saw the pirate movie

[rmd]

for the most part, it was silly fun. kiera knightly is tasty as a pirate. the plot was a bit ... scattered, but fun. i expected a bit more resolution - i hadn't realized it was dropping the plotlines so fast to pick them up in a third movie. (i knew there was a third movie planned, but i didn't realize it was so tightly coupled.)

a few moments of compositing looked a bit odd, but the fabulousness of davey jones' little waving tentacles made me happy they spent the rendering money where they did.

my biggest peeve, however, wasn't with the plot per se, or with the acting. it felt a bit like i was watching a much older movie in terms of its treatment of people of color. boy howdy, the brother always gets it. let's look at our good guys: a bunch of white guys, a white chick, and one black person -- a voodoo priestess/witch. awesome. and it's just coincidence that all the white heroes were in one hampster ball while all the non-white guys were in another - the one where that sneaky trecherous guy of color screwed up and managed to get noticed by the tribesman. (unless, as a friend pointed out, they were separating the white meat from the dark meat... i think maybe they were going to marinate them differently.)

i don't normally go around analyzing the racist undertones in popular media, but this struck me as pretty egregious.

Comments

Arrr! Me crew lacks diversity, too!

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= My LJ pirate crew (http://jymdyer.livejournal.com/3701.html) is -- alas! avast! -- entirely persons of pallor.

[freudian-slip.livejournal.com]

and the voodoo priestess/witch...TEH HOT. (well, other than the teeth)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

did you recognize her? she was the chick in "28 days later"

[marith.livejournal.com]

There was a huge argument over that in LJ just after the movie came out. (Which you might already know about, but if not you might find interesting to read. ) I think it was one of the things that led to the blog-against-racism week.

(Haven't seen it myself - pirates are not really my thing - but was curious as to whether I would have found it noticeable. From your description, oh yeah. :P)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

yeah, i'd avoided most of the discussion of it when it first came out.

i think what added to the noticable, besides the pirate crew color split, was the tribe of black guys. kind of cartoon primitive polynesian/pacific-island sort of thing, except black. which seems a bit odd for something set in the carribean. if they'd been aztec/mayan looking, hey, okay, my suspension of disbelief can handle it. you've got your history of human sacrifice and everything going on there. (my favorite movie tribe of that sort is the waponi wu tribe from "joe vs the volcano".)

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

I heard somewhere that they filmed both the second and third movies together (a la
Back To The Future), so they're likely closely tied.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

ah. i hadn't realized they were filming the third at the same time. it makes perfect sense after having seen the second flick, tho.

[tcb.livejournal.com]

goat and I saw it on the way home from the cape last night, and were more confused than anything else. as you said, it seemed very scattered.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

...with those dreads, i always kinda see jack sparrow as a black guy, even though i know perfectly well that johnny depp is white as snow.

that said, the movie still struck me as awfully racist in general. freaky.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Actually, Johnny Depp's some significant percentage Cherokee. But he reads as white to general American culture, anyway.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

*nod* demonstrating once again that race is a social, not a biological, construct.

what race, if any, do you ascribe to capt sparrow?

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

The Race of the Magnificent Cheekbones, if there's such a thing.

Slightly more seriously, I try to think in terms of ethnicism rather than race, because (from my oh-so-easy Irish background) 'race' annoys me (one race, human; many ethnicities), but I know it's called racism, not ethnicism, when we're dealing with behavior based on people's skin tones. I would never actually *think* about Sparrow's ethnicity or race unless *asked*, which probably (again from the oh-so-easy Irish background) means my default is "He's white." Except he's not really, and if I think about it I actually have no idea what racial or ethnic background I'd assign to him. Mediterranean, maybe Northern African, probably, because he's too dark to be from further north than that unless you take into account the actor's actual ethnicity.

I completely failed to notice the racism problems in Pirates II. I don't know if this means I'm really enlightened or really blind. The only thing I actively noticed was that the black female pirate from the first movie was gone, but then, I expected she had a ship of her own by Pirates II.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i am always skeptical of claims of cherokee descent, having encountered a bit of the "my grandmother was a cherokee princess" thing (http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=2505). he does have some of the facial structure i think of as being typical of native americans, tho.