One data point: My brother-in-law married a Chinese woman a few years ago. She lived in China for the first fifty-plus years of her life before she emigrated to marry him. I asked her once about the book The Good Earth (book, not movie), whether it was well known in China, how it was perceived. She rolled her eyes and informed me that it was indeed well known and considered highly racist. --Perhaps not the type of “Asian American” you’re looking for, but I thought her reaction was…instructive.
Yes. But as I think I remember it, for whatever reasons the movie doesn’t show Marvin answering any questions at all. He just gives them Jack’s name and he’s in. That’s what bothers me, although it shouldn’t- it’s just movie shorthand.
The movie is horribly racist. The book is very accurate for a certain time and place sort of thing. I would not consider it racist, but it details a certain rural life that some Chinese find embarrassing. I, personally, found the rags to riches story to be unbelievable. But the description of rural farm life is pretty much accurate.
I love that book. I didn’t know it was criticized as racist. We all have our blind spots I guess. I’d be interested to know how so.
Before that. According to Django Unchained, the Civil War started in 1860. I love it when people point that out as a “goof.”
Do you have links to any articles on this? I don’t disbelieve you. I just find it fascinating.
Actually not too far off from reality.
Another classic movie: Dark Victory. Today, the doctor would get hugely sued for not telling his patient that she has an incurable brain tumor, yet telling her best friend. And then, leaving evidence of the diagnosis out where she could discover it. Oy vey!
And what, they didn’t have MRIs and chemo in 1939?
Speaking of thinking like 60’d people, there was at least one time in TNG where someone gave someone else tons of “homework” on a PADD. But it wasn’t just one pad, it was like ten. If the PADD is like a tablet, one should have enough memory to hold everything. And if it is just a Personal Access Display Device with no memory, why would you need more than one?
The scene did not seem to being played for in-universe humor.
Something that happens all the time in TNG/DS9/Voyager is when a character enters a room and physically hands another character a PADD in order to turn in a report, or letter, or whatever. There was an episode of Voyager that had Neelix walking all over the ship passing out PADDs containing letters from home to the crew. Have the people of the 24th century lost the technology for sending email? That Voyager episode felt particularly silly since they apparently had the ability to transmit data across light years of space, but then when it reached Voyager they couldn’t route the messages to the correct crew members.
Yes, I know most of the time it’s done to give two characters a reason to be in the same room.
no, just what the head manager told me when he was doing a return for me because I made the remark "I could have come in at 1 or 2 am like I usually do " and he said “not anymore” and explained it to me …
I have a tritium source that I wear on my neck chain with my dogtags [and I also have one attached to my keyring, and my bedside flashlight] It started as a joke 12 or 13 years back, I know a caver, and many cavers giving tours of places like Mammoth Caves will flip the lights off to show how absolutely dark it is in there … and they will mention how long batteries in a flashlight will last. Anmar pointed out that this point source will actually provide enough light to at least let one crawl and avoid falling down a hole =)
I tend to get maps - I have in my car the current atlas, and when I went to Nevada, I bought a new Nevada state map. We also have a satellite GPS in addition to the telephone GPS. WE have plans of bombing around in desert areas that are no where near cell towers =)
Not to mention gasoline/diesel access - I recoursed to the winter Western NY habit of not really dropping below half a tank - it isn’t uncommon to go 4 or 5 hours without seeing anything close to a fuel station.
My first thought was Breaking Bad, but that’s not a time difference thing. It was more:
“I’m afraid you have cancer, Mr. White”
- “Oh my god! I’ll have to cook wicked-strong blue meth in an RV with one of my old students to be able to afford the treatment!”
“…erm…no? The NHS will be sorting that out for you, obviously. And it’s called a ‘motorhome’, FYI.”
But other than that, I’ve been watching a lot of The Professionals recently. Setting aside the obvious boys-in-the-playground fantasy of the premise, the series did take place against the backdrop of the real world. When Bodie was off duty with his girlfriend, he apprehended a terrorist, nicked a car because the gang had found his, and holed up in a remote vicarage. He tried to call it in but the gang cut the phone lines. He’d left his radio in his car, so that meant the entire story turned around Doyle and Cowley working out where Bodie might have ended up. The lost radio was easy enough to write, but the vicar & his housekeeper in their own house, plus Bodie and his girlfriend all being without a mobile? I guess you could write it as a signal issue, but it would feel pretty contrived. Not really a likely plot today.
I saw some cheesy movie that had the killer, a rising Hollywood star, murdering her blackmailer.
Leading me to wonder if that movie was made today, what on earth somebody could blackmail her for in the '20s?
Unwed mother? Would not be a secret and she would have custody.
She’s really black and has been passing? Sure, pal.
Child is a different race? Hmpf.
Lived with lover without marriage? Nope.
Lesbian? Nope.
Made a porno early in her career? No, that’d be on the internet, she’d be even more famous, she’d probably have a reality show.
Worked previously as a hooker? See above.
Secretly born a man? Nope, she’d be a media darling, probably have a reality show.
Any of those things would have worked so well at various points in the past but today? No. And she’s too young and wrong sex to be a Korean war deserter, Vietnam war deserter, that kind of thing.
She can only be secretly a murderer. And who would blackmail her knowing that she was already a murderer and might just do it again?
End of plot.
I don’t actually remember what the Hollywood rising star was getting blackmailed for.
Murder She Wrote and pretty much any amateur Detective show.
The Police would ignore them or throw them in jail today.
Now, that said- Castle did it well.
My SIL is pretty careful about words like “racist”–I don’t believe she meant that Chinese people found the book an embarrassing reminder of their past, but rather that many of them do indeed perceive the book to be, well, racist–expressing incorrect and unhelpful stereotypes.
Buck saw herself as at least as much Chinese as American, perhaps more so; the impression I got in this admittedly brief conversation is that Buck was perhaps not as immersed in Chinese ways and Chinese people as she thought she was. I think my SIL would take issue with the claim that the book’s depiction of rural Chinese life is “pretty much accurate.” But as I say it was a short conversation, and goodness knows I’m no expert.
I hate when smug Europeans pull the ultimate GOTCHA! with they try to explain the plot away of Breaking Bad as “If only he had Universal Health Care it wouldn’t have happened” and it’s like they never even watched the TV show.
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He had terminal lung cancer, and even when treated lung cancer has an abysmally low survival rate Universal Health Care be damned.
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He wanted to provide for his family after his death and have them live comfortably which has nothing to do with Universal Health Care.
Home Alone. They’re running late to the airport because they have a power outage and all their clocks get reset. Somehow they make it to the airplane, only to realize they’ve left Kevin behind. And they’re out of contact with him for days. Wouldn’t happen in today’s world, with cell phones.
My my, somebody’s cage has been rattled.
I watched it, end to end. I got it. However it played out as his concerns and his activities developed, whatever his motives in the long run, the initial “got cancer, lack of insurance is a problem” was there. In a country with free-at-point-of-delivery healthcare, that initial panic is not there to start the ball rolling, so that comes across as a wouldn’t-happen-here premise.
Same as “But the cops would have just drawn their guns, there’s only one armed robber and there are four of them, he’d never get away…oh…yeah…UK cops.”
You don’t have to be smug to notice the difference between different nations and the consequent likelihood of characters from those nations behaving a particular way.
I know, because I’m not.