For number 4, what happens when those women and men catch you? I'm not a very fast runner, and it sounds terrifying.

Thanks for sharing! And yeah, it seems to be getting worse of late; I also remember reading how Hollywood movies are actually less diverse in terms of race and gender than they were perhaps 20 years ago, partly because they want to play it safe and partly because of racial politics in the US.

I'm less bothered by Tilda Swinton's casting than Scarlett Johannson's, despite being unfamiliar with both sources. At least with Tilda we rarely as it is get older women playing old wise characters, whereas that's a stereotype when it comes to old Asian men. Gods of Egypt was very distracting though.

I also wish people stopped describing Keanu's race as was convenient for them - in that article he's described as an Asian lead without qualifiers, while in another article on this I read he was given as the first example of white actors playing non-white roles. Both are pretty offensive. Framing him as an example of a famous Asian lead does a disservice to fully Asian actors who have a much harder time getting far in Hollywood compared to Eurasian ones, and for some weird reason lots of people seem to think Keanu is a white guy and treat him accordingly, accepting him in roles they wouldn't accept a fully-Asian actor in. But then describing him as white and as whitewashing roles does a disservice to all mixed race actors, and disrespects Keanu's own racial heritage and the problems he faced in Hollywood as mixed, especially early in his career, as well as dismisses all the nuances of how his race affects how he's seen by the audience. There have been a lot of interesting articles about that, especially with The Matrix.

But that flip-flopping on Keanu's race has led to such paradoxical things as some people praising, say, 47 Ronin as a good example of casting mixed white/Asian actors as such characters, while other people criticize that same role as an example of whitewashing; or some people saying that Keanu should play more Asian roles instead of exploiting his ability to pass as white, while others are saying he needs to stop that and leave those roles to Asian actors who don't have the privilege of being easily cast in white roles. They're all valid points, but only when it comes to mono-racial actors, and I wish people could be more nuanced about this and stop trying to shove him into one side. A lot of it seems to depend on how the author reads Keanu's race.

It also makes me really appreciate how great Man of Tai Chi was in this regard - Keanu playing a racially ambiguous character in an all-Asian cast.

Yes. :)

The bathroom debates are infuriating - I can understand people's fear that male perverts might pretend to be transgender women and slip into female bathrooms, but they don't seem to realise that the laws banning that would just mean male perverts could pretend to be transgender men and slip into female bathrooms, much more easily at that; they wouldn't even have to bother cross-dressing. It'll cause so much damage and put so many trans people in danger while not even solving the problem it was meant to, and already there are cases of non-trans women getting kicked out of female bathrooms because others thought they were male.

All the best for your niece! I hope all goes well for her.

I think the first is Ted; second is Scott Favor from My Own Private Idaho.

Technically that's ethnicity, not race - race is the larger category and historically has only had 3-5 types, primarily Asian, Caucasian and African, with ethnicities being subcategories of that. e.g. Austrian, German, Scottish etc are all white ethnicities, though that categorization too is politically influenced - Irish people used to be considered black.

You're right, it shouldn't be an issue, because ultimately race is just about what physical characteristics a person has (and not even that, sometimes; there is often more biological variance within a race than between two average people of different races).

But the problem is that much of the world doesn't see things that way, and continue to hold subconscious or conscious prejudices about different races. Such that race does end up playing a big part in how we experience the world and how other people treat us, and how we treat others, even if we're not aware of it and do our best to be see everyone as equal.

A lot of it happens subconsciously and only gets revealed in controlled studies - such as experiments which sent out identical resumes for job applications but changed only the name to be stereotypically white or black, and found that the 'white' applicants got called for interviews 50% more often than the 'black' ones: http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
(There have been similar studies involving gender, where applicants with male names were favoured over identical applicants with female names.) Or racial profiling, or where people regardless of race have a tendency to find black people more suspicious - there was an experiment in which they got a white boy to pretend to steal a bike in broad daylight, attempting to break the lock and even admitting he was trying to steal the bike when someone asked what he was doing, and it was a long time before anyone bothered to stop him, vs when they got a black boy to do the exact same thing and almost immediately people started freaking out and yelling at him.

An easy conclusion might be that all those people were racist, but that wasn't the case - many of them we're strong proponents of racial equality, but subconscious bias still ended up affecting their actions. They affect mine too, despite my best intentions. And then there are all those people who are blatantly racist and proud of it.

I wish, very much, that we were in a world where race (or gender, or sexual orientation, or class status) didn't matter one bit and people could just be people, judged on the content of their character. But until we get there, there are still discussions and dialogues to be had, and that need to be had in order to break out of that cultural programming so we can get there; ignoring racism might provide some appearance of peace, but it doesn't make it go away nor stop the people who are cheerily racist and continue to make life hard for people.

You might be interested in the Implicit Association Test, which is available online for free: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html It's a measure of subconscious bias when it comes to race, gender and other factors, and is pretty insightful. It doesn't always translate to conscious bias though (I'm gay and extremely passionate about LGBT rights, but that test revealed me to be strongly homophobic in my subconscious responses, which sadly wasn't even a surprise because I've got years of internalized homophobia stored up in there). Similarly, there are likely also people who have little or no subconscious racial bias but choose to be racist anyway because they benefit from it. In the end, actions are what matter, but self-awareness always helps.

Thanks! Added to archive.

I'm reserving judgement on this until we know more; we haven't even heard Keanu's side of things. The film itself wouldn't be racist either way - it was the editing process and decisions of what to cut that were accused of being influenced by racism, and of trying to make the film more suitable to a mainstream audience. The only people who know what happened there would be those who worked on the film, so we won't be able to tell until we get more information.

Getting a film made is an extremely complicated process and tied up with red tape; it's really the people providing the money who have the most control and say over what happens, more than the directors or producers or actors who often end up powerless.

Nah, that's not suitable riding attire. It wouldn't be realistic. His butt would stick to the seat.

@Taluthah - I think the anon poster was referring to the other anon who mentioned Facebook posts etc.

And a mistake on my part - the issue wasn't with getting it greenlit but in getting funding. Based on LucaM's sources it looks like it was billed as a thriller from the start; who knows how true that was to the script, or if from the beginning they'd felt the need to present it as such for marketing purposes.

Regardless of the specifics of this case, there's still a problem with Hollywood preferring to stick to tried-and-tested money-making movies (and never-ending sequels) rather than take risks on different things. While I'm not a fan of difference for its own sake and I admittedly don't watch many indie films, I still think there's a lot more room for experiment, and it's not as though Hollywood can't afford to risk losses now and then. It seems like there was a wider variety in the past - just look at the mixed bag of Keanu's 1980s films vs those of the past decade, even including his non-blockbuster work.

I think it's pretty straightfoward:

- Unnamed producer pitched and sold an action thriller to Lionsgate, either because they were unable to or perceived themselves unable to sell them the actual film

- Lionsgate "liked it", according to the source, but still wanted to get what they ordered, and thus asked that the film be edited until it resembled that

Keanu and the director don't seem to be part of that picture.

So there are two main culprits:

1) That unnamed producer who wasn't honest with the studio, although they might have been working under pressure to get this film greenlighted; maybe their job was on the line, or maybe they'd been honest with other studios and been repeatedly turned down as a result

2) Lionsgate (and Hollywood in general) for giving a strong enough impression of what kinds of film pitches would succeed or fail to the point that people need to lie just to get their movies sold, and for still insisting on the original deal rather than take a chance on an unconventional film that they admitted they liked.