sigelphoenix

On Friday I went out with some coworkers to say goodbye to a coworker who's leaving for a new job. They took me to Feierabend, a German tavern just north of downtown. There was good beer that I actually liked (usually beer and I don't get along well), and mouthwateringly delicious German food. It struck me as the kind of place rivendellrose might like, but I think it would be fun for anyone to try.

After dinner, we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum - even though I haven't seen the first two movies in the trilogy, because my coworkers assured me that Matt Damon was The Sex in it. That wasn't the *only* reason I went to the movie - I was also told that they're pretty self-contained and easy to follow, and that the action is good - but it helped. :P

We got a few trailers before the movie, the most promising of which was for the new Beowulf movie. Sadly, though, the reason I found it promising wasn't so much the trailer itself but the fact that I know Neil Gaiman is doing it. The trailer itself, while displaying the pretty CG, tried to attract audiences by showing Angelina Jolie as the ZOMG! Hawt Woman who's pretty much naked the entire time oh yeah and then there's this Beowulf guy and maybe you caught the fact that Angelina Jolie was the mother of Grendel.

Regardless of the content and probable quality of the movie, the trailer bothered me because of the way it sold the movie. As Tekanji brings up in her discussion of the RE5 trailer, the preview is how the company thinks their product can be sold - in other words, it highlights what is considered most attractive or marketable about the movie. And apparently, in the case of Beowulf, that quality is Angelina Jolie - not even displaying her acting abilities as the mother of a slain creature who attempts to psychologically defeat her son's killer, but as the Evil Seductress. Who's nekkid.

I had the same kind of problem with the trailer for The Kingdom, which pretty much anchored itself on the fact that LOL! Saudi Arabia is different from us! Seriously, there's even a part where the narrator says, "Leave your world behind ..." and we get a shot of dozens of people kneeling in a mosque: Look at the weird brown people, har har.

After that we got a preview for a movie about the Russian mafia in London ... which, okay, it's kind of tiring to see ethnicity brought up only for the sake of referencing organized crime. But I was willing to go with it. Until Naomi Watts' character sneers, "Family is important to you people" at one point in the trailer, and then we find out that the name of the film is Eastern Promises.

What the fuck, people.

Look, maybe Watts' ignorant and stereotyping comment gets called on in the movie. And maybe the "woo exotic" quality isn't as prominent. But, again, the trailer is how the movie is sold - it highlights what the audience theoretically wants. Just like the way that female characters are inserted into action trailers mostly/only as the sex partner of the male hero, it's kind of annoying that racial minorities are reduced to their "exoticness" against the normative white characters.

The final trailer we saw was for American Gangster, in which Denzel Washington plays a man whose smuggling business outstrips the (white) U.S. mafia. This trailer didn't bother me at all - actually, I found it kind of intriguing. The big difference for me was that they didn't try to hide the racial dynamics - the characters outright discuss the fact that Washington's character is black and that his position as a crime lord is unusual. Washington discusses his history of racial oppression and its role in motivating his actions.

So it doesn't bother me just when enemies of white people happen to be people of color, or people of color happen to be flawed or villanous, or when white people go to predominantly non-white countries. But there's a history of imperialism behind any of these dynamics, and when pop culture blatantly ignores this history - or, worse, tries to make it into a selling point - that's ignorant and racist. Even if it's just in a trailer.


As for the movie itself, I had fun. It took place in several different countries, including predominantly non-white countries, but I didn't feel that it was excessive or exploitative. The action was clever and sometimes ridiculous - but the movie felt self-aware enough that I laughed with it, not at.

Although the scene in which both the assassin and Matt Damon locate Julia Stiles through her hairstyle was a little much. In the next scene, we see Stiles dying her hair, and I can just imagine her thinking to herself, "Perhaps my distinctive bright blonde highlights in dark brown hair are not conducive to my life as a secret agent!"

There was also the pre-climactic final scene in which Matt Damon mutters, "This is where it began for me. This is where I'll end it," and the dramatic BOW-WHAKA-SHAKA-BOW music kicks up before he even finishes talking. XD