Eh, I see it differently: I see it as a reason for remaking it, not a challenge to overcome. Otherwise, why on earth remake it? I know Hollywood remakes things because it's easy money, not for artistic reasons, but if I were an artist, making a more modern version of a 90-year old movie would be a pretty good reason for doing it, if it tells a story that can still resonate.
I think I've already answered all of these questions with my comments, but I'll say it one last time, and let you go on beating around the bush as much as you like after that: if they are upset, or won't see it, because an actor cast in the movie is black, then they're racist, by definition. If they don't want to see it for some other reason, it's not relevant to what I'm saying, no matter how much you try to muddy the water by bringing it up.
I mean, she's right, the movie is dated. There aren't many movies made in the 1930s that aren't.
To me, her comments sound like an artist pointing out the reasons why a modern retelling of the story is justified, which would I would consider good PR. But that's probably because I don't have 1930s views on gender, so I'm not offended when someone points out that they weren't great.
I admit I'm not much of a fan of the original, though I have seen it too many times thanks to my two children, and I assume most of the audience for the new movie will be children who also won't care that she's criticized aspects of the almost 90-year old version. I'm not really sure what to make of adults who do think criticizing the original is out of bounds for someone making a new version of it, though. I definitely don't think it speaks well of them.
The Taste of Things: Really enjoyed it, but it also made me very hungry.
Sleeping Beauty: I have seen this so many times at this point that even the wonderful animation has ceased to impress me, but we did see it in a theater I love (The Paramount on Congress Ave, for folks who know Austin), so there's that.
Paddington 2: Also saw it at the Paramount (they do a summer classic film series, with kids movie matinees on the weekends). Good movie, and my partner's first time seeing it, so she cried a lot, as did the then 4 year-old.
Moana 2: I damn near fell asleep, but the then 4yo loves all things Moana, she has a Moana outfit, she frequently wears Moana's necklace, and as a result, she loved the movie, and keeps asking me when we can watch it on Disney Plus.
I didn't see it in theaters, unfortunately, but if you haven't seen Flow, it's a (sort of) kids movie I recommend for adults. I enjoyed watching it with the 5yo, but I do warn parents of kids that young: she cried so hard, and for so long (basically from about 5 minutes in until the end) that she looked like she had the beginnings of two black eyes.
Let me be clear: if a black actor is cast, and because that actor is black, a person is upset, or refuses to see the movie, then yes, absolutely, that person is a racist. If they don't want to see the movie for other reasons, and don't care about the race of the actor cast for a given part, then no, they're not racist, or at least we can't tell whether they are from their willingness to see the movie.
If you want to beat around that bush, feel free, but that's the only bush I'm talking about.
If they're refusing to watch it because a black actor was cast, then yeah, they're racist, by definition. I still fail to see why this is even a question, or why you're so determined to defend them.
By the way, if you want to understand why French politics are less infused with what American conservatives call "postmodernism" (if I used enough scare quotes to convey my contempt for the conservative use of that term, this comment would be entirely quotation marks), it's not because of their Catholicism, which is at best vestigial at this point, but because, in addition to having a very different Enlightenment tradition and a very different intellectual, cultural and political impact of that tradition, they have also dealt, or rather not dealt, with their history of racial and colonial oppression very differently than we have. Theirs is pushed into the banlieues, of Paris and of their minds, while ours pervades our society, culture, and politics in ways that can't be merely swept aside.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but a big part of it is, I think, that the French have a very good idea of what it means to be French, while in this country, we're still litigating what it means to be American, which produces a discourse that interacts with America's extreme (relative to most of the developed world) religiosity, its history of slavery and colonialism, and its own Enlightenment ideals, to produce a pretty unique political discourse, including what conservatives decry as "postmodernism."
Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany
There's much in that piece that gives away the game, but this one might be the largest, given France's near complete lack of reckoning with its own fascist and brutal colonial history, its collaboration with the Nazis, and its complicity in the Holocaust.
To write that sentence in a piece calling for increased European nationalism comes very close to saying the quiet part loud, as the kids say.
Refusing to see it because Gal Gadot is in it is also bad.
See, that's remarkably easy! I didn't have to beat around the bush, or defend racists. I can just say: Yeah, those people are bad.
I realize that the world is a complicated place, full of gray areas, but when people are upset about a movie because of someone's acting in it's, ethnicity, religion, or nationality, I think things are pretty black and white. That you feel the need to defend it for tribal reasons puts you in a tribe defined explicitly by its racism, and man, that's just not where I'd want to be.
I was here when a certain former front-pager argued that casting a black actor as Indiana Jones would be bad because if he'd been a kid and Indiana Jones had been black he wouldn't have gone into archaeology. That was also inarguably racist.
What other reasons, that exclude any reference to her race, ethnicity, or skin tone, might there be for opposing her casting on grounds that it is "woke."
Look, I think there's some wiggle room in anti-wokism that makes it difficult to call everyone who's anti-woke racist/misogynistic/anti-LGBT, but the only reason for being upset about this casting decision is racism.
Seems like it to me. Generally when you have a protest like that, you don't let counterprotesters in. Since most supporters of Israel are not Jewish, it's quite a stretch to call this discrimination against anything but counterprotesters.
That said, if we're going with that, what about universities canceling speakers who support Palestine? Ban Palestinian flags from events (but not other flags)? Ban pro-Palestinian protests specifically? Deny tenure to faculty who support Palestine? Are these forms of discrimination, because if so, man, we have a whole lot of universities that should lose funding.
I think if the legal one includes "protesting a genocide" and "supporting Palestinians" and, in fact, basically just being a Palestinian, then, gasp! It ain't the students/faculty/school doing the discrimination.
Yeah, for me at least, the worry isn't that Russia would launch its nukes at us. It's that if things got to the point that Russia was pressing the button, they wouldn't be the only one, and I'd bet most of China's increasingly modernized nukes work.
I think the worry was that Ukraine (and other smaller former Soviet republics) would not protect their nukes as well. Perhaps to a lesser extent, there was a worry they'd sell them, but just thinking back to the post-Cold War discourse around the nukes in the former Soviet Union, it was security that was the big issue. I remember talk of these nukes basically being out in the open for anyone to take.
Whether this was realistic or not, I don't know. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to the politics of Ukraine in the early-to-mid 90s.
Ha... was just responding that I wasn't spending time in right wing world back then, so I may have just missed it. This might be the origin of it in the broader discourse, then. I remember liberals referring to MAGA as a cult during Trump's first term (maybe even the '16 campaign, I can't remember), and was thinking maybe that's where it started.
And I'm not gonna lie, I remember going to an Evangelical church in 2017, where Trump was much discussed in extremely religious terms, and thinking this was disturbingly cult-like behavior.
Interesting. Sadly I can't read it without a subscription. Whatever the articles says, the idea of Obama fans as "cultists" doesn't seem to have taken generally, though I admit I was not hanging around a lot of right wing circles back then, so maybe it took there.
I also found this from 2005, though it seems to be using cult to refer to a specific shadowy group, not all Dubya supporters.
I wonder when people started referring to hyper-partisans or staunch supporters of particular candidates as cultists. I don't remember it being a thing under Bush or Obama, though it's possible I missed it, or just forgot about it because it wasn't a super common thing. But at least since Trump's first term, I've heard people on both sides refer to people on the other as cultists. I get the idea of Trump as a Cult of Personality, but where does the rest of the cult talk come from?
Who's gonna convince him to reverse it? Trump is either a lame duck president or he won't need to be reelected to remain president, and doesn't seem to really care about the impact of what he's doing on voters. Is Congress going to tell him to reverse it? Musk? Someone else he actually listens to?
I assume at some point, Republicans in Congress, and maybe even at the state level, start sweating about reelection if Trump keeps breaking things, but to date, they've shown absolutely no interest in challenging Trump on anything, so a lot of damage can be done before that happens.
(By the way, sorry to turn this into a discussion about the healthcare system. I meant only to use it as an example of an actual idea someone who at least caucuses with the Dems has, and has campaigned on, to show that it is at least possible for someone to the left of Mitt Romney to have ideas and campaign on them.)
I agree it would be a mess for the labor market, but that's largely a problem for capital to sort out, not labor, and I believe people would be able to recognize, fairly quickly, the benefits to labor on top of the raise in pay (even if it's ultimately mostly taxed away), one of which you mention: the ability to leave your job, rather to drop out of the workforce (say, to become a stay at home parent, a full time caregiver for an adult relative, or because of your own health/mental health issues), or to find another job, is severely limited by having your healthcare tied to your employer. A universal healthcare system that is not tied to employment would result in one of the biggest increases in labor power in a century, and if I were a politician selling something like Medicare for All, I'd be saying this a hundred times per day.
I should have been clearer: I actually think Trump is this. I mean if they'd ever seen one among the Democrats (actually they have, Bernie, and they like him).
Let me just add: I'm not even a Bernie supporter, though it may seem like that here. I just would prefer that the opposition party model themselves after a popular politician with ideas than, well, whatever they've been doing.
Hell, if we can go back to a very different Democrat who did this, it worked pretty well for Obama. His ideas were more centered around vibes than Bernie's, but at least they were ideas, and he was very good at selling people on them.
I think it's possible to convince people without presenting them with graphs and syllogisms. Trump is living proof of that. I watch on Facebook as people are regularly convinced by him and his minions (and whatever Musk is) that what he's doing is good for the country. The Democrats would have to have ideas in order to want to convince people of them.
Oh for sure. I think someone like Bernie could win this debate in the eyes of voters, given the proper forum (and I think he generally succeeds when he has the forum). I don't know that anyone else with national visibility in the Democratic Party could.
Unrelated, but an interesting thing in considering the centrist perspective is that Bernie himself is not only not particularly aligned with the "woke" wing of the Democratic Party, but in '16 at least, was pretty actively opposed by that wing. So while I get the centrist argument that "wokeness" is harmful, it really feels like they, or at least some of them, wield it as a general attack on the party's left wing even where it doesn't apply.
I think universal healthcare, once real proposals were before the American people, is something people would have to be convinced on, especially the middle class, who likely are pretty happy with their insurance, barring major illness. Unfortunately, I think the U.S. has had precisely two politicians who have been good at convincing people of things in the last 16 years, both of whom Democratic Party insiders hate (Trump and Bernie). To me, this says something both about our political system generally and about the Democratic Party in particular.
I prefer a party with principles than one whose entire political philosophy is avoiding making the other party's ads for them. I suspect the electorate would too, if they ever got to see one.
I think people would be fine with the tax required to, say, give us a truly universal healthcare system, because for most of us at least, it would cost us less, because so much of our compensation is in the form of health insurance, because our health insurance costs on top of that are so high, and/or because even with health insurance, we still have to pay out the ass for healthcare and medicine. I also think the American people are smart enough to understand that. I think the center right (the wing of the Democratic Party Tony Blair feels most sympathetic to) have a vested interest in making sure they never do understand that.
After every election loss, for as long as I can remember, the moderate Democratic strategy has been "Become Republican Lite," and then people start saying, "There's no real distinction between the two parties," and moderate Democrats get very upset.
I realize, of course, that the non-Republicans here are overwhelmingly within the moderate wing of the Democratic electorate, and spend pretty much all of their reading time reading others who are at least as far right as they are, but the most popular Democrat in the country remains the party's most visible left liberal, and his ideas remain incredibly popular not only among the Democratic Party base.
It makes perfect sense to talk to people where they are (the moderate Dems' gun shows and tailgate parties), and to talk to them about what is happening in their lives, but it's so weird to me that so many Democrats, and so many people here, feel like the job of a political party is to do what the electorate wants (which, at least last year, was vote for Republicans), instead of to convince voters that their ideas are better on the issues that voters care about. Why even have two parties? We can just fight out all of these disagreements in Republican primaries.
The commenter archive features may be temporarily disabled at times.
Eh, I see it differently: I see it as a reason for remaking it, not a challenge to overcome. Otherwise, why on earth remake it? I know Hollywood remakes things because it's easy money, not for artistic reasons, but if I were an artist, making a more modern version of a 90-year old movie would be a pretty good reason for doing it, if it tells a story that can still resonate.
I think I've already answered all of these questions with my comments, but I'll say it one last time, and let you go on beating around the bush as much as you like after that: if they are upset, or won't see it, because an actor cast in the movie is black, then they're racist, by definition. If they don't want to see it for some other reason, it's not relevant to what I'm saying, no matter how much you try to muddy the water by bringing it up.
I mean, she's right, the movie is dated. There aren't many movies made in the 1930s that aren't.
To me, her comments sound like an artist pointing out the reasons why a modern retelling of the story is justified, which would I would consider good PR. But that's probably because I don't have 1930s views on gender, so I'm not offended when someone points out that they weren't great.
I admit I'm not much of a fan of the original, though I have seen it too many times thanks to my two children, and I assume most of the audience for the new movie will be children who also won't care that she's criticized aspects of the almost 90-year old version. I'm not really sure what to make of adults who do think criticizing the original is out of bounds for someone making a new version of it, though. I definitely don't think it speaks well of them.
In 2024, I saw 4 movies in the theater:
The Taste of Things: Really enjoyed it, but it also made me very hungry.
Sleeping Beauty: I have seen this so many times at this point that even the wonderful animation has ceased to impress me, but we did see it in a theater I love (The Paramount on Congress Ave, for folks who know Austin), so there's that.
Paddington 2: Also saw it at the Paramount (they do a summer classic film series, with kids movie matinees on the weekends). Good movie, and my partner's first time seeing it, so she cried a lot, as did the then 4 year-old.
Moana 2: I damn near fell asleep, but the then 4yo loves all things Moana, she has a Moana outfit, she frequently wears Moana's necklace, and as a result, she loved the movie, and keeps asking me when we can watch it on Disney Plus.
I didn't see it in theaters, unfortunately, but if you haven't seen Flow, it's a (sort of) kids movie I recommend for adults. I enjoyed watching it with the 5yo, but I do warn parents of kids that young: she cried so hard, and for so long (basically from about 5 minutes in until the end) that she looked like she had the beginnings of two black eyes.
Let me be clear: if a black actor is cast, and because that actor is black, a person is upset, or refuses to see the movie, then yes, absolutely, that person is a racist. If they don't want to see the movie for other reasons, and don't care about the race of the actor cast for a given part, then no, they're not racist, or at least we can't tell whether they are from their willingness to see the movie.
If you want to beat around that bush, feel free, but that's the only bush I'm talking about.
If they're refusing to watch it because a black actor was cast, then yeah, they're racist, by definition. I still fail to see why this is even a question, or why you're so determined to defend them.
I have a 5 year old, so yes, of course I'm going to see it, as I have the, er, pleasure of getting to see every new Disney movie.
By the way, if you want to understand why French politics are less infused with what American conservatives call "postmodernism" (if I used enough scare quotes to convey my contempt for the conservative use of that term, this comment would be entirely quotation marks), it's not because of their Catholicism, which is at best vestigial at this point, but because, in addition to having a very different Enlightenment tradition and a very different intellectual, cultural and political impact of that tradition, they have also dealt, or rather not dealt, with their history of racial and colonial oppression very differently than we have. Theirs is pushed into the banlieues, of Paris and of their minds, while ours pervades our society, culture, and politics in ways that can't be merely swept aside.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but a big part of it is, I think, that the French have a very good idea of what it means to be French, while in this country, we're still litigating what it means to be American, which produces a discourse that interacts with America's extreme (relative to most of the developed world) religiosity, its history of slavery and colonialism, and its own Enlightenment ideals, to produce a pretty unique political discourse, including what conservatives decry as "postmodernism."
Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany
There's much in that piece that gives away the game, but this one might be the largest, given France's near complete lack of reckoning with its own fascist and brutal colonial history, its collaboration with the Nazis, and its complicity in the Holocaust.
To write that sentence in a piece calling for increased European nationalism comes very close to saying the quiet part loud, as the kids say.
I'm sure that's why the anti-woke folks are upset that she's starring in it: they just want to defend the quality of the original as cinema.
Refusing to see it because Gal Gadot is in it is also bad.
See, that's remarkably easy! I didn't have to beat around the bush, or defend racists. I can just say: Yeah, those people are bad.
I realize that the world is a complicated place, full of gray areas, but when people are upset about a movie because of someone's acting in it's, ethnicity, religion, or nationality, I think things are pretty black and white. That you feel the need to defend it for tribal reasons puts you in a tribe defined explicitly by its racism, and man, that's just not where I'd want to be.
Ah, I didn't know UCLA was a Columbia campus.
Aha, so people have been saying since 2023 that they don't like a movie that has yet to be released in 2025. Definitely not racist.
I don't think so? When was it?
I was here when a certain former front-pager argued that casting a black actor as Indiana Jones would be bad because if he'd been a kid and Indiana Jones had been black he wouldn't have gone into archaeology. That was also inarguably racist.
What other reasons, that exclude any reference to her race, ethnicity, or skin tone, might there be for opposing her casting on grounds that it is "woke."
I'd love to see some video or accounts that confirm your understanding.
Look, I think there's some wiggle room in anti-wokism that makes it difficult to call everyone who's anti-woke racist/misogynistic/anti-LGBT, but the only reason for being upset about this casting decision is racism.
Seems like it to me. Generally when you have a protest like that, you don't let counterprotesters in. Since most supporters of Israel are not Jewish, it's quite a stretch to call this discrimination against anything but counterprotesters.
That said, if we're going with that, what about universities canceling speakers who support Palestine? Ban Palestinian flags from events (but not other flags)? Ban pro-Palestinian protests specifically? Deny tenure to faculty who support Palestine? Are these forms of discrimination, because if so, man, we have a whole lot of universities that should lose funding.
I think if the legal one includes "protesting a genocide" and "supporting Palestinians" and, in fact, basically just being a Palestinian, then, gasp! It ain't the students/faculty/school doing the discrimination.
What are some examples of this discrimination?
Yeah, for me at least, the worry isn't that Russia would launch its nukes at us. It's that if things got to the point that Russia was pressing the button, they wouldn't be the only one, and I'd bet most of China's increasingly modernized nukes work.
I think the worry was that Ukraine (and other smaller former Soviet republics) would not protect their nukes as well. Perhaps to a lesser extent, there was a worry they'd sell them, but just thinking back to the post-Cold War discourse around the nukes in the former Soviet Union, it was security that was the big issue. I remember talk of these nukes basically being out in the open for anyone to take.
Whether this was realistic or not, I don't know. I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to the politics of Ukraine in the early-to-mid 90s.
Ha... was just responding that I wasn't spending time in right wing world back then, so I may have just missed it. This might be the origin of it in the broader discourse, then. I remember liberals referring to MAGA as a cult during Trump's first term (maybe even the '16 campaign, I can't remember), and was thinking maybe that's where it started.
And I'm not gonna lie, I remember going to an Evangelical church in 2017, where Trump was much discussed in extremely religious terms, and thinking this was disturbingly cult-like behavior.
Interesting. Sadly I can't read it without a subscription. Whatever the articles says, the idea of Obama fans as "cultists" doesn't seem to have taken generally, though I admit I was not hanging around a lot of right wing circles back then, so maybe it took there.
I also found this from 2005, though it seems to be using cult to refer to a specific shadowy group, not all Dubya supporters.
I wonder when people started referring to hyper-partisans or staunch supporters of particular candidates as cultists. I don't remember it being a thing under Bush or Obama, though it's possible I missed it, or just forgot about it because it wasn't a super common thing. But at least since Trump's first term, I've heard people on both sides refer to people on the other as cultists. I get the idea of Trump as a Cult of Personality, but where does the rest of the cult talk come from?
Who's gonna convince him to reverse it? Trump is either a lame duck president or he won't need to be reelected to remain president, and doesn't seem to really care about the impact of what he's doing on voters. Is Congress going to tell him to reverse it? Musk? Someone else he actually listens to?
I assume at some point, Republicans in Congress, and maybe even at the state level, start sweating about reelection if Trump keeps breaking things, but to date, they've shown absolutely no interest in challenging Trump on anything, so a lot of damage can be done before that happens.
(By the way, sorry to turn this into a discussion about the healthcare system. I meant only to use it as an example of an actual idea someone who at least caucuses with the Dems has, and has campaigned on, to show that it is at least possible for someone to the left of Mitt Romney to have ideas and campaign on them.)
I agree it would be a mess for the labor market, but that's largely a problem for capital to sort out, not labor, and I believe people would be able to recognize, fairly quickly, the benefits to labor on top of the raise in pay (even if it's ultimately mostly taxed away), one of which you mention: the ability to leave your job, rather to drop out of the workforce (say, to become a stay at home parent, a full time caregiver for an adult relative, or because of your own health/mental health issues), or to find another job, is severely limited by having your healthcare tied to your employer. A universal healthcare system that is not tied to employment would result in one of the biggest increases in labor power in a century, and if I were a politician selling something like Medicare for All, I'd be saying this a hundred times per day.
I should have been clearer: I actually think Trump is this. I mean if they'd ever seen one among the Democrats (actually they have, Bernie, and they like him).
Let me just add: I'm not even a Bernie supporter, though it may seem like that here. I just would prefer that the opposition party model themselves after a popular politician with ideas than, well, whatever they've been doing.
Hell, if we can go back to a very different Democrat who did this, it worked pretty well for Obama. His ideas were more centered around vibes than Bernie's, but at least they were ideas, and he was very good at selling people on them.
I think it's possible to convince people without presenting them with graphs and syllogisms. Trump is living proof of that. I watch on Facebook as people are regularly convinced by him and his minions (and whatever Musk is) that what he's doing is good for the country. The Democrats would have to have ideas in order to want to convince people of them.
Oh for sure. I think someone like Bernie could win this debate in the eyes of voters, given the proper forum (and I think he generally succeeds when he has the forum). I don't know that anyone else with national visibility in the Democratic Party could.
Unrelated, but an interesting thing in considering the centrist perspective is that Bernie himself is not only not particularly aligned with the "woke" wing of the Democratic Party, but in '16 at least, was pretty actively opposed by that wing. So while I get the centrist argument that "wokeness" is harmful, it really feels like they, or at least some of them, wield it as a general attack on the party's left wing even where it doesn't apply.
I think universal healthcare, once real proposals were before the American people, is something people would have to be convinced on, especially the middle class, who likely are pretty happy with their insurance, barring major illness. Unfortunately, I think the U.S. has had precisely two politicians who have been good at convincing people of things in the last 16 years, both of whom Democratic Party insiders hate (Trump and Bernie). To me, this says something both about our political system generally and about the Democratic Party in particular.
I prefer a party with principles than one whose entire political philosophy is avoiding making the other party's ads for them. I suspect the electorate would too, if they ever got to see one.
If your paycheck is smaller after getting rid of your employer-provided coverage, it's probably because your employer pocketed the savings.
I think people would be fine with the tax required to, say, give us a truly universal healthcare system, because for most of us at least, it would cost us less, because so much of our compensation is in the form of health insurance, because our health insurance costs on top of that are so high, and/or because even with health insurance, we still have to pay out the ass for healthcare and medicine. I also think the American people are smart enough to understand that. I think the center right (the wing of the Democratic Party Tony Blair feels most sympathetic to) have a vested interest in making sure they never do understand that.
I have shamelessly joined the pile-ons of both The Democrats and the Third Way Dems:
https://x.com/MixingChris/status/1895850328098271336?t=ryugv2tu5jc3uGVNrrgwEw&s=19
https://x.com/MixingChris/status/1896578900681224356?t=YO_fZYJwSBNd7t2nM2EiLA&s=19
I'm not gonna vote for them anyway, but I'd at least like to see the opposition party act as a competent opposition.
After every election loss, for as long as I can remember, the moderate Democratic strategy has been "Become Republican Lite," and then people start saying, "There's no real distinction between the two parties," and moderate Democrats get very upset.
I realize, of course, that the non-Republicans here are overwhelmingly within the moderate wing of the Democratic electorate, and spend pretty much all of their reading time reading others who are at least as far right as they are, but the most popular Democrat in the country remains the party's most visible left liberal, and his ideas remain incredibly popular not only among the Democratic Party base.
It makes perfect sense to talk to people where they are (the moderate Dems' gun shows and tailgate parties), and to talk to them about what is happening in their lives, but it's so weird to me that so many Democrats, and so many people here, feel like the job of a political party is to do what the electorate wants (which, at least last year, was vote for Republicans), instead of to convince voters that their ideas are better on the issues that voters care about. Why even have two parties? We can just fight out all of these disagreements in Republican primaries.