Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to JacksonP,
Yup, Marlee Matlin definitely deserves a mention.
Not least for getting through a season of Celebrity Apprentice with her considerable dignity intact. Great representation for the non-arsehole adult community.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Emma Hart,
Heh, I was going to be all, “Yeah, we weren’t nit-picking on Joey Lucas, we were just fucking astounded to see her,” but I can’t think of a single thing wrong with that character.
At least she didn’t suffer from Aaron Sorkin’s creative ADHD which saw an awful lot of characters given elaborate introduction only to be promptly disappeared to the Ainsley Hayes Memorial Steam Trunk Distribution Venue without anyone noticing… Damn, those famous West Wing ‘walk and talks’ have a higher attrition rate than the Hunger Games.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
Speaking of accessibility, the Mojo Mathers saga is a classic case of government/public agencies not taking disability seriously.
Oy. Lockwood Smith is right he can’t just pull at least $30K a year out of his arse, but that begs a more basic question. It was looking highly likely pretty early in the campaign a profoundly deaf MP would be part of the next Parliament. Where the hell was the forward planning?
And while I esteem Smith more than a lot around here, I suspect, when he decides to be obtuse and intransigent he doesn’t stuff around. Insisting Mathers and The Greens pay for these “note-takers” out of their budget (as I understand it) basically wipes out her ability to have a PA and run an office.
IIRC, when Parliament was refurbished in the 90s induction loops for hearing aids were installed in the Chamber and Gallery.- and were not funded though an effective user-pay levy on parties with hearing-impaired MPs. Nor should they have been – accessibility for hearing-impaired MPs and citizens is a feature not a bug.
It’s this simple:
Ms. Mathers is a legitimate and duly elected Member of the House of Representatives.
Following the business of the House is a fundamental part of her job, It’s not bloody expensive organic free trade coffee for the kitchenette.
Parliament could rouse itself to pass a retrospective amendment to the Electoral Act under extreme urgency to avoid a by-election. Smith getting David Shearer and Jerry Brownlee (the other two members of the Parliamentary Services Commission) in his office to resolve this should be a doddle.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Jeanette King,
the Bechdel test is a pretty good indication of whether in any book/film/TV programme/etc women are treated as people with independent lives worthy of interest. Just three simple tests – a surprisingly large number of movies fail to pass even the first or second step.
1. The movie has to have at least two named women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a manTry running a modified version of The Bechdel Test over The Help or other films where minority experience exists to make a straight white middle-class person feel all empowered and virtuous in their still unchallenged privilege.
The movie has to have:
1. At least two named women of colour who aren’t domestics, on welfare or sexually/physically abused…
2. Who talk to each other…
3. About anything totally unrelated to men or white people. (Extra credit if said movie involves nobody demeaning women as bitches or whores.) -
Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to BenWilson,
I have to say he made the very worst director’s commentary I’ve ever heard for A New Hope , when it was finally released for DVD. I had to stop watching it, he was boring me so badly.
There’s an art to good commentary track, and most directors aren’t terribly good at it. Some just don’t bother – David Lynch says he won’t do them because it “demistifies” his films and I think he has a point. What matters more: Eating a tasty sausage or know how it was made in exhaustive, and exhausting, detail?
That said, my DVD of the “final cut” of Blade Runner includes the feature length “making of” documentary Dangerous Days. Watched it several times, and it’s a model of its kind. Never bothered with the commentary tracks on the film itself, because I’d rather get lost in the film without Ridley Scott, (or the producers or the writers or a good chunk of the FX crew) yapping away in my ear.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Chances are you'll only need English.
I understand so - but really, how hard is it to be a gracious guest and learn how to say "excuse me", "please" and "thank you" in the local lingo? You can't choose whether or not to be born into any number of positions of cultural privilege, but whether you stay there or not most certainly is. Not so far off-topic as you might think.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Russell Brown,
I always thought it was Cantonese, which I gather is much better for swearing and cussing.
Anzac Day in Hong Kong is going to be interesting - do I need to learn two ways to say "your donkey has eaten my passport, please direct me to the nearest lavatory"? :)
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Oh, that's why I was pretty careful not to deal the racist card on Whedon. If he was, I suspect his sister-in-law (and frequent collaborator) would introduce him to Mister Pointy in short order. :)
It does raise questions about how hard is it for asian actors to get agents or auditions even when the story doesn’t immediately exclude them.
That's a vexed question, and one I don't have a simple answer for. While the white chick might have gotten the part, both Grace Park and Kandyse MacClure read for Starbuck more than once - and obviously made enough of an impression to get called back for other roles.
From the beginning, Ron More and David Eick had always pictured Edward James Olmos as the lead in their version of Battlestar Galactica - not because they wanted to make a statement but because they were huge fans of Blade Runner. Ironically enough, EJO has said in interviews he only bothered reading the script when his son said, "Dad, you really need to get past the title and read this". Much the same for Mary McDonnell - who was also on Eick and Moore's dream team: she isn't a big SF fan, Donnie Darko (arguably) is the most genre project she'd done, and the title just didn't grab her. Her agent convinced her to read Laura Roslin's part with an open mind.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Bart Janssen,
me confused. Gina is in firefly (cuban), Morena is brazilian
I won’t presume to speak for Lucy, but I think her point (and a fair one) was that if the world-building of the Firefly/Serenity ‘verse was that The Alliance was some kind of Sino-American hybrid, would have been so difficult to cast a few more quote unquote “Asian”* actors? For example, in Shindig, one of the few episodes focused on Inara’s relationships with the Alliance “aristocracy” why not cast, say, George Takei rather than Larry Drake as Sir Warwick Harrow? If nothing else, it would have been as awesome Trekkie-bait casting as Walter Koening’s recurring role on Babylon 5 or Leonard Nimoy on Fringe.
I’m not dealing the racist card on Whedon, but as Lucy says it seems rather poor follow-through on his own world(s)-building.
Broader point: I’m certainly not say ’diversity’ is as simple as counting vaginas, bringing a GLBT person in to teach everyone an important lesson in a ‘very special episode’ or saying “we need a token off-white person here.” But it didn’t just happen that we now see a wider range of roles for African-American women on television than “sassy domestic” or “third crack whore on welfare from the left”.
* Deliberately threw quotes there because, of course, “Asians” are no more homogeneous and interchangeable than “Europeans”. Just watching my white(-ish) privilege. :)
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Russell Brown,
That’s a fair point, but no, Homeland doesn’t go there. I could rephrase by saying that the mental illness is as much a part of her as the skills that make her good at her job – no judgement or novelty, just.. it is what it is.
I think that’s a better way of describing it, yes.
Yup – and I love the scene where Carrie is a delicious gumbo of shocked, terrified and heinously pissed off when her colleague confronts her with the meds she hides in a aspirin bottle in her bathroom. Yeah, you’re fucked off at the violation of your privacy, when the only reason the man was in your apartment in the first place was to help you wipe your arse on the Bill of Rights and “nine federal laws” to spy on Brody.
Wet liberal wimp that I am, I find “Crazy” bipolar Carrie a damn sight less disturbing than “Privacy? Whatevs, I gotta HUNCH” Carrie. The most disturbing thing in the whole pilot is the look on Daines’ face, utterly transfixed by the Brodies fucking – with sex noises on the soundtrack. That’s not about her mental illness, but the kind of moral void a lawless scopophiliac security state exists in. You’d never see that on 24.
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