From my review in Taki's Magazine of the fine time-travel movie Looper, with Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a hit man from the future at different ages:
One irony about dystopian sci-fi and comic-book movies is that although leading men may be slightly East Asian-looking in the future, America's slums will apparently be mostly white, with everybody else black. Much like in The Matrix, Hispanics don’t exist in Looper’s vision of America in 2044.
While climate change is a favorite subject of sci-fi movies, demographic change is not. With the exception of Blade Runner (set in an Asian-dominated Southern California) and, to a lesser extent, Idiocracy (where America in 2505 is about as Mexican as Texas in 2005), sci-fi movies have shown little interest in projecting out current trends in ethnicity.
Read the whole thing there.
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52 comments:
"I felt jealous of a friend’s little sister because she would grow up two years further into the future."
Envious, not jealous.
Yes, there's stuff they want us thinking about (the oceans will rise!) and stuff they definitely *don't* want us thinking about. Blade Runner is old enough (1981) that it predates large scale population displacement, and slightly predates the point when it became Politically Incorrect to have any demographic change in movies. Most future-California movies are more like Demolition Man, with California much whiter than today.
Around the end of the Cold War there was a bit of UK sf predicting a flood of white east-European migrants into the West; this did actually happen. They did not predict the efforts that eastern Europe would go to to encourage their gypsy populations to migrate, though!
I haven't seen the movie but your review reminded me of Mohs sliding scale of science fiction hardness. Ask a question: "Gee willikers professor, how does your time machine work?"
Very soft sci-fi: "With science."
Soft sci-fi: "You sit down in that chair, punch in the time and place you want, push the button, and off you go."
Hard sci-fi: "An excellent question. Please allow me to spend the next five pages explaining the latest theories in quantum mechanics."
Very hard sci-fi: "It doesn't. Time travel into the past is impossible."
The Chinese(or whatever) actress who plays Willis' love interest in this film is one of THE most beautiful woman I have ever seen i ly life. When one of the bad guys shoots her, for a second I found myself yelling at myself:
"NOOOOOOOOO...YOU MORONS HAVE JUST PUT TO WASTE SOME OF THE GREATEST GENES EVER!!!...
...Until I remembered that it is just a movie. I remembered the entire audience became hypotized when she appeared onscreen.
And Gordon-Levitt may not look much like a leading man, but he certainly putd one of the manliest performances ever since that guy from the Brazilian film "Elite Squad". LOL, Levitt is a total sadist and brute in this film.
As for the film itself, it is silly. The movie's theme would involve creating multiple paradoxes in physics that would result in things much worse than seeing your aged Self 30 years on. Garbage.
Well several scifi movies touched the theme of the race.
Usually, they bring the coexistence of humans and aliens, that is a good allegory for human races.
Independence Day, the aliens were smarter than us, but without home planet, and they wanted ours, and its resources, and exterminate us. Guess what race the allegory refers.
About demographic change, did you not like Planet of the Apes?
I liked that Johnson said the sci-fi wasn't meant to be overthought. After watching it, I know why he said it: there are too many plot holes. The nerds have gone crazy over his flipping between multiverse and single loop time travel......
The one that gets me the most, since it seems key, is why are the Loopers killed 30 years into the future when time travel is invented? They have no information on who they killed or who ordered the kill, they only know if they closed their loop. Assuming the rationale even makes sense, the Blunt character knows what a Looper is, which means the information is out.
When I watched though, and the kid explains how he couldn't go back to save his mom, and he's building electronic devices at age 5, I figure he invents time travel. But then why have the Loopers in the first place?
About demographic change, did you not like Planet of the Apes?
Rise of The Planet of the Apes was released right in the day of London Riots...
Reading the review, I'm somewhat surprised that you didn't end up with a Japanese wife and futuristic looking kids.
Or Korean, I suppose, if we are talking Chicago.
"Rise of The Planet of the Apes" keeps growing in my estimation.
@ traveller
independence day was about how all humans are really the same race and if whites just stop being raaacist we can all achieve our dreams together
I notice there are more images of suffering in movies now. You guys (the White, weak, cowardly generation) seem somehow feel vindicated by images of overwhelming suffering - I guess it makes you feel better for not defending the future for your children?
Movies like "No Country for Old Men" and "Saving Private Ryan" seem to make a certain type of middle aged White male feel like his surrender was OK (after all, life is just so painful, no one can really be heroic).
If Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks part-Asian then so do many, many Russian Jews.
"The Chinese(or whatever) actress who plays Willis' love interest in this film is one of THE most beautiful woman I have ever seen i ly life. When one of the bad guys shoots her, for a second I found myself yelling at myself:"
What really? Average at best in Beijing.
The short-lived sci-fi TV series "Firefly" made a generous effort to extrapolate current ethnic trends 500 years into the future, when Earth has decayed and humans have settled into a new solar system. The result? Everyone speaks both English and Chinese. All the main characters are white and speak English, but the dialogue is spattered with unsubtitled Chinese phrases, usually swear words, which is a clever way of bypassing the FCC's censorship on cussing.
Gordon-Levitt
A Jewish Gosling
"Rise of The Planet of the Apes" keeps growing in my estimation.
------
terrible movie. conquest is so much better.
It is probably a combination of deliberate action on the part of media executives, and ignorance, that future demographic projections are not taken into account in futuristic movies.
On a slightly on unrelated note, Eric Hobsbawm passed a way recently. He was a British Liberal Marxist who was revered by academics, the Guardian and Tony Blair's New Labour party.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2211961/Eric-Hobsbawm-He-hated-Britain-excused-Stalins-genocide-But-traitor-too.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
a whap or whink?
most directors today are fanboy dorks churned out by film schools or video-clerkship.
look at the looper director. look at the guy who made NEVER LET ME GO. dorks, not men.
what happened to real men like hawks, walsh, griffith, welles, peckinpah, etc?
70s had movie brat directors. now we have movie dork directors. boyteurs.
people pissed at wall street so romney is more for ws.
people tired of wars so romney is more pro war.
If Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks part-Asian then so do many, many Russian Jews.
That Khazar blood! hein IHTG?!
I don't know. Time travel has become one of those Hollywood plot devises that give screenwriters an excuse to avoid developing plots concerning stuff that could really happen.
Like having two completely unrelated people who look and sound exactly alike. Comedy and tragedy ensues! Or the character who gets clunked in the head and loses his or her memory, but suffers no other physical or mental trauma. Or "the reading of the will." You know why you've never been to readings of wills? Because, like our first two examples, they don't exist in nature.
Whenever I'm exposed to phony phony plot devices lie those, it's "check, please." Especially time travel, since the others are at least possible in theory.
""The Chinese(or whatever) actress who plays Willis' love interest in this film is one of THE most beautiful woman I have ever seen i ly life. When one of the bad guys shoots her, for a second I found myself yelling at myself:"
Please Sir ... get a grip on yourself.... or else somebody do an interventon.
I undertand you have a terrible case of Yellow Fever, God knows I have a terrible case of it myself,... but still... really ....you are embarassing yourself and the others who are in the grip of it.
I am not sure what the cure is ... I suppose marrying one ....marriage seems to cure a lot of idle fantasizing about others it seems.
"The Chinese(or whatever) actress who plays Willis' love interest in this film is one of THE most beautiful woman I have ever seen i ly life."
child, you is blind.
If the GOP is to have any chance, we need a leader who comes forward and admits all the mistake GOP made. In a way, Clinton did this. He made a break with the Old Democrats and ran as a new one.
What are the big mistakes of GOP?
Going with dummies easy to use as puppets. As if the lesson of having dummy Quayle for VP wasn't enough, GOP went with dummy Bush II for president!
Slavishiness to Wall Street and superrich. It's time to realize that Wall Street is for liberal globalism and superrich are Democrats.
Pandering to Evangelical dummies. No more creationism and ID and that junk please. (I don't think a man as intelligent as Ben Stein and other neocons really believe in ID. I think they are afraid of American conservatives waking up to the truth of evolution and HBD, and so they push that stuff.)
Pandering to Israeli lobby. I mean what good has it done for us? Jews laugh at us while we kiss their hynie.
We need a TIME FOR TRUTH moment.
Who began the trend of the nerd-stud hero or ectomorph-hero? Or bean-curd hero. (Not much red meat in this kid). Or cookies and milk hero? (When you look at Levitt, you wanna serve him milk and cookies).
James Dean? But he wasn't in action movies.
Johnny Depp with PIRATES?
Damon with BOURNE?
In a way, it's preferable to the musclehead moron heroes of 80s. I never much cared for Stallone or Schwarz(except in the first Terminator).
But it's still too dorky.
What happened to guys like Lee Marvin, Wayne, Heston, etc. Harrison was good when he wasn't too much of a boyscoutish character.
Freakin A, I figured something out. Gordon Levitt isn't some Jewish kid. Someone went back in time with a time machine and brought back the child Ron Paul and turned him into a movie star so that maybe libertarian message will spread via Hollywood.
Or he's really the son of Mickey Dolenz.
Or Andy Gibb.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fDOkzOulrc
Was crazy about this song as a kid.
One thing I don't understand about Looper: why did they even bother with the loopers. If they could kill in the future (and obviously they could considering Willis' Chinese wife was shot) but couldn't get rid of the bodies for some reason, why not send back the bodies already dead? Why not just program the time machine to drop the dead bodies in an incinerator? Why even hire some guy to shoot them in a field.
I can take plot holes but that one is just too glaring to overlook.
Making remarks about celebrities' looks turns all of us into Beavis-and-Buttheads.
Boy George!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZYljRGGnnc&feature=fvwrel
Beavis and Butthead, the first pencil-neck stick boy action studs?
A Mexico conquers the world future interests no one. It doesn't even offer the prospect of forming the basis for a cool dark grim future SF flick (like Blade Runner). Perhaps the insipid reception of Idiocracy stemmed from the trashy awfulness of the setting it projected: it looked like a rubbish heap. So did the post-apocalypse setting of the Terminator movies but one got to watch the heroes fight cool robots. Quite a few late Westerns featured a Mexico setting - dusty towns, dusky women in long dresses, sombrero and bandolier wearing bandits, grinning fat corrupt Federal generals. Perhaps the Mexico Everywhere for as far as you can see looks too archaic, not a vision of the future but of the past.
You know what the gay gossipers at Datalounge say about JGL?
He's straight. And when they say he's straight, he must be. He'll go far. The genuine article - a young truly straight leading man!
I've always wondered why Keanu doesn't make more of his non-white ancestry. Maybe it's because he hated his pothead Hawaiian dad.
He has a movie upcoming, if it is ever released, in which he plays a half-Japanese character, the first time he's ever played a part that refers to his ancestry.
Keanu's father, "Baby Sammy":
http://archives.starbulletin.com/2001/04/22/features/index.html
"Rise of The Planet of the Apes" keeps growing in my estimation.
I can see why. It's basically an allegory about Sandra Bullock, and we all know how interested you are in Sandra Bullock.
If Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks part-Asian then so do many, many Russian Jews.
Maybe that's because lots of people from that neck of the woods are part-Asian, thanks to good ol' Genghis.
most directors today are fanboy dorks churned out by film schools or video-clerkship.
A very succinct analysis of the problem. It's only going to get worse, too.
I always taunt nerds with this one. "Yep, one-world globalism will achieve perfect human harmony and unity in the future, and that reign will last centuries...and the demographics of Star Fleet wil always be 1960s America. Er, no. It'll be beige generic diversity-less man. Star Trek is complete fantasy on the demographic level, and not accidentally - the writers are hiding the inevitable consequences of their vision from you - they know what would happen, and they don't want you thinking about that bit."
I went to see “Looper” because I am still trying to spend credits on the movie gift card my 93-year-old mother gave me last Christmas, because she thinks I am culturally deprived because I go to few movies. Oh, and the local movie critic, a lefty-feminist ditz named Hornaday, said it was better than the average time-travel movie.
Okay, it was. But as I sat there watching it, I did not think about science fiction, plot holes (or divots) or the various permutations of the time travel-multiverse landscape. All I could think was, “oh, another high-SAT, body-perforation movie.” Meaning, yes, the plot was intricate, although given the years over which it was probably developed, that may not mean signal much cleverness, and yes, it had all the technical skills that Hollywood budgets can buy. But in the end, neither audience nor director could be satisfied unless it also had lots of realistic simulations of sharp objects perforating the human body.
Now this kind of high-tech gore would be unwatchable, if anyone took it seriously. We can watch it only because we have learned to distance ourselves from this simulated mayhem knowing it to be "only a movie." But what kind of realistic narrative art deliberately seeks to distance its audience and emphasizes the fantasy of what its characters endure?
My toddler son is 3/4 White and 1/4 Korean. I guess he's definitely a child of the future. Thing is, many people think he looks Hispanic. He's the spitting image of me, except for sllightly darker skin and eyes that are a little less Asian-looking than mine (obviously tempered by his 100% white mother). With those characteristics I can see how he could pass for a Mestizo. Maybe that will help him when he applies for college (and I certainly ain't putting Asian down as his race).
Whites who look sort of Asian..
Richard Gere
Pat Buchanan
Putin
James Carville
Beavis
The bully kid in A CHRISTMAS STORY looks Asian.
Hard Sci-fi is does not appeal to the mostly feminized writers-directors-producers of Hollywood. Look at how it took Stallone to do Expendables. A female dominated culture wants feelings and identity, and emotional stimulation, not "oh my god that's so cool" sort of cerebral stimulation.
And frankly, most in Hollywood are in denial about demographic change and its implications: nothing but 1950's level Sabado Gigante type entertainment. That's the group-think inherent.
Pat Buchanan looks Asian the way Christopher Lee did in those old '60s Fu Manchu pictures.
The Chinese actress who plays Willis' love interest truly looks like a woman of the future. She makes all Hollywood actresses look like beta females in comparison.
Incredibly, incredibly beautiful.
"My toddler son is 3/4 White and 1/4 Korean. I guess he's definitely a child of the future. Thing is, many people think he looks Hispanic. He's the spitting image of me, except for sllightly darker skin and eyes that are a little less Asian-looking than mine (obviously tempered by his 100% white mother). With those characteristics I can see how he could pass for a Mestizo. Maybe that will help him when he applies for college (and I certainly ain't putting Asian down as his race)."
I have a friend who is full-blooded Japanese and regularly gets mistaken for Mexican in Texas.
Also, the general consensus from my Chinese friends and associates is that by Chinese standards, the wife is slightly above-average.
The Chinese actress who plays Willis' love interest truly looks like a woman of the future. She makes all Hollywood actresses look like beta females in comparison.
You must have that "yellow fever" I keep hearing about. I looked her up - her name's Qing Xu and she's nothing special. Here's a pic.
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3353062912/nm0944647
It would appear that Qing Xu's publicity agent is working overtime here. Okay, okay, we'll go see your client's new movie. Jeesh.
Debbie Harry looks sort of Asian to me.
Debbie Harry looks sort of stoned to me. Not oriental.
Debbie Harry definitely has the slanted-eye white person thing going on. As does Taylor Swift. Wouldn't say they are Asian-looking though. See, it's not so much the slantedness of the eye that defines the East Asian look, but rather the almond shape of the eye.
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