Disney is putting out a new film called Flaming Hot, which is about the story of the creation of the Cheetos flavor.  Why stop at product placement when you can just make a film about the product?

Worse than that, they're billing the film as being "uplifting to the Hispanic community".  Satire isn't quite dead, but it does have a pillow over its mouth.
 

Finally got a trailer 7 months after TIFF



 

Amazon Studios bought MGM last year, and now they've announced a bevy of proposed reboots.  This is likely just the beginning.  Needles to say, it looks like a bleak future of regurgitated half-assed entertainment.

Robocop, Legally Blonde, Fame, Stargate, Barbershop, Magnificent Seven, Pink Panther, Thomas Crown Affair, Poltergeist

Note that three of these - Robocop, Magnificent 7, Poltergeist - have already been rebooted less than a decade ago, and they were all uniformly awful.  Maybe they're betting that audiences have already forgotten about them, like how most of them have forgotten a world where creative people write new ideas and stories.  Some of these projects will be made into TV shows, and no doubt will be written by Chat GPT 4.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

Amazon Studios bought MGM last year, and now they've announced a bevy of proposed reboots.  This is likely just the beginning.  Needles to say, it looks like a bleak future of regurgitated half-assed entertainment.

Robocop, Legally Blonde, Fame, Stargate, Barbershop, Magnificent Seven, Pink Panther, Thomas Crown Affair, Poltergeist

Note that three of these - Robocop, Magnificent 7, Poltergeist - have already been rebooted less than a decade ago, and they were all uniformly awful.  Maybe they're betting that audiences have already forgotten about them, like how most of them have forgotten a world where creative people write new ideas and stories.  Some of these projects will be made into TV shows, and no doubt will be written by Chat GPT 4.
 

You know it's getting pitiful when they can't even be bothered to come up with new remakes.

What do these people get paid for exactly? Considering I know some supposedly creative people in television who do absolutely fuck all for their pay checks, I imagine it's not much different.

Ugh there are so many other black artists we can tag with this 'overlooked' distinction and LR is clearly one of the ones where it is totally absurd to even suggest it.

So I already don't want to see this. How can I have faith in anyone who says such deliberately stupid shit like that?

Which is a shame because one thing I think is true about his legacy is how few people, my age and younger, who actually listen to original rock and roll any longer. And there is no better person to illustrate how incredible that music can be than Little Richard. He's as good as he gets, even though everyone I know goes 'yuck' when I say I'm a fan.

But, even with them saying yuck, they know who the fuck he is..they know he's a legend. They know he's really really important if you care about these things.

Last edited by crumbsroom (4/19/2023 7:28 pm)

I can't speak to the kids these days, but even being not especially interested in music until my late teens, I had some awareness of Little Richard. I'm calling BS on this doc.

I don't want to turn this into some kind of SJW thread, and I don't want to be one of those people who's constantly complaining about such things.  In fact, rather than any complaints on my part, I'll say that I'm more amused, intrigued and chagrined about this latest controversy regarding the casting of Cleopatra, and more than anything else, a bit concerned about the general illiteracy of most of those, from all sides, weighing in on it.  So naturally, I feel like a more literate understanding of the ethnicity and history should come into play.

The only really sensible quote that I've found during this week's rehashing of the old squabble is from a Classics professor from Denison University, Rebecca Futo Kennedy: "To ask whether someone was ‘Black’ or ‘white’ is anachronistic and says more about modern political investments than attempting to understand antiquity on its own terms.  We continue to have the same conversations decade after decade instead of actually learning more about how the ancient world considered its own identities."  Simply put, a person in 1st century BC Egypt would have no idea what a black person or a white person was.  Similarly, up until the mid-20th Century, no one in America would have recognized a Macedonian Greek as being a white person either.  We can safely say that Cleopatra was a "person of color", if you wish.

Cleopatra VII was born from the Ptolemaic Dynasty, an era of Egyptian rule that was established by Alexander the Great and his cohorts.  Her mother is unconfirmed, but widely assumed to be Cleopatra VI, who is also of Ptolemaic lineage.  (There's evident in-breeding involved - Cleopatra VI's grandfather was her grandmother's uncle, for example.)  One article claims "the mother of Cleopatra has been suggested to have been from the family of the priests of Memphis".  Alright, we can suggest whatever, but I can't find a backup for that.  But let's say this is the case, then "if the maternal side of her family were indigenous women, they were African".  Fair enough.  Africa's a big place though.  And especially the Delta region of Egypt had seen centuries of ethnic traffic.  The Pharoahs of Memphis (Lower Egypt) are depicted as lighter-skinned than the southern sub-Saharan (Upper Egypt) Pharoahs centered around Thebes and Nubia.  These distinct regions warred, consolidated, dissolved in cycles over the course of 2000 years.  The semitic Hyksos ruled Egypt during the 15th Dynasty.  Pharoah Ahmose, roughly around the mid-2nd Millennium BC, defeated the Hyksos and had brought tens of thousands of captives from across the Levant and West Asia (the Euphrates) and Turkey back to Egypt as slaves, and these communities inevitably intermarried and settled there.  The Phoenicians (from modern day Lebanon) established dozens of port cities across the North African shore soon after.  The Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks throughout the 1st Millenium BC.  And at the time of Cleopatra, although the Ptolemies still ruled Egypt, Palestinian Jews had migrated to Alexandria and the Romans controlled the entire Mediterranean, rotating their conscripted soldiers across the entire region, from Spain and Morrocco to Afghanistan, all of whom would have passed through the Delta Egyptian cities and presumably making some babies along the way.  Clearly, "African" has very little meaning in this context.

To reiterate, I don't really care whether or not a black woman is cast to play Cleopatra.  As far as I'm concerned, as long as it isn't Angelina Jolie, I'm happy.  (I've never gotten over her lying about being part Iroquois, this fashionably diabolocal bitch.)  But I also think it's pretty stupid to say that Israeli Gal Gadot can't play Cleopatra because she's too white.  (It's because she can't act, people.)  And in my opinion, Theda Bara is ethnically ambiguous and darkly exotic enough to pass what would be a fairly believeable Mediterranean visage of that time.  But my favorite is likely Leonor Varela, a Chilean/Spanish actress, who I think also has a realistic bronzed sand-and-honey hue that checks all of the necessary boxes, including a certain serpentine charm to boot.  It's only a shame that she starred in what's probably the absolute worst version of Cleopatra on screen (a TV movie from the 90s) even if it wasn't her fault in the slightest.

What struck me the most is seeing the actress playing Cleopatra in this new Netflix series - Adele James - and noticing how uncanny her resemblance is to many of the real African Egyptian queens, those like Nefertiti, Khensa, Nubkhesbed, Nefertari, Tiye and so many others of the Theban/Nubian/Kush dynasties of the New and Late Kingdoms.  Why has this Netflix show, African Queens, dedicated an entire season to Cleopatra rather than any of these other relatively unknown queens and their stories anyway?

Rock wrote:

I think Executive Producer Jada Pinkett Smith is probably the biggest red flag about this whole thing.

Or just the empty-headed valorific of famous historical persons, "telling the stories of powerful black women", who actually weren't very good people.  Cleopatra poisoned her 15 year old brother/husband (she was 25) because she didn't want to have to share the crown with him.  We're not talking about Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth here.

I mentioned something similar last year about The Woman King.  If you want go woke, maybe start by not emulating royalty and avarice.

Hey, it finally dropped.





And I guess if anyone is curious....





 

My first trip back to the theatre during the pandemic was for Suicide Squad. The theatre was empty except for me and my friends. Honestly, I was just happy to be back in that environment, I pretty much tuned out the actual movie. Probably for the best.