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Voice of Sanity from the Film Industry? Or a Cop-Out?
Imagine an actor allowing for racist themes in movies and television! An actor from the UK, Idris Elba, thinks that racist viewpoints should be included in films as long as they are included in the rating systems that we have already accepted. He thinks that censorship is not necessary:
Out of respect for the time and the movement, commissioners and archive-holders pulling things they think are exceptionally tone-deaf at this time—fair enough and good for you. But I think, moving forward, people should know that freedom of speech is accepted, but the audience should know what they’re getting into.
I wonder how long it will take for him to get blowback? I haven’t seen any yet.
Then again, I’m not on Twitter or Facebook.
What do you think about having a “racist warning” in the movie rating system?
Published in Culture
This film is rated NW, for “No whiners.”
So you’re saying Thor should have had a race change
rrather than a sex change?We could do a lot of good by eliminating all video format from classrooms.
I got a new rating system; big label on everything that says, “Warning: You May Not Like This So Look It Up On Your Damn Phone First!”
That works. Please implement nationwide. Thanks.
If we do this, can we have Song of the South back? Will they stop threatening Gone with the Wind?
Disney+ has labeled some of their older movies with a warning similar to that.
Just another example demonstrating that we are the only adults in the room. Everyone else has to have their hands held as if they were children.
Religious people see themselves as Children before G-d.
I guess being secular means you can be children above all.
I guess I have a question.
If there is no evil in movies, how can the “good” shine through?
I know, I know I need to be stoned for such a thought because there is no “good” or “evil” to begin with. But if there were not Good and Evil ( like racism) in movies or other types of artistic or journalist media, then how would we know that “racism” is a “bad” thing if it is altogether erased from what we see?
In those now banned fights between “Good and Evil”, like you kinda had in that ancient insipid series from clearly another racist era, StarWars, doesn’t really bad racism need to be in “the Pantheon” of really bad things right up there with murder, voting for Trump and of course environmental plunder? Or otherwise how would our children know what it is and how bad it is?
Another minor quibble. I think it was Walt Disney who thought you really needed really bad “evil” in your movies to really get the drama of the picture really worked up and going so that you could contrast the good with it, otherwise things would be rather dull and your story would fall flat. So I am a thinking that if you ban racism or other really “bad” things movies will be become quite dull and uniformly boring. But I guess our new Overlords, the Hard Left, does have a thing against “Fun” so I guess that’s OK.
Gone with the Wind is safe on my shelf. All they can do is raise the resale value.
I’ve never seen a dramatic presentation without evil in it. In fact, a couple of months ago I spoke with a spectacular woman who told me she stayed away from movies with demons in them. I objected that they all have demons in them, there are just a few where they don’t manifest for the camera. Haven’t heard from her in awhile…
Since the definition of racist is now on shifting sand, what good is a warning?
Very, very fine. So very Fine.
I remember the old Justice League cartoon. Earth’s mightiest (DC) heroes in a sort of world-protecting club. Each week a villain would be doing something-or-other that damaged the environment. After using their assorted superpowers to prevent fallout from whatever-it-was, they would catch up with the villain only to discover that he just had it wrong, and all they had to do was find a non-environmentally damaging solution and he could then be on his way, no harm no foul.
Perhaps we will get something like Wokewoman and the Legion of N.I.C.E™ who will simply explain to the person that [epithet] is inappropes and that the [ethnicity/minority] are actually made up of only good people. Unlike the person who is wrong and twisted – but, after a few days in the Chamber of Reeducation he’ll be cured, and possibly have a new gender.
Well, it is a small step in the right direction that Idris Elba believes that films with outdated or offensive content should not be cancelled and cast into the memory hole forever. He gets points for that in this day and age. Hope it doesn’t cost him his livelihood.
I can’t help thinking though, that this insistence that every single thing must come with its own list of warnings, cautions, advisories and admonitions has gone too far. In the case of merchandise, there are obvious legal ramifications–if the manufacturer of a product hasn’t taken into account every stupid thing a person might do with or to it, and has not explicitly warned against it, then the actions of a stupid person doing stupid things with or to their product might leave them open to catastrophic lawsuits.
But in the case of entertainment, I think it’s different. And I don’t buy the argument that we must label a movie or TV show with such granularity that we’ve covered every possible offense-causing base there is–racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, fatophobia, and so on. It would be like putting a disclaimer at the beginning of the DVD of Super Bowl I announcing that vegans may find the name “Green Bay Packers” offensive (roots in the city’s meatpacking industry), Native Americans may find the name “Kansas City Chiefs” offensive (Raaacists!), and that KC fans may not feel safe at the end and may need to go find a place to snuggle with a puppy, because their team ultimately loses.
There’s some merit to the idea of a movie rating system that gives us a rough (sometimes very rough) idea whether or not a movie is suitable for children. And perhaps to a system that identifies films with “mature” themes. But I can’t see a need to go further than that. As for the idea that we can decide for ourselves based on the rating, no thanks. I never consider the rating now, and I certainly won’t then. I’ll read about it, see it if I want to, and I’ll make up my own mind. Sort of like I do with everything else.
Placing excessive reliance on any sort of external worldly authority, from government to movie ratings, and expecting that following its instructions or doing what it recommends will guarantee us a trouble-free, hurt-free, offense-free life is just folly.
A lot of teams lost to the Packers in those days.
For the only time ever, when referring to either @colleenb , @charlotte , or @julespa ‘s opinion on this actor’s good looks, I can say with no irony, “I’m with her.”
:)
I especially enjoyed him in the role of John Luther.
There is a fine line between movie producers, writers and directors taking original source material and trying to tweak it to make it more race/gender inclusive, and producers, writers and directors who care more about ideology than telling a good story taking an already successful property and attempting to graft their identity politics onto it, based on the idea that the material is a cash cow, and nothing they do to it can hurt the future film’s box office receipts.
That’s the difference between turning Nick Fury from the white guy in the original Marvel Comics into Samuel L. Jackson, and the decision to make Bree Larson’s Captain Marvel into the most hyper-powered being in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to the point she might or might not have been intended to be the one who took out Thanos in “Avengers: Endgame” until blowback from fans caused her part to be severely edited down. The former doesn’t change anything vital that Marvel fans grew up with in their world; the latter would have asked the audience to accept a new character coming in and bigfooting all the other characters they had cared about for the past decade, simply for gender wokeness purposes.
But MCU v2.0 still reportedly is going to make Captain Marvel its focal point, and overpowering a character and making them virtually flawless for ideological reasons will likely work as well for Disney there as overpowering Rey and making her virtually flawless for ideological reasons worked for them in the recent ‘Star Wars’ trilogy. The same thing would apply to Elba as 007 — if MGM/UA wants it to work, they better do a script that allows the audience to identify with Bond and not turn him into ‘Super-Bond’ for SJW purposes.
They can do the opposite as the BBC is making shows that just ignore race entirely. It was very jarring watching the Frankenstein Chronicles where their is a 19th century black cop and they make no comment on his race whatsoever.
To my mind ‘fantasy’ which includes comic books, Medieval+magic, sf, in all its iterations such as, steampunk, alt history, etc. should get a pass – Heimdal was a god from a comic book rendition of Planet Asgard, after all. Jarring, yes, but able was I to see Elba in the role after quickly re-suspending belief.
And I don’t much care what they do in the theater because those people are all nuts anyway.
Where I draw the line is in things that purport to be history or historical. We do our children a disservice whenever we lie in a visual medium.
Perhaps we do need a ratings system after all;
WARNING: Film may contain Brainless Presentism or Ahistoric SuperMinorities. View at risk of becoming less educated.
Exactly right. The internet is full of reviewers – we have several here on ricochet – and the advantage is that you can find people whose tastes and distastes align with your own and read his thoughts on a specific movie.
Government reviewers just stamp labels on things.
Enough of this, ladies!
Although, even as a straight man I have to admit, he’s a good looking man.
Perhaps this thread would be more to your liking.
Which would be ironic, since that scene was one of things that led to the creation of the PG-13 rating in the first place.
And the day came when they assembled a Mary Sue beyond all others…
If it could be done by the agency that Winston Smith worked for in 1984, it can be done now.