Yesterday’s list dealt with Tom Cruise’s performance in Tropic Thunder. Today, a response to Robert Downey Jr.’s role in the same film as a white actor portraying a black soldier in a war movie (seen in the above clip). Doesn’t it seem such an original and shocking idea? I guess not if you see it as an update on blackface. Fortunately, it’s different when it’s an actor playing a character who makes himself up to look black. It’s funny. But isn’t it typically more acceptable when the make-up isn’t quite as authentic-looking as Downey’s? He actually looks black. Specifically, he looks like Fred Williamson.
I’ve seen plenty of lists detailing the worst instances of one race or nationality playing characters of another race/nationality (John Wayne and Susan Hayward in The Conquerorcomes to mind as #1), but I can’t recall any lists involving actors playing characters disguised as or playing another race. So here’s one:
Another season of MTV’s faux-reality melodrama and grade-A guilty pleasure The Hills debuted last night, and it was greeted by yet another New York Times review comparing its “plotlessness and dreamy cinematography” to the cinematic style of Michaelangelo Antonioni. As you know, I’m a big fan of cinema-conscious analyses of the Hills. But when the NYT’s Ginia Bellafonte calls The Hills — a by-all-accounts highly manipulated soap opera about “real” people, produced for the consumption of young, female mass audience — “Antonioni-esque,” what does she actually mean? I carefully watched the season premiere this morning on MTV.com and came up with five areas where this tale of California blondes of the aughts converge with Antonioni’s mid-to-late century masterpieces of modern isolation.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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