I remember people getting all up in arms that Tom Cruise was playing "The Last Samurai" but if you watch the movie you see it's actually Ken Watanabe. (And according to imdb he got top billing)

Homosexual as token symbol of other?

I'm not sure how this would work. Is there an example?

And I can't say I'm not bugged that whites are so constantly portrayed as the good guys. Race is problematic because racism is a problem. But if people of so many different ethnicities hadn't been used to portray Native Americans over the years, I wouldn't have missed a major plot point of Dances with Wolves.

according to imdb he got top billing

Top billing? Where?

I remember people getting all up in arms that Tom Cruise was playing "The Last Samurai" but if you watch the movie you see it's actually Ken Watanabe.

Huh, I had no idea. But you can see how one would be confused.

Top billing? Where?

Only in the credits, apparently.

Huh, I had no idea. But you can see how one would be confused.

Yeah.

eta-

I'm not sure if that's racism or put-the-biggest-star-on-the-poster-ism. Marketing campaigns are more about getting butts in the seats than honestly telling you what the film is about.

David, one difference that I see is that LotR and A:TLA exist within the wider context of cinematic history, a history that has been dominated by white people. So if Asian actors can't even get cast in leading roles in a movie based on anime that draws very very obviously from different Asian cultures, how do they get cast? Also, those are whole cultures, not necessarily ugly stereotypes.

I think that's a huge and valid difference. So that posits the issue against a dominant culture. It's about a kind of equity of representation.

But there are other issues when it becomes more granular as Liese notes in her critique of H50 casting. At what point in history do I stop caring that an Italian-American was cast as a Greek-American? There's some fulcrum point where it becomes onerous to limit the actors or the creators as well.

There's also a related issue, the burden of expectation about creating a positive image for a particular group or ethnicity, often enforced within that group. Spike Lee continually coming under fire for any negative portrayals of black culture.

The parallel that's interesting to me (and I guess this would include the Cameron Avatar movie too) is the way fantasy/Science fiction has a distinct responsibility in portraying race because it's metaphorically dealing with the idea of otherness so often.

While Westerns as a genre also are interested in that question, in those instances there's an historical record to consider. Whereas in the fantasy/SF realm, there can be unwieldy and unintended associations very quickly (cf., Jar Jar).

I don't personally think J.K. Rowling is antisemitic, but I do think when she went to the imaginative well spring she tapped directly into an unconsidered pile of associations to create Goblins that wouldn't have looked out of place in Jud Suss.

Only in the credits, apparently.

In the movie itself, or just on the site? Because IMDB doesn't count for anything. It's user maintained. Posters count. They're studio generated.

Incidentally, ita, I'm sorry if how I broached elements of this discussion pinged you, particularly my broad characterization of Maori culture. (Which, admittedly, I only know from things like Once Were Warriors and Keri Hulme's The Bone People.)

I think it's valid to use race as shorthand artistically.

Shorthand for what? Because I can't think of what race could stand in for, could mean to convey, without it devolving very quickly into the broadest of sterotypes.

I'm pretty sure imdb lists the cast in credits order, so when the credits roll at the end of Last Samurai, Ken Watanabe should be first.

We use accents as shorthand while playing D&D, dwarves are scottish, halflings are high-pitched, goblins hiss. I'm trying to think of a movie that uses racial shorthand that's not a racist movie.