But fiction isn’t real life, real life doesn’t make sense but fiction does because it is a totally artificial creation. With stuff like Chekov’s Gun and narrative tightness the audience is naturally going to assume an obviously adopted sibling will end up meaning something.
The example you listed wouldn’t work in a more reality ground work of fiction, because the audience is going to want to know how someone can switch races as they age. And if it really has no meaning then it just hurts the suspension of disbelief.
Louie CK has done a bit of exploration in this area. Throughout the series, his ex-wife has been played by actors of different races. Most recently, by a black actor and eventually another character commented on the fact that it seemed incredible that this woman could be the natural mother of two such lily-white children, but in the end no explanation was given other than she is indeed their mother.
I think that TV and movie audiences, like theater audiences have been for centuries, need to get beyond these questions.
It requires a mature audience to accept that a woman can be played by a man or a white personal can be played by a black actor (or different, dissimilar actors can play the same character or the same actor can play different characters).
TV and film portrayals are not meant to be fictional documentaries. You go beyond what you see on the surface. As I said, it’s accepted in live stage performances. There’s no reason why it can’t be accepted on the screen.
Lots of things are accepted in live stage performances that aren’t accepted on the screen. Movies are not just filmed plays. We also accept painted backdrops on stage, but not in a movie.
I have seriously disliked when anyone except a minor background character is recast, what can I say it breaks the illusion for me. Unless you’re talking about some work where this has an established reason, like scifi or Doctor Who etc.
It has nothing to do with race, it is just that recasting a character breaks the immersion.
That interracial relationships and adoptions are such exotic and weird things that we should be looking side-eyed at any family unit where not all the members are lily white (or whatever).
Every single character in Fantastic Four was recast, not just Johnny. Well, except maybe for whatever cameo Stan Lee is doing: He’s still playing the part of “as himself”.
Indian Summers frequently took me out of the story with its casting. All those kids who were meant to be mixed Indian and English? Very dark skinned. That could be excusable for extras, but the main mixed-race little boy was much darker than his Indian mother. And the Farsi characters were so obviously Indian it was a bit weird. Farsis do not look like Indians. Afrin was dark even for most Indians.
And one of the major topics of this show was race. That Afrin (Farsi) was a different race to his (bizarrely lighter-skinned) Indian GF. That the mixed-race kids could be spotted in a crowd, even though they really couldn’t. Terrible, stupid, casting. The show cast unknowns for those roles so they could easily have found a light-skinned Indian or an actual Farsi for Afrin and a light-skinned or mixed kid for the mixed kid. There are tons of them. There are tons of them even in England.
I agree that that would be fine. And just because it’s a science fiction movie doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be logical. It’s not like you go oh, science fiction, might as well have all the humans say jhbjhhg for hello and khiugh for yes and iheie for no, etc, with no explanation or translation, and everyone accepts it because, hello, science fiction is weird!
Some older, well-known fiction works OK with race-changes if the race wasn’t mentioned and the race isn’t important. There was the period film version of Misdummer Night’s Dream, for example, with a black Prince, and his white brother. For some reason it didn’t matter because the story is so well-known to anyone who wants to watch it. What really jarred there was Keanu’s accent as Dogberry. Just be American, you’re allowed!
OTOH I’ve seen Otello, the opera, with a white Otello, and would much rather see someone in that role who wasn’t white. In that role, because the needs of the job are so specialised and the words can’t really be changed (because it’s an opera), even blackface would have been better than having a white man singing about being a Moor. Or just don’t stage it till you can cast someone who’s not pasty white - there are black and Asian singers coming up through the ranks. There are other operas in the meantime.
Well, I am invested in the source material. The Fantastic Four should be a major cornerstone for comic book movies, as much as** Batman** or Avengers, but it’s been bungled badly twice, going on three times.
Why is it a problem if Johnny is black? If you change too many of a character’s characteristics, he’s no longer the same character. (Sherlock in modern times? Sure, why not? Sherlock in the 1960s as a womanizing, hard-drinking ad executive? Why are you dragging Sherlock Holmes’s name into it at all?) As for Johnny Storm: He’s the slow learner of the group, always has been; the one who moves his lips while he reads, the one who dropped out of college and more than likely high school too. You want the only black guy in the group to have THAT baggage? How much else do you feel comfortable changing about him?
Underlines mine. The first, I agree. The second… well, for starters Much Ado is not one of Shakespeare’s works that’s well known to Hispanic audiences; for many of us, our first encounter with Don Pedro is the movie and having a medieval black prince of Aragon is as culturally jarring as, oh, a black US Army Colonel in WWII or a black Morgan le Fey. To you apparently Don Pedro’s race is “not mentioned”: to anybody half familiar with Spanish history it is: he’s a prince of Aragon, that means white (more specifically, the brown shades of white - someone superblond would look as weird as Washington did).
So, depending on the audience, a choice will be terribly jarring or not.
There would be some uncomfortable, but witty irony if “The Invisible Man” were played by a black actor.
(Credit to old original FF: they once visited an alternate world where blacks were severely oppressed, and alluded to them as “invisible” in a nod to Ralph Ellison.)
Any list of offensive racist miscasting would include “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” for Mickey Rooney’s small but resoundingly despicable turn as Mr. Yunioshi. Equally offensive to me, and I never hear this, is casting George Peppard as Truman Capote! Big handsome straight guy? Really? Playing small gay Truman? :eek:
I admit to being so old that I read the book before seeing the movie, but not old enough to see either brand new. Books were far easier to obtain back 'in the day. Movies were only at theaters.
Really, it kind of broke my heart that the amazing perfection of Audrey Hepburn, Buddy Ebson, and that song were in the same film with those travesties.
Hell, I could start a thread on ‘Times Hollywood Flung the Gay Plot Out the Window.’
I’m confused. Was I supposed to think that the characters played by Chris Evans and Jessica Alba had the same biological mother and father? Because as a non-comic reader, I didn’t get that at all. Before this thread I wouldn’t have even remembered that they were supposed to be siblings at all, having only watched those movies when they came out 10 years ago. Plus the fact that they don’t look like siblings.
Michael Jordan and Kate Mara (yay! I love me some Kate) look less like blood relatives than Evans and Alba, but it’s not like the original casting was Jason and Justine Bateman. I don’t see see this current casting as a departure from the previous movies racially; more like a heightening of the already-disparate racial composition.
Obviously I have no objection to either of the casting choices in the 2000s movies or the 2010s movies, having no knowledge of the characters to begin with. But for a solid decade now I am unable to give credence to any criticism of comic book character casting of any kind. To my ear it’s all tainted by the nerd rage that erupted when Keanu Reeves was cast as Constantine, which was a sin because apparently the core, primary aspect of Constantine’s character is that he’s blonde. It all sounds as stupid to me as that, fair or not.
Thanks for the correction - I was being very lazy.
Nava, thing is, it does seem to work with Shakespeare. There were a load of blonds in the cast too, which, like you say, is equally anachronistic.
Blake, if you know the play then, regardless of whether Moors were light-skinned or not, this one was very dark and it’s actually important for his character - make him white and some of the lines and actions make no sense.
Woah, now, that’s far too narrow a brush. Moors were diverse, and could range from blonde-haired&blue-eyed (especially nobles, it seems) all the way to sub-saharan-looking.
