Tag: diversity casting

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I was surprised at how much I liked Disney’s live action Star Wars series Andor, so I watched the Mouse’s next Star Wars series, Ahsoka. It was a trudge across vast, dreary plains of pulp, nostalgia, and estrogen-sodden wokeness — punctuated with peaks of genuine magic and drama.

The character of Jedi apprentice Ahsoka Tano, an orange-skinned alien, was created by George Lucas and Dave Filoni and first introduced in the 2008 animated film The Clone Wars, which focused on her relationship with Anakin Skywalker. (more…)

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A Haunting in Venice is a Halloween movie and also sees the return of the detective Hercule Poirot to the screen, as most recently played by Kenneth Branagh, who directed this film. The story is lifted from Hallowe’en Party, a 1969 Christie novel set in Britain, although here it is moved to 1949 Venice. Little of the original story remains, although bobbing for apples is retained as the staging of an attempted murder. Since this is Venice, floods rage outside, and a past drowning adds to the haunted setting. It all fits. (more…)

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As the Queen worked, gazing at times out on the snow, she pricked her finger, and there fell from it three drops of blood on the snow. And when she saw how bright and red it looked, she said to herself, “Oh, that I had a child as white as snow . . .” — The Brothers Grimm, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”

Hey white boy, what you doin’ uptown? — Lou Reed, “Waiting for the Man” (more…)

The blacks brought by the Empire Windrush in 1948: cheap labor for Britain, or the result of cheap tickets?

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(Post-)modern history

Have you ever talked yourself out of a job? The Cambridge University Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic have. The Dons have declared that Anglo-Saxons did not exist, which should free up a third of their time. (more…)

Production of Sophocles’ Antigone at the Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2018, starring Ty Jones and Alexandria King.

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After I graduated from college way back in the 1980s, I decided to return to my old high school to substitute teach for a while. Soon after beginning to sub, I asked the school’s theater director if at some point I’d be able to direct a play. (more…)

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Roald Dahl’s children’s books are to be republished with the text politically corrected.

In the new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie’s antagonist Augustus Gloop, who never stops eating, is not “enormously fat” but just “enormous.” (more…)

Riot in Knowsley on February 10 that was sparked by a video of a migrant propositioning a minor.

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Out, damn’d Scot!

So it’s fare thee well to dime-store Lady Macbeth, Nicola Sturgeon. The Scottish premier, and the woman Nigel Farage called the most unpleasant politician he had ever met, quit after an uproar, which is what journalists reading tweets and sensing a story is called just at the moment. (more…)

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HBO Max has begun airing a new series, Velma. This is a prequel spinoff of Scooby Doo, the much-beloved animated series from the 1970s, and told from the perspective of the eponymous character.

According to an old study, American kids grow up watching about a thousand hours of television a year. I confess that I was one of the young addicts who wasted an epic amount of time in front of the idiot box. After school meant cartoons, and so did Saturday mornings. But all told, Scooby Doo was one of the ones that was worth a look. Is it just me, or did it have some influence on The X-Files? (more…)

Agatha Christie

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There’s a reason why Agatha Christie is the world’s best-selling author. Her whodunnits are cleverly crafted, well-written, and highly entertaining. I also find them wholesomely Eurocentric, which is problematic these days.

Death on the Nile (1937) is one of her best novels. A shot rings out onboard a luxurious Nile steamer. It is clearly a case of foul play. But the two prime suspects have airtight alibis. Moreover, practically everybody else on the ship had means, motive, and opportunity to do the deed. Even Hercule Poirot’s famous gray cells are baffled . . . for a time. (more…)

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I confess: I did it. I saw the new installment of the space opera about blue cat people, Avatar: The Way of Water. I know; this officially makes me an incurable fanboy. The only pitiful excuse I have to offer in my defense is that we, the incurable fanboys, have been waiting for this thing since the last one came out in 2009.

Catching up briefly

After the events of the last film, most of the humans on the planet Pandora boarded their starship and bugged out for Earth. (more…)

Kyrie Irving, the latest black celebrity to have his career destroyed by powerful Jews because he dared to suggest that there is something wrong with having Jews in power.

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Kanye West’s Jewish Ex-Trainer Threatens to “Medicate the Crap” Out of Him

Powerful Jews continue to prove they’re not powerful by flexing their massive power to disempower anyone who dares suggest they are powerful.

Kanye West tossed a couple more salvos last week in his ongoing quixotic one-man battle against International Jewry. (more…)

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Did you know that America’s involvement in the First World War was fought and won primarily by black soldiers? I didn’t, but now I do thanks to David O. Russell’s Amsterdam. Please, whatever you do, don’t make the same mistake I did and pay money to view this film; it is pure regime propaganda wrapped in a bowtie of high production values, beautiful stars, and an A-list director. (more…)

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It seems ironic that Tom George’s 2022 film See How They Run was released in England a day before Queen Elizabeth’s death. The film, a whodunit that follows the genre’s steps like following footprints in the snow, wants to be funny and breathe life into the old form. But, like recent events with the monarchy, this film is a kind of death watch on England and English culture, especially that middlebrow artifact known as the murder mystery. (more…)