Hey! You booted me in the head!

I heard about this controversy from Emily when word first came out about a new movie project near and dear to her heart- Avatar, the Last Airbender aka Airbender aka Avatar No Not THAT One- but now that it's on the verge of release, it's firing up again all about Teh Interwebs. This manifesto of it is probably as pointed and passioned as you can find.

Here's my problem with the OMG They Can Only Cast Asians In This Movie business, though: where does the line get drawn in Central Casting if we buy into this?

Next month, there's going to be what sounds like a really imaginative piece of theater in town: Macbeth with an all-female cast at Shakespeare in the Park. Can't have THAT, especially since the original material had men in even the womens' roles.

Not long ago, I enjoyed the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, one of the first thriller novels I actually went out and bought in my childhood. Despite them totally messing about with racial casting from the original film, I thought Denzel Washington did an awesome job in the role first done by Walter Matthau despite the latter being much older and much whiter. Was I wrong and racist-ageist to have felt this way?

And clearly we're going to have to recast someone in the lead of House, because that Brit twit Hugh Laurie has no business taking work away from an American actor just because he has a better fake US accent than I have a real one.

I hear the cries of "That's different!" Yeah it is. All of those characters are based on, and have always been portrayed as, real, living breathing (if on occasion mentally deranged medical-doctory) human beings. The actors in Avatar II: Electric Boogaloo are re-enacting performances of toons- and magical-creature toons at that. It's not like they're providing necessary role models for the struggling Asian children of this country, except the relative few who have arrows pointing down to the bridge of their noses.

I'm not saying that race shouldn't be a consideration in casting, but I really don't think that the Hollywood establishment- one of the most liberal and diverse bunch of multigagillionaires you're going to find anywhere- is engaging in a secret plan to keep every one other than Whitey down. If the casting produces the best actors on merit, and if their appearances don't objectively distract the audience¹, or subjectively offend for legitimate historical reasons², I'll go see the finished product. Especially if it makes my daughter squee.

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¹Point taken, especially looking at the graphic I linked to, if you are arguing based on the silliness of a bunch of white actors running around a plainly Asian backdrop. Yet it's equally silly for the 20-something cast of Glee to be dancing around a US high school, and I've yet to hear any teen actors complaining about THAT.

²Sorry, white actors, but blackface is not coming back anytime soon.

Well. How about that?

We didn't feel anything here, but the airwaves are all agog:

Western New York just had an earthquake.  Magnitude of 5.

Does that mean we don't get all the snow anymore?

More when the internets catch up with it.

Quite a day....

An earthquake in Upstate New York, Vermont and eastern Canada. Nobody hurt and little if anything was damaged, now six hours after the events thereof, but we're not used to this kind of thing;)

The biggest stories on the American sports pages today were about soccer and tennis. It may be another century before you hear me say THAT again. In World Cup, it was America, fuck yeah!, advancing to the Sweet Sixteen or whatever it's called. Meanwhile, at Wimbledon, there was a positively epic set between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. They split the first four sets, but the fifth requires the winner to win by two games, and neither has gotten two past the other for 118 games, and it's STILL tied 59-59 until they start again in the morning.

And even that didn't get as much coverage as the audio of former player, now ESPN commentator, Pam Shriver getting called out by one of the men on the court for criticising his play during one of his matches:

"Florence + The Machine: Hunger" (Watch on YouTube)

It's a good thing she wasn't covering the match between Angus Podgorny and giant blancmange on Court Three, or things might've gotten REALLY ugly over there.

Things just kept piling up on top of other things today; the radio broke into regular programming a little after 1:30 to cover Obama's sacking of the loose-lipped general (who is being hailed on the right as some kind of right-talking hero, whereas when the generals disagreed with Bush, they, of course, were treasonous rogues for failing to shut up and follow the Decider). Then, the national bulletin got broken into by the local coverage of the quake. National pundits were running out to UB to cover the story from the earthquake center they have there (which never quite seemed to be the highest and best use of federal funds until, oh, about now), and I'm just glad it hit today and not in the middle of Emily's road test tomorrow.

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Amidst all that, I did virtually nothing other than catch up. Got billing and bank accounts under control; had one five-minute appointment with a client who didn't even remember my name and from whom I made all of five bucks for seeing; and hauled all of the weekend's foliage out to the curb. On a sticky, shaky day, that's plenty.

As they say in tennis, love-love.