stills point up the makeup techniques, making what most likely was unnoticed in a moving picture, seem ripe for laughter. Others have commented on the Avatar movie, but I don't know about that fandom. There is a book out there entitled 'Great White North' or something like that, that points out the tropes that Hollywood has used through the years for Canada: All Snow, All Pine Trees In Their Forests, Wild French-Canadian Hellions, etc.

[jen-chan13.livejournal.com]

we were discussing the fact that nearly all the casting for the live-action movie has focused on white actors/actresses, especially for the lead roles, but the various people in the show are modeled on pan-asian/indian, japanese, chinese, and inuit cultures. i'd made a comment to my friend about that and yellowface, and i hadn't meant to be at all offensive, but i was ignorant of the term and the history behind it at the time, so she called me on it and showed me the link.

i lived in germany for a few years as a child, so i have noticed cultural stereotypes in acting, but things like affected accents are far less offensive - or rather, they can be done far less offensively - than things like yellowface. the actual race of the actor had been beyond my perception until now, because i had just assumed that race-blind casting was the norm. more fool me, apparently.

[pronker]

This guy, Russell Peters, ought to be in any movie that features Indians. He has a unique take on racial matters and is one of the wickedest accent actors I've heard. But if it helps any, I hadn't heard of yellowface as a term and I've seen a number of Anna May Wong, Sessue Hayakawa silent movies where they were stars and if you can stand to sit through the heavy dramatics of the silent era, they were true stars, in nearly every scene and the entire movie focused on them.

Blackface, yes, Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson among others used blackface in '30's and '20's movies, throwing back to the minstrel shows of the 1840-1890's or so. Stage history is fascinating in itself, especially stuff like vaudeville with its many, many takes on Yiddish and black and American Indian themes.