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However, most "historical" films are not historical reenactments. They are usually character dramas that are using a historical period as a backdrop to tell some other type of story. For me personally I see this more in the tradition of live theater. If the race (or even gender) of the characters isn't massively integral to the plot, it's fine and good to cast whoever acts well in the role. Cleopatra and the little mermaid are literally fairly tale characters, could not imagine caring what the race of the actress playing them is.
Of course, and I can’t say I ever noticed the race or gender of characters until recently. If movies/TV were was always just equally non-accurate then it would be fine, but that’s not how entertainment works. A man can be replaced by a woman or a transgender, a white character can be replaced by a non-white actor, and anybody can be made gay/bi/++. But the reverse is never allowed. It’s not some insane conspiracy theory either, these are basically the new rules of film making.
https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-s...
For people that are aligned with this political agenda, I’m sure it’s good for them. But I’m personally just not interested, and I think there’s quite a few people out there with the same views as me on this.
I don't know what the Mauri looked like, but probably not like Italians, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them had dark skin. The same website thinks that emperor looked like this: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/13005/macrinus-facial-rec... and if so, Denzel Washington's portrayal looks pretty good https://i0.wp.com/www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07...
This doesn't look like the Netflix African Cleopatra situation. She was Greek IRL, which is actually interesting for anyone who didn't know about the Ptolemaic dynasty, and it's relevant because even today the Coptic minority in Egypt is (sorta) Greek.
Amazighs Algerians are an ethnic group that exists today, you can google them yourself to see how close they look to Denzel Washington.
Just because he was born in africa doesn't mean he is black or 'african'. Elon Musk was born in africa too but nobody would claim he is a black man.
Also, how people started to use "being woke" (alert to racial prejudice and discrimination) and "DEI" (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) as swear words is beyond me.
It makes me want to ask Putin to just launch those nukes already...
What's with accounts here wanting Putin to use nukes all of a sudden?
'If I could have one wish it would be for Putin to nuke Warsaw.'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41051619
It is some meme I'm not getting? Bizarre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slough_(poem)
Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!Before this war I've said "Kim Jong-Un has my permission to nuke X"...
The Scottish in 1600s were. Not to say it matters, as Macbeth is a quasi-fantasy play and it's been adapted a million times. At this point "black everything Macbeth" might draw more viewers than "just another fucking Macbeth" (maybe, idk but producers may have a better idea).
The question is always "who is this for" and "will people pay to see it"
It's just an artistic/stylistic judgement, not a complaint (very few readers here are likely to go see another in the pile of Macbeth movies). A modern day adaptation even with all the original names and dialog would still work better. I don't have a horse in the race because I don't care to see yet another Macbeth.
I don't see how.
How else do you explain the comic irony and theatrical resonance of Lady M saying "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, [...] come to my woman's breasts and take my milk for gall."
What I'm saying is you are not purely interested in artistic faithfulness to the original. You are interested in particular aesthetics that fit your own perspective, and you're using box office receipts to defend your own aesthetics, which is weird.
I didn't express any preference for any particular aesthetic. Everyone has them, but it's neither here nor there.
I didn't explicitly say so. But given race-blind adaptations, do it or don't. If you're going to turn a historical period on its head, then going all the way would be better.
Going back to something you said:
> What I'm saying is you are not purely interested in artistic faithfulness to the original. You are interested in particular aesthetics that fit your own perspective, and you're using box office receipts to defend your own aesthetics, which is weird.
Consistency and approximating faithfulness to an original is itself an aesthetic. It does not itself make an adaptation superior, it's a stylistic choice, and no one said it's the only good one.
Another user mentioned people are looking for "depth and coherent world building". All I said is in keeping with that.
Lol. That is exactly what they're doing. You just don't like a black Macbeth, but others do and are fine with it. For the record, there have been black, green, orange, purple, yellow Macbeths since the dawn of time, ever since Shakespeare became a global cultural touchstone performed all over the world. I'm pretty sure whoever he is, wherever he is now, he must be pretty pleased to see his work continue to have cultural relevance through adaptation and appealing to audiences he could not have imagined rather than limited by the lack of imagination of hidebound tradition.
I think I made it clear, it isn't.
> You just don't like a black Macbeth, but others do and are fine with it.
Wrong.
Sure, I agree. As far as I’m concerned the earth is populated by ~8 billion individual human beings. But this is heresy according to the idiotic identity politics that has slowly taken over bits and pieces of western culture. It’s an ideology that demands everybody be shoehorned into race/gender/sexuality tribes. When it comes to DEI scores, there’s no ambiguity about who’s white and who’s not white. It’s an ideology that I don’t like at all, and it’s been constantly forced into a lot of entertainment. Whether this role was cast as a part of that mission or not doesn’t really matter, because it’s tainted the whole industry.
> And now demographics of audiences have changed so Hollywood has (slowly) adapted
I would say this isn’t a response to audience changes at all, and simply the result of a small elite of political activists, often producing product that directly defy the tastes of the core audience. But that doesn’t really matter either, because the people that don’t like it will simply disengage (though some will complain about it more than others).
I personally don’t really care very much either, I’m just offering my perspective. I barely watch any TV or movies any more, and I couldn’t say my life has suffered for it at all.
Conspiratorial thinking based on absolutely nothing.
Anything that "directly defies the tastes of the core audience" will fail. It's obvious you're choosing to put yourself in this "core" audience. What if you're wrong about that?
And what if I told you that the free market is the most powerful cultural force in the US, and TV/film studios produce content in ways they think will make the most money? That if they aren't making enough money, they change their strategy?
Would that be new information to you?
Even if Hollywood were a well-oiled machine, what would you say if they estimate they're losing sales from diversity casting, due to upsetting part of their audience, and decides to undo that?
https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-s...
> And what if I told you that the free market is the most powerful cultural force in the US, and TV/film studios produce content in ways they think will make the most money?
These DEI products fail all the time. The most recent Star Wars series is a great example. These failures are also well documented in every TV show/movie where the critics score and the audience score are miles apart on rotten tomatoes.
Basically all of your film's department heads have to be white straight men, you have to fail to hire just 6(!) women/POC/etc in other significant jobs, and the studio's executives all belong to over-represented groups. As in, they are whiter and straighter than THE COUNTRY.
That you insist on seeing evil and bad faith in efforts to make our culture more representative of our actual population is very depressing to me.
My point was that the things I mentioned are sufficient on their own to qualify a movie for the Best Picture category.
Pick any TWO of these four:
- "Diverse" casting (aka roughly in line with US pop demographics and even then, STILL favoring white men) OR storyline centered on non-white OR non-male OR non-heterosexual theme
- "Diverse" leadership (Simply have two dept heads that aren't white, straight, male, AND fully-abled)
- Opportunities for training and advancement for people who are not white, straight, male AND fully-abled
- Studio has >1 senior executive OR consultant that has a significantly different background from the rich, white, straight, fully-abled men that ran Hollywood for the better part of a century. Just find two people!
Second, the word "elites" perfectly describes the people who run the system people are trying to change. Elites don't want to change anything. Why would they?
For instance, you can go the route of Throne of Blood. It transposes the plot to feudal Japan, and doesn't call itself Macbeth. This allows you to hit all the story beats with the freedom to change literally anything else you want, and still be "faithful" in its adaptation. I'd argue it's also a more intriguing approach for film.
Alternatively, you can opt for the original dialog, names, historical setting, and aesthetic. If you go this way, with a story set in Medieval Scotland that is not genre fantasy, then having something as incongruent as a change of race in the main character will stick out. Notwithstanding, here no one cares because a) Macbeth's been done to death, b) no one gives a damn about Macbeth. You can of course suggest that people are nonplussed about this for movies in general, but if they aren't invested in any way they may not see your film either.
So in fact you aren't likely to see this done for every film set in a historical period all the time, and the minor controversy and trolling if anything helps create buzz for a film that will otherwise flop anyway. Were you going to see it in theaters? Statistically, not likely.
Ridley Scott is on record as being extremely exasperated with historians when it comes to his historical films. So I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.
> a) Macbeth's been done to death > b) no one gives a damn about Macbeth
These are very bizarre claims you make very confidently.
I don't see how both of these aren't equally applicable to Gladiator 2, the sequel(!) to one of the worst Best Picture winners in history.
> So in fact you aren't likely to see this done for every film set in a historical period all the time, and the minor controversy and trolling if anything helps create buzz for a film that will otherwise flop anyway. Were you going to see it in theaters? Statistically, not likely.
So... what are you saying exactly? It was fine to make Macbeth black because no one was going to see it anyway? It was a good idea to make Macbeth black because controversy?
The clearest point you are making is that you cannot see outside your own point of view when it comes to race in cinema.
> Ridley Scott is on record as being extremely exasperated with historians when it comes to his historical films. So I'm not quite sure what you're getting at.
This is a bizarre non-sequitur. You might as well have said "My friend Mike likes pizza, so I'm not sure what you're getting at". What's the point?
> These are very bizarre claims you make very confidently.
https://www.imdb.com/find/?q=macbeth -- count them.
The latest ones were flops. For instance Macbeth 2015 grossed $16 million worldwide against its production budget of $20 million. So yeah, I make the claim "confidently".
> I don't see how both of these aren't equally applicable to Gladiator 2
You brought up Gladiator 2! And speaking of bizarre claims, for Gladiator to have been "done to death", it would have needed a sequel!
> It was fine to make Macbeth black because no one was going to see it anyway?
No. This has to be a weird projection because I did not say anything near that.
Whitey Macbeth has been done many times, no one's being deprived of Whitey Macbeth. My answer to those who complain is: if you're watching, it's for you. If not you're not watching, it's not for you. Producers are banking on someone watching.
> It was a good idea to make Macbeth black because controversy?
Probably.
I'm not sure why you're denying that you implied that diversity is fine in movies that don't do well. What other conclusion am I supposed to draw - especially in the context of this discussion - from your assertion that "no one cares about Macbeth" ?
I'm puzzled why your points are all now strictly based on how well the movies have done at the box office. You were talking about artistic and stylistic judgments before. Now it's about the business?
Nope. That would be unsurprising, it being fiction and all.
> I'm not sure why you're denying that you implied that diversity is fine in movies that don't do well.
Because that isn't what I fucking said.
> What other conclusion am I supposed to draw - especially in the context of this discussion - from your assertion that "no one cares about Macbeth" ?
That no one cares; it's a moot point, there will not be that much discourse surrounding it. That is the observation. There's no possible way to contrive that suggests "it's only justifiable to have diversity in films that don't do well".
The important part of the paragraph that belonged to is that some stylistic changes can seem incongruent with the whole of a film. A black Scottish medieval king is incongruent. That's not even a value judgement, and it's not always clear whether audiences will be drawn or repelled.
> I'm puzzled why your points are all now strictly based on how well the movies have done at the box office. You were talking about artistic and stylistic judgments before. Now it's about the business?
Wow, you are obtuse. Be puzzled then, run off and do something else.
- Macbeth is old fiction, but some approaches to adapting it are BETTER than others
- Don't do something "incongruent" and "brazen" like cast a black man and call your movie Macbeth, because that isn't one of the BETTER approaches.
- But honestly, no one cares because ugh Macbeth is so played out, NO ONE gives a damn.
Then you shouldn't have said those things?
As it stands, you have drawn a rhetorical distinction between fictional Macbeth and the also-fictional Gladiator 2 without actually saying how they're different vis a vis performer ethnicity, other than "more people care about" Gladiator 2.
You accuse me of being obtuse and then fail to actually make a point about why people are complaining about Gladiator 2, only that bringing up Macbeth is dumb because who cares about stupid Macbeth.
I did say and mean that.
> - Don't do something "incongruent" and "brazen" like cast a black man and call your movie Macbeth, because that isn't one of the BETTER approaches.
That isn't what I said.
Do cast a black man, do call it Macbeth. But seriously, keep going. It's weird to set something in Medieval Scotland and make just one guy a-historical. Make half the cast black, or whatever. It's seems like restraint or half-measure to try to keep in tradition in every other way but a single character. There's no reason you can't go full Bridgerton. I think that would serve it better.
I hope that's clear. I'm not sure if you actually aren't capable of grasping, or refuse to do so because you'd rather project racism. It's a bit weird.
Another user mentioned people are looking for "depth and coherent world building". I think if it feels coherent then it works.
> fail to actually make a point about why people are complaining about Gladiator 2
Dude. You brought up Gladiator 2, not me. Ask them why they're complaining, because I sure didn't.
> As it stands, you have drawn a rhetorical distinction between fictional Macbeth and the also-fictional Gladiator 2 without actually saying how they're different vis a vis performer ethnicity, other than "more people care about" Gladiator 2.
I don't know anything about Gladiator 2 other than it's an entirely new spectacle.
Hey, that's what I thought when I read your comment!
What about the fact that the treatment of women and slaves is almost certainly significantly toned down from what we know to be the reality?
Also there was almost certainly way more gay sex going on among any number of historical personages. Commodus (Gladiator's main villain) in particular was said to have "defil[ed] every part of his body in dealings with persons of either sex." Where is your outrage at this lack of accurate representation?
The implication here is that it's really your own baggage that ruins the immersion for you. You suggest that you can't watch a movie now without cataloguing and mourning the places where a character was more likely in your opinion to be white, male and/or straight.
This is not something anyone can help you with.
White actors have dominated in Hollywood since the beginning, and I don't remember anybody complaining that Mickey Rooney's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's ruined the immersion. Or that literally all of the ethnic Asian characters in the Manchurian Candidate were played by white actors.
Is it political soapboxing, or trying to make show business fairer? Because if Hollywood listened to your preferences, minority actors have less oppportunities for roles.
I was watching "A Gentleman in Moscow", a series about an aristocrat living in house arrest in a luxury hotel in 1920s-1950s Soviet Russia. Everyone in it spoke English since it is an US/UK production, and there were black and Indian actors in it, I guess because of "DEI". I found it awkward at first, but I thought "I guess this is progress, better get with the times.". No one moaned about all the Russian characters speaking English, the show didn't have any race-related topics (a movie about the KKK with black Klan members would be incongrous), but with actors of different color skin? That series had lots of IMDb reviews complaining about "political soapboxing"...
I must be one of those people^W sheep who don't mind being oppressed by the woke-mafia, huh?
As an addendum, I find it obnoxious if people insist straight actors can't play gay characters, or genteel actors playing Jewish characters. It's called fucking acting! Scarlett Johansson should've been able to play a fictional Japanese cyborg in Ghost in the Shell without idiots complaining about it...
I don’t think that at all. I believe very strongly that nobody should ever feel the need to apologise for liking something. I simply don’t like this political ideology at all, I think it’s turning everything into monocultural forum for activism, and I’m not interested in the entertainment it’s producing. If you used a bit less prejudgment you’d be able to see it’s possible for me to have a distaste for this kind of product without being a horrible bigot.
There are plenty of reasons TV and movies are bad these days. With the glut of new shows, writing and directing in particular seems to be suffering.
The Witcher (for instance) fell off a cliff after its first season, and its shittiness had nothing to do with "DEI" and everything to do with Netflix's belief that cheaper creative doesn't hurt the bottom line.
What if more than one trend is happening at once?
Idk if anyone was actually not watching the Ghost in the Shell remake over the casting. The characters look right. If someone out there is upset that the main character wasn't played by someone Japanese, I don't get it, the original character didn't even look Japanese.
They didn't announce her as the new "Bond", and she is not confirmed to continue the character.
She didn't even have that designation at the end of the movie.
It's literally a number.
How eager are you to find things to be mad at?
gay and black people exist, and the people they are portraying are dead. it’s called acting for that reason, the character isnt really cleopatra.