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

[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".)