Review of Limitless.

I didn't know Heather Hav went to The Atlantic.

[link]

Basically, my biggest problem with that statement is the joke. If he'd just defended casting white, and left it at that, I'd probably have shrugged.

But making a condescending joke about hair color, which is disingenuous (does he really think we don't know you can dye an actor's hair? that anyone was arguing that?) to defer attention from the question about race is pissy to me. It's dismissive and, I feel, ultimately disrespectful.

But. I am a) not actually a reader of the book in question and b) probably disproportionately likely to get my dander up at the moment. So I probably should shut it.

I haven't read the book, so I'm not sure how white-washy this is. But it sounds like Katniss is darkly complected but not necessarily biracial? "Olive skinned" to me is code for Mediterranean (Greek, Southern Italian).

There is something there though for so many people to think the character is biracial. In my mind's eye she was a young Sophia Loren, but I readily admit to missing something, because I didn't know two other characters were Black.

examples of great title design (short video)

[link]

I never inferred bi-racial. of course, i also don't understand people attributing Peeta with being pudgy. the whole time i was reading i had him in mind and while he's not skinny or athletic, he's definitely not pudgy. since they've cast a bit older for Katniss, i'm kind of hoping he's in the running for Peeta, but it will probably end up being Hunter Parrish, who i haven't seen in anything.

short video

it could have been longer! RJD2 has so much love to give!

Nice to see The Fall in there, and, thanks to Santa Claus, I can now pop it into my DVD player.

i also don't understand people attributing Peeta with being pudgy.

I think it's because he works at a bakery. They made a point, though, of saying that his family rarely got to eat what they baked. I read him as being not as chronically malnourished as most of the seam kids, and well-fed enough to develop a decent amount of strength, but not much more than that.

I also never saw Katniss as biracial, necessarily, or Peeta as pudgy. He's often described as large, comparable with the professionals from Districts 1 and 2, but that doesn't read pudgy to me. Bulky and strong, yes. Well-fed, obviously, as opposed to the typically malnourished Katniss, but not pudgy.

Frankly, I think the idea of "biracial" doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense in the context of the Hunger Games - even the fact that Collins described Rue and Thresh as African-American is weird to me. In the book, they are described as having dark skin, which obviously makes African-American actors the best choice, but I sort of got the impression that modern race distinctions didn't exist in the same way in that world. Meaning that at some point in the history of the book there had been enough racial mixing to make nearly everybody "multi-racial."

I guess the conclusion is that I can't get outraged. If they only looked at caucasians then that's a sad reflection of continued racism in Hollywood casting (though potentially also a sad reflection of continued racism in audience dollars) but if they looked at a broad range and decided Jennifer Lawrence was their best choice, then so be it.

I liked Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, and I think she'll probably make a good Katniss. But the fact that they only considered Caucasian actresses for that role (as smonster mentioned above, from here: [link] ) is really shitty.