another racist movie from peter jackson

[bakedinapie]

last night i saw the new harry potter movie and it was nice
BUT
there was a trailer for the new king kong movie and i was bowled over by its racism. think dark-skinned people in ragged grass clothing dragging screaming blond white woman through the mud, tying her to a stick structure, carrying torches and beating drums... you can see it here (the

Comments

[bakedinapie]

yeah i'll be interested to hear what you think.

and yeah let's totally get together. i'm booked up on saturday but free sunday morning and evening. (because in the afternoon we're filming the bicycle jam scene! more info on that very very asap, i promise!) i'm also free monday evening. both nights i shouldn't be up horribly late because i have things in the morning. so would you be up for dinner on sunday or monday?

neat.

[lovingislabor]

dude, we saw the trailer for king kong when we saw jarhead last week. i'm glad someone else thought it was totally fucked, too.

[bakedinapie]

thank you. i thought about yelling at the movie screen but i couldn't get it together.

how was jarhead? i really want to see that. i read an intriguing article about it in harpers a couple weeks ago...

alsooooooo guess what? i just found out i got that seiu job! hurray! i start next tuesday. so i'm sure there'll be lots of calling you up to compare notes...

[lovingislabor]

al bradbury! yay!!! we'll be colleagues! (do you know what specifically you're going to be working on?)

we should compare notes regularly. seriously.

i thought jarhead was good -- impartial when it came to the notion of war, really, but intense in its own way. plus (superficial alert!) i like jake gyllenhaal (and/or think he's really hot, whatevs), so that was a bonus.

[bakedinapie]

colleagues yes! well, research for health care organizing campaigns -- i don't know much more specifically than that, but i will most definitely keep you posted.

also re: jake gyllenhaal and his hotness, do you realize he's in a gay cowboy movie that's about to come out? probably i am the last person in the world to discover this. but i mean, it just doesn't get much hotter than that...

[didi_the_blue]

i just watched that trailer and didn't understand what the movie was about at all
i thought the scene with the T-Rex fighting the giant gorilla was funny...it's like something a little kid would play with those plastic animal toys

about the part you mean: you're right, that's not cool
i had this feeling about LOTR, too
but if it makes you feel any better, the "dark-skinned" people in this one actually looked to me like dirty white people

[bakedinapie]

uhhuh. i kinda had that reaction too, and wasn't sure what to do with it. i mean, and that might indeed be who the actors were, who knows. but either way the filmmakers were clearly invoking this stereotyped image of violent dirty fierce scary irrational pacific-islanders, which is to say it certainly draws on/reinforces negative and highly raced images, whatever the ethnicity of the actors involved, yes? and yeah i agree on lotr too.

[didi_the_blue]

which reaction?

you're right, of course
but all the same, i'm finding it hard to get worked up about it because when i was little i picked up the notion that "everyone" thinks King Kong/Godzilla is ridiculous
in which case (my logic goes) they'll see this as a caricature of actual racist stereotypes

i'm probably wrong, though
::sigh::

[chankly_bore]

Alfred H. Bradbury! Hello!

I friended you.

[bakedinapie]

right on! i friended you back, salamander o!

[anonymous]

You do realize of course that he is remaking the movie and it's not, therefore, just 'racist Peter Jackson.' Complain to the makers of the original King Kong and public sentiment if you really have an issue, otherwise writing letters to the newspaper to complain would have just been idiotic ranting. Welcome to the age of political correctness to the extreme.