saw the pirate movie
Jul. 30th, 2006 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmdfor 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 07:18 pm (UTC)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.