Kobe Tai Resident pRonologist Registered: Nov 2001 Location: Posts: 178 ROFL..Kobe Owns The Detroit News wtf? omfg, further proof that the world should just be destroyed before humanity as a race gets any more idiotic, here is the original article that got my attention: Photos by Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News The Detroit News panel: Robert del Valle, clockwise from upper left, Gary Anderson, Martina Guzman, Ahmad Chabbani, Imad Nouri, Robert Deane, Jose Cuello and Zana Macki. Critics say 'Clones' has racial stereotypes By Michael H. Hodges / The Detroit News Temuera Morrison is Jango Fett in "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones." "He looked totally Latino," says Martina Guzman about Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays Jango in "Attack of the Clones." Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery George Lucas, sometimes accused of reinforcing racial stereotypes with his movies, has done it again, according to critics. Latino critics in particular charge his latest Star Wars epic, Episode II: Attack of the Clones, toys with American paranoia about Mexican immigration with its cloned army of swarthy lookalikes who march in lockstep by the tens of thousands, and ultimately end up serving as Darth Vader's white-suited warriors. Modeled on bounty hunter Jango Fett, the clones, we're told, are genetically modified for docility and obedience. The breeding project, conducted by long-necked aliens who look like refugees from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, takes place on the planet Kamino -- soundalike for the Spanish word "camino," which means "road" or "I walk." Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays Jango, is a New Zealander of Maori descent. But that didn't get in the way of some members of an eight-person Detroit News panel assembled to review the film. "He looked totally Latino," says Martina Guzman, a Detroiter who's managing a State House election campaign. "And his kid," says Wayne State history professor Jose Cuello, referring to the young Boba Fett, "looked even more Latino." It reminds Cuello a little bit of "those Reagan ads in the 1980 campaign, that suggested if Nicaragua went communist, you'd have wild-eyed Mexicans with guns running across the California border." A flabbergasted Lucasfilm spokeswoman, Jeanne Cole, says "This is the first we've heard of this. Star Wars," she says, "is a fantasy movie filled with creatures and aliens from all different planets and universes and galaxies. There is no basis for this." Lucas was in Cannes and could not be reached for comment. The celebrated mythmaker has been through what some might call the p.c. mill before. In 1999, a furor erupted over The Phantom Menace's Jar Jar Binks, a floppy-eared alien whom some read as a sort of Stepin Fetchit by way of the West Indies. "Everyone I've ever spoken to says there's a Rastafarian element to his speech, his walk, and in his 'dread' ears," says copy editor Robert del Valle, who was on The News panel with Guzman and Cuello. But such allegations were dismissed as "absurd" by Lucas in a Thursday interview published in the Washington Post. "People say, 'He sounds Caribbean.' Well, he doesn't. He's a complete invention. It's a different language. Just because he speaks with that accent doesn't mean it's a racial stereotype." The interview did not address the clone issue. A somewhat muted Jar Jar makes another appearance in Clones, but it is the dark-skinned Jango-copies that seem to have caught some audience members' attention this time around. Still, not everybody's buying it. Harry Knowles, on-line film reviewer and author of Ain't It Cool: Hollywood's Red-Headed Step-Child Speaks Out (Time Warner), says the whole Jango ethnic premise is "reading racism into something that's not there -- it's just in the minds of the viewers. It's like calling Jar Jar racist when all he is is Bullwinkle." The Jango dispute surfaced in internet chat rooms devoted to Star Wars days before the movie's release, says panelist Gary Anderson, the artistic director at Detroit's Plowshares Theatre and longtime Star Wars student and critic. If the planet name "Kamino" caught some Latinos' attention, three Arab-Americans on The News' panel seized on the fact that Jango's son calls him "Baba." "I frankly think the bounty hunter is Arab," says college counselor Imad Nouri of Royal Oak. "He's basically a terrorist," explains Nouri, "and 'baba' is Arabic for 'father.' " Such allegations have a long history in that galaxy far, far away. A number of observers noted that the 1977 original was, at least at the human level, an all-white party -- looking, in Anderson's words, "like the Ku Klux Klan's fantasy of the future." The only exception was Darth Vader's basso-profundo voice, supplied by African-American actor James Earl Jones. Which leads to all sorts of ironies, intentional or not: Darth Vader has a black man's voice when he's bad, but in Clones -- before Anakin Skywalker does the Darth-thing and defects to the Dark Side -- he's a white guy, played by Hayden Christensen. The big question lurking beneath all this ethnic deconstruction: Could any of this possibly be deliberate? For their part, The News' panelists were divided. "The plot is so superficial," says Cuello, "I don't think they could possibly have any deliberate intent about manipulating images." Like almost everybody who commented on Lucas, Anderson doubts there's anything malicious going on. "If your entire world perspective is based on 1950s TV and films, what do you expect?" he asks. "Garbage in and garbage out." For her part, Guzman was astonished that, given the Jar Jar flap, Lucas didn't scrutinize everything a little more critically this time around. "He's been criticized before," she says. "So he had a choice." It's not that she's opposed to Latin-looking baddies per se. She just wishes the occasional swarthy good guy would get as much on-screen time as the villain. "Jimmy Smits had all of two lines in the whole movie," Guzman says. "And Samuel Jackson had like five. Then there's the bad guy." For pop-culture professor Robert Thompson at Syracuse University -- who has yet to see Clones -- the issue boils down to whether Lucas really wanted to tweak Anglo fears. He's inclined to say no, attributing Lucas' occasionally confusing choices to "a certain degree of cluelessness. Look at Jar Jar Binks. The moment that guy comes on the screen, you wonder what in the world they were thinking. This isn't 1957. Didn't anybody say, 'Have you paid attention to what this guy is doing?' " The sad thing, he says, is that the Star Wars saga is also "about tolerance and dignity. But then you've got this 'camino' thing, which sounds a little creepy, and swarthy people who march in uncountable masses." Thompson calls the imagery in Star Wars a "great big Rorschach test, not just for the people who watch the movies, but for Lucas himself." With the latter, that leads him to two possibilities. "One is that this is coming out of the id of the creator without translation -- a West Coast fear of the Latino population in America." (Lucas grew in the 1950s in Modesto, Calif., the agricultural town immortalized in American Graffiti, and one visited annually by thousands of migrant workers.) The second hypothesis, he notes, is that it's all deliberate -- a way to prompt deep emotional response in audiences by probing "a phobia that's afoot in America. And that's the scarier interpretation." Or, as some argue, perhaps it's all stuff and nonsense. Knowles at aintitcool.com keeps emphasizing on the fact that Temeura Morrison, the actor who plays Jango, is Maori. When asked how audiences are supposed to know that, he says, "How can you tell? You stay for the end credits. Is his name 'Raul Julia?' No." But even if Jango was meant to be taken as a Latino, others just don't see a problem. "At least we're in the picture," says Hollywood producer Michael Gonzalez with a laugh. "I mean, what did we have before -- Lt. Torres on Star Trek? It's just a movie," he says. "It's just fun. And you're going to hit a stereotype one way or another. At least we get some screen time." In any event, Guzman doubts most Hispanics will notice, if only "because they're so used to seeing images like that of themselves -- little dialogue, always being the bad guy. It's going to take the intellectual community to call Lucas on what he's doing." Latinos are now the nation's largest minority. But box-office analyst Adam Farasati -- who argues Hollywood rarely takes minority concerns into consideration -- doesn't see any collateral damage to the film's profits. "The only real issue is that Attack of the Clones is one of most anticipated movies of all time," he says from RealSource's Los Angeles office. "And beyond that, any type of media attention -- even negative -- really just creates more hype for a film that has hype coming out its ears." Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged 05-19-2002 06:04 AM Kobe Tai Resident pRonologist Registered: Nov 2001 Location: Posts: 178 Haha here is my reply that I sent to the owner of this newspaper, the gentlmen who wrote the article, and the editor I must say I was completely flabbergasted by your article "Critics Say 'Clones' has racial sterotypes". I suppose when you view anything from a morosely skewed perspective inevitably you will see what you are determined to. The sad truth in this world is that yes, unfortunately racism does exist, however all too often it is in the eyes of people determined to see it. It seems you just can't please some people, while I admit the young boy who does play Boba Fett struck me as Latin, I didn't think of the clone army as a "large group of migrant workers" or any other such nonsense. If true equality is to exist, actors/actresses will portay quite a variety of roles both "good" and "bad", the nature of the characters they portray should by no means be considered as automatically carrying insidious racial overtones. i.e. I was, thank goodness able to make it all the way through "Hannibal" without developing the belief that all middle-aged white males were psychotic cannibals. On a similar note, I truly enjoyed Cuba Gooding Jr's performace in "Men Of Honor" and have never once been plagued by the strange feeling that surely all black males must be Navy salvage divers. Your article also sadly failed to mention that Samuel L Jackson's character Mace Windu is second in command of the jedi knights, a society known for honor and peacekeeping. Fortunately the fact that he is second only to Yoda who is of a fictional race (Whill) probably prevented your "panel of experts" from seeing racism there thus explaining it's omission. Another fact not mentioned is the fact that this "offensive latino invading force" was, not the protaganist in the film as the title implies, but actually the factor that enabled the "good guys" to win in the end. Also worthy of mention is the statement that these clones "ultimately wind up serving as Darth Vader's white-suited warriors" is incorrect. The stormtoopers in the original episodes 4-6, while obviously looking quite similiar as they are the end of an evolution of troop-types are in fact human, and not clones, cloning had become too expensive and impractical for wide-scale use as troops at this point. I suppose in the future to prevent accusations Lucas could just cast his films with blonde haired, blue eyed actors/actresses, but, oh, wait, I suppose this "lack of ethnicity" truly would be racist. The impression that I got from your article was that the obvious solution to this problem is to have actors/actresses of ethnic descent play only non-morally objectionable roles, but, I suppose ultimately that could be construed as racial stereotyping as well. It seems no matter what you do you can't please everyone. On that note, I certainly hope the animal rights activist, when seeing the variety of creatures slaughtered at the end realise that they are computer animated before a furor starts there as well. In summary I would like to say that it is truly sad that someone somewhere is funding and giving your "panel" a platform to publish this drivel. The main thing I came away from this article with a better understanding of was the obvious reason why Detroit is known for making automobiles and not for publishing respectable and intelligent news. Good Day, Jon McNulty