Faking the race, the sequel

Look, it's Jake Gyllenhaal!

Last time I ranted about the crappy fake foreign accents in games. Well, turned out, there's plenty more to say about faking and insulting. Yes, I'm talking about you Hollywood. Where Tekken the movie actually follows the complex, multi-game series in the original mix of different races and nationalities (no matter how much it sucks otherwise), some just seem to look at the game and simply think "fuck it". You know by now what I'm after. The new Prince of Persia: Sands of Time movie shows the beauty of the "faking the race" phenomena. The prince is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, evidently the most Persian looking guy in Hollywood, and the Farah substitute seems to be some British chick. With a tan!

Gemma Arterton's ethnic career:

"Oh hai, iz Greek!"

 "Oh hai, iz Indian!"

That’s about as foreign as it gets. There's also Alfred Molina as a sheik and Ben Kingsley as Nizam/The Vizir, who seems to be inspired by the Persians in 300. Thus, a cultural diversity turned into a whitey party. Weirder still, they went through a hell of a lot of trouble to make the game sound right. So, Jake sis talking with a fake British accent, which ironically is the only authencity in the whole goddamn thing.

There's been "Greek" Gerard Butlers and Sam Worthingtons before, so it's nothing shocking really. And gamers certainly have had some hard time with godawful game adaptations with a total miscast (thank you Uwe Boll). It does make you think though: why to take a perfectly good concept and specificly turn it into an ethnic cleansed western fable? Not that it's any of my business (as a paying customer) but personally I'd have enjoyed watching someone a bit more, you know, Persian. Gemma's part is understandable, surely they couldn't have cast any of the 1,5 million Brits with indian heritage. That's just crazy talk.

Why even try. I suggest Hollywood does the whole damn series and bleaches the characters in every part.

So Kaileena will be played by Yvonne Strahovski.

Elika will be played by Lily Cole.

And Forgotten Sands will be an epic tale of a ghost in a snowstorm.

Yeah. It's pretty obvious Jordan Mechner, the creator of the consept, Disney or Jerry Bruckheimer don't care about the actual cultures they make money on, they just want the cool sounding bits such as "Persian" and "Caribbean" and dress up some white folk in nice clothes.

It's not the ethnicity that bugs me even so much as the need to put someone white, even the totally wrong one, into the role. I'm sad about the characters which were butchered in this project. Farah, who was excellent, for instance. She was interesting, and the exotic looks was part of her charm. She could have been a goddess really. So fail there. Jake doesn't remind the prince from the actual game at all. The muscles and the rough edgy look is more of Warrior Within. This one should have been sparky and smirky, frisky and boyish, a charmer. Even then, it might have been forgivable if it had worked. Jake is a great actor, and he's got the teddy bear eyes and feet sweeping looks, but he's not comfy here. Who ever chose to make the ultimate choices with Prince of Persia turned this movie pretty much into an empty shell.

As predicted, Mechner went all politician about the race thing. When asked whether they'd looked at anyone of Persian descent, Mechner said: “Yeah, they looked at a huge range of actors -- There are hundreds of great actors that could’ve done the job, but you end up picking one”.

What an asshole. Wonder if their "search" was similar to The Last Airbender's "caucasian...or other...".

Which leads us to another great example of Hollywood's ethnic cleansing.

I personally find this quite antic:

"Two months after the initial cast of The Last Airbender was announced and after considerable fan outcry, the role of Prince Zuko, the film’s primary antagonist, was recast from a white actor to Indian-British actor Dev Patel. Subsequently, several actors of “Latino, Middle Eastern” descent were cast to play villains and conquering Fire Nation soldiers that are the antagonists in the film. The production also began casting “Asian and African” actors to play citizens of a country that has fallen victim to the Fire Nation. Because of these castings, M. Night Shyamalan has declared The Last Airbender “the most culturally diverse tent-pole movie ever made.”

This quote is from the wonderful anti-Airbender-movement racebending's site, which I recommend for further reseach. So, what's happening is that Avatar: The Last Airbender, a loved show about Inuits and Asians is now made into a movie called The Last Airbender, cast entirely with white people, except for the baddies and props. "The most culturally diverse" flick is copying the pattern Hollywood have been doing since, oh I don't know, forever. Of course those of us who actually have watched the show have already identified with the Katara, Sokka and Aang we know, and they sure aren't white.

Check out, for example, the pic of Katara and Sokka with their "tribe".

Since I'm choking into disbelieve I'll let racebending do the talking once more. "An entire tribe populated using extras from Greenland – a nation that is almost 90% of Inuit heritage – is championed by two Caucasians."

I don't know how to emphasase this any stronger, but for fuck's sake, the white leads has been there for the last 100 years. It is seen, done, over and out, old news, tired and self repeating. It is nothing to be tampered for, especially by force and obsession, ending up with actors who have absolutely nothing to offer to the characters. Yeah, for a while it looked pretty good for non-whites too, but obviously the last few years' regression wasn't just financial. Distress wouldn't need to lead to discrimination, xenophobia and downturn, yet it often does and these are the results.

Stay tuned for Leonardo DiCaprio as Akira!