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Movies you like that would be considered 'problematic' today

Started by Sin Agog, February 04, 2018, 03:09:42 AM

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CaledonianGonzo

Though Rocky in itself is a white supremacist fantasy about taking Muhammad Ali down a peg or two, so is problematic enough anyway ..

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: CaledonianGonzo on February 05, 2018, 10:19:44 PM
Though Rocky in itself is a white supremacist fantasy about taking Muhammad Ali down a peg or two, so is problematic enough anyway ..

That's certainly one way of interpreting this multi-faceted franchise.

Sin Agog

I showed Big to a younger relative over Christmas, and aside from all '80s/'90s films that I thought of as being kid's movies actually being so much more goshdarn sweary than I remembered, the uptight lady at the office does actually sleep with a twelve-year-old in Tom Hanks' body.

Danger Man

Quote from: CaledonianGonzo on February 05, 2018, 10:19:44 PM
Though Rocky in itself is a white supremacist fantasy about taking Muhammad Ali down a peg or two, so is problematic enough anyway ..

Much as I'd like to think so, there's no way Rocky can be called racist. Over the course of the series he fights three black guys and two white guys. The white boxers are the worst people (in terms of personality) he ever fights. Rocky has a black trainer in most of the movies and two of the three black opponents are portrayed as businessmen in control of their lives.

If he only ever fought white opponents it would have looked racist but, as it is, it's just the usual bullshit of The American Dream where if you work hard enough you'll get what you want.


Sin Agog

If anything a working-class Italian palooka living in Philly during the '70s not being overtly racist makes the film less realistic.

(Which may be a racist comment in and of itself).

Ballad of Ballard Berkley


Sin Agog

I wrote that post solely so I could use the word 'palooka' and feel like a man for a few seconds.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: Sin Agog on February 06, 2018, 12:20:57 AM
If anything a working-class Italian palooka living in Philly during the '70s not being overtly racist makes the film less realistic.

(Which may be a racist comment in and of itself).

Early drafts of the Rocky screenplay accentuated Mickey's racism, but Stallone decided to tone that down when he quite rightly twigged that the uplifting message of the film would be massively undermined if his character went the distance under the tutelage of a total cunt.

Also, I don't think Rocky's lack of racial prejudice is unrealistic in the slightest. He's not an arrogant, aggressive, foul-mouthed wiseguy, he's a genial fella whose poverty-stricken upbringing has presumably made him empathise with anyone who's struggled under similar circumstances.

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Quote from: Danger Man on February 05, 2018, 11:43:55 PM
Much as I'd like to think so, there's no way Rocky can be called racist. Over the course of the series he fights three black guys and two white guys. The white boxers are the worst people (in terms of personality) he ever fights. Rocky has a black trainer in most of the movies and two of the three black opponents are portrayed as businessmen in control of their lives.

If he only ever fought white opponents it would have looked racist but, as it is, it's just the usual bullshit of The American Dream where if you work hard enough you'll get what you want.

Yeah, but Clubber Lang is a fucking psycho. He's Rocky's most unpleasant opponent, a one-dimensional brute who causes the death of the Rocky saga's most prominent and much-loved African-American character. What are we supposed to glean from that? My God, those films are a minefield.

newbridge

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on February 06, 2018, 12:47:05 AM
Yeah, but Clubber Lang is a fucking psycho. He's Rocky's most unpleasant opponent, a one-dimensional brute who causes the death of the Rocky saga's most prominent and much-loved African-American character. What are we supposed to glean from that? My God, those films are a minefield.

Clubber Lang's not the one who kills Apollo, you racist!

Ballad of Ballard Berkley

Oh fuck. I should never drink and post about Rocky, it always shows me up as the reprehensible human being that I am.

Clubber's fight causes the death of Mickey, the lovable Irish-American racist. That in itself is food for thought.

Yep, recovered from that one pretty well I reckon.


Danger Man

Quote from: phantom_power on February 06, 2018, 12:13:40 AM
Why would you like to think so?

Because it would confirm the idea that the film is a giant sulk about Muhammad Ali.

bgmnts

Obviously Genghis Khan. John Wayne as the famous Mongolian.  Just no.

CaledonianGonzo

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on February 06, 2018, 12:21:25 AM
I don't think CG was being serious.


Deliberately being a bit mischievous, yeah....but I wasn't really talking about the franchise as a whole and it's definitely one way of reading the first movie.  What if the American dream does kinda apply to whites only? 

greenman

Quote from: Kelvin on February 05, 2018, 09:33:27 PM
Han and Leia's first kiss on the Falcon stands out as a particularly unpleasant moment in the original trllogy: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMk0-pZfx5Q

Specifically the way he has her cornered and deeply uncomfortable, trembling even, but he still pushes on because he "knows" she really wants it.

Obviously the prequels are also full of awful racist stereotypes, but they were considered problematic even when the films came out, so it kind of goes without saying, really.

The kiss itself doesn't give the impression of being forced but before that I think what your really dealing with more the nature of the character who's rather more antihero than you'd see in a mainstream blockbuster these days, the exchanges on Hoth for example.

madhair60

Quote from: Howj Begg on February 05, 2018, 01:57:06 PM
And, you know, the horrific OTT transphobia

Quote from: Twed on February 05, 2018, 09:10:54 PM
Also the fact that the plot is "haha, transgender".

My post was an attempt at humour via ignoring the incredibly obvious for comic effect - it didn't land because of three main reasons

1) execution
2) it wasn't funny
3) people here don't respect me enough to assume I understand

ieXush2i

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on February 05, 2018, 07:46:52 PM
I think the character actually was originally written and intended as a white American, but after Bronson Pinchot left to do that sitcom and was replaced by Stevens (who had already been fired from the role once prior to Pinchot IIRC), something happened whereby someone thought it might be a bit progressive to have an ethnic non-American person as a main character.  As for why didn't they just get an Indian - that didn't really happen in mainstream Hollywood until relatively recently.

But they speak so funny, you see, and they bob their head all the time don't they? And smell of curry. Fact of the matter is until very very recently the best people to cast as Asian men in movies where white Western men.

ieXush2i

Quote from: Shit Good Nose on February 05, 2018, 09:50:50 PM
It might be in the commentary where they go into it in a bit of detail desperately try to justify it.

Shit Good Nose

Sarcasm over genuine discussion again eh?

Whatever (Ex poster), whatever.

ieXush2i

I've just realised both posts quoted you, that wasn't intnentional. sorry. My first one is generally about the cluelessness of "but it's not malicious" defences and the second one, well, it is rape no matter how the filmmakers retroactively try to make it not so. Putting aside the dormroom spycams, selling nude private photos, racism and homophobia... The Boat That Rocked also features rape by deception for a more modern(ish) example.

Noticing that there are dodgy elements in older movies doesn't automatically disqualify their qualities and our enjoyment of them. We can all enjoy School Of Rock for the fun and the singing and the music while still thinking Jack Black's character is wildly irresponsible and should receive prison time for fraud and endangerment. Right, kids?

Quote from: (Ex poster) on February 06, 2018, 10:30:53 AM
We can all enjoy School Of Rock for the fun and the singing and the music while still thinking Jack Black's character is wildly irresponsible and should receive prison time for fraud and endangerment.


ieXush2i

I don't know what kind of background checks they do over there but I would expect to see resignations from the school board and faculty too.

Shit Good Nose

Quote from: (Ex poster) on February 06, 2018, 10:30:53 AM
I've just realised both posts quoted you, that wasn't intnentional. sorry. My first one is generally about the cluelessness of "but it's not malicious" defences and the second one, well, it is rape no matter how the filmmakers retroactively try to make it not so. Putting aside the dormroom spycams, selling nude private photos, racism and homophobia... The Boat That Rocked also features rape by deception for a more modern(ish) example.

My defence of Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit wasn't really clueless, and your simplifying of the character as a stereotypically portrayed wobbly head Indian is not only wrong but massively undersells both the character and Stevens' performance which, for a white American in brown face in the 80s, is incredibly sympathetic (i.e. about as good as you could reasonably expect back then and for quite a long time after).  Of course, it's not RIGHT, but the point I was making is it was the mid 80s and mainstream Hollywood just generally didn't employ "forruns" in those roles.  Even today mainstream American and British films that feature Asian characters from Asia still frequently hire the likes of Riz Ahmed, Dev Patel and Benedict Wong (to name three of the most recognisable), who are all British.  Plus, as I said, Stevens fooled Indian audiences, in the same way that yer Spinal Tap peeps fooled a lot of British audiences (who would not have been overly familiar with Guest, McKean and Shearer at the time) into thinking they were unknown English actors.  That's a HUGE step away from (to use the most often used ethnic wrong 'uns) 70s portrayals of Japanese people, with the slitty eyes and big teeth, and the black and white minstrels.

As for Nerds, the commentary is from the DVD, which was released in early 00s, and possibly even comes from the laserdisc which was released in the early to mid 90s, when people were generally less aware (or, perhaps, just plain didn't give a fuck) of that sort of thing in films so, far from the makers retroactively desperately trying to justify it in the wake of how the industry has moved recently, they were arguably addressing it way before talk like what is happening in this very thread and the media in general at the moment.

Blumf

There's that Orientalism trope where our white guy protagonist goes off to the far east, usually the Himalayas (sometimes the magical wise man comes to the west) and gets trained in some mystic arts.

It was a big thing in the 1930s, but you still see it in films from this century; notably Batman Begins, and Doctor Strange.

Anyway, to the main question of the thread: I still like Remo Williams, even though it a dumb film and suffers from perhaps the last big 'yellow-face' character in Hollywood films.


Shit Good Nose

Quote from: Blumf on February 06, 2018, 11:00:13 AM
Anyway, to the main question of the thread: I still like Remo Williams, even though it a dumb film and suffers from perhaps the last big 'yellow-face' character in Hollywood films.



Know what?  I've not seen that for, probably, 25 years.  But I ALWAYS (and to this day) thought that was Mako.  One for the Fuck My Hat thread.

Of course, seeing that still now it very obviously isn't.

ieXush2i

Ben Jabituya (the total respect for Asians shown in the made-up surname) may well be a likeable sympathetic character etc, but it's still an example of benign racism with many tics and mannerisms which were mainly performed by racists at the time, tied as they were to an ignorance of the culture and racial stereotypes dating back over a century. As for the accent, well oddly enough The Atlantic put out an article on it a few days ago:

QuoteIn the recent documentary The Problem With Apu, which takes to task the convenience-store owner of the same name on The Simpsons, the actress Sakina Jaffrey dubbed this type of common, broad, and ultra-exaggerated South Asian accent patanking. For those unfamiliar, patanking is characterized by a retreating tongue, stressed syllables shaken out of order, mixed V's and W's, and hammered-out A's. It tries to fold thousands of languages and dialects from eight countries into a single accent. (Of note, recent research from the University of Oregon upends common assumptions of a mere standard Indian accent.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/trump-modi-india-south-asia-accent-apu/551696/

I think people cottoned on to the rape by deception scene in RotN way before #metoo etc. At the time, I shouldn't wonder. So I can see the makers attempting to make it Not A Rape by the time of digital home viewing with a dodgy understanding of what consent is. Absolutely they would have been trying to cover their arses if you're referring to a DVD commentary.

Shit Good Nose


ieXush2i

Yeah, sorry about that!

Hari Kondablou's recent doc The Problem With Apu is available on Vimeo if anyone wants a perspective from Asian-Americans on white American media portayals of Asians:

https://vimeo.com/244914735

"A white guy doing an impression of a white guy doing an impression of my father"

Shit Good Nose

I've seen it.  Good and fairly thought-provoking, but not without its own problems.

I still stand by what I said earlier.