Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Hunger Games Movie shocks some

I just saw the Hunger Games last night. It's a pretty good movie. It passes the Bechdel Test. It also has people of colour in it. More than one! That should be cause for celebration. But unfortunately, not everyone sees it that way. If you follow that link, you will find stacks of tweets of people who were shocked!, just shocked I tell you, to find that they had cast the characters of Rue and Thresh as black people. Except if you read the book, Collins describes them as black. I read the book first, and as Collins describes them as having dark skin, I always pictured them as black, so I was not surprised at all when Rue and Thresh turned out to be black, and would have been very surprised if the opposite was true. And you might think that these people just didn't read the book, but nope. They read the book. In fact some of them complain that the movie makers should have stuck to the book and made Rue and Thresh white. But as I said, that isn't in the book at all. These people actually changed what they read in their minds so that the characters would be acceptably white. It's a crazy, crazy world out there. And if you think people aren't still racist, still blatantly, painfully racist you've got your head up your ass.