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By the Mystic Moons of the MCU, I conjure [Doctor Strange]!
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Far and away the best 3d movie i've ever seen, and a strongly compelling argument for 3d in general.
I dug the story and (thank god) didnt feel like Strange was "Stark Lite" he felt like his own character.
I liked the ancient one. I mean, Tilda is amazing no matter what she does, so of course she knocked it out of the park. I didnt get a "whitewashing" sense from anything. There was people of every nationality and color in the school there. If anything, i liked that they really seemed to try and give evidence that race and nationality are meaningless to becoming a sorcerer.
Death spoiler.
I thought they made that explicit:
Strange was good. Felt sufficiently like the Strange comics that my inner nerd was pleased. Not sure it will be remembered very fondly in a few years by the general public but I was happy.
Amazed:
Also I was amused at how blatant the "Guess where the extra scene for China will be inserted" bit was.
The character she's supposed to represent is Asian, specifically Tibetan or pseudo Tibetan. That's where the issue lies, and Marvel has a bad history with Asian presentation. This is why they altered Wong so much, rather than being Strange's Asian butler. While it's good TAO's school had various ethnicities few were actual leading roles. 99% were cameos, aside from Wong and Mordo.
Which is great, except time and again when this happens - it goes to a white actor. Along with the implications of a white person being the best in an Asian dominated culture/society like here, which is another bad trope for Marvel to reuse, and soon we'll be getting another with Iron Fist.
Tilda did excellently, but I'm unconvinced they couldn't have gotten a minority actor/actress to do the exactly same role.
If they'd had a single Asian super hero lead show up in the MCU before this they would have a lot more wiggle room to work with.
It's the context of all their movies this is annoying in.
There is no 100% winning solution to this, but I don't think the problem with characters like this is by replacing them with white people. Especially a demographic this particular company has difficulty putting in leading roles in their movies.
Not to mention they didn't have to make TAO Asian, either. They could have them Indian, Hispanic etc. Lots of options here, and they didn't bother trying.
i take your point. But i think they "dint bother trying" because they got Tilda Swinton. Not, they didnt want to try and so went out and got Tilda Swinton.
Kaecilius didn't think he was trying to destroy the world but the Ancient One knows that if he unleashed the dark dimension and Dormammu, the world would be destroyed. As for the Sanctums being on full alert, except that wasn't what was shown. There was one guy protecting the New York Sanctum. They didn't mobilize to protect the Hong Kong Sanctum until after Kaecilius had attacked the other two.
The only eastern mysticism involved was the picture of chakras, really? Other than the fact that Strange finds the Ancient One in Nepal, where much of the movie was filmed, all the aesthetics and clothing are based on Asian culture, and they learn magic by practicing eastern meditation and martial arts.
As for the difference between whitewashing and white savior, the whitewashing was made worse when they combined it with the white savior narrative.
So the only choice is to default to white?
And that might be a valid excuse if they were casting Asian actors for other significant roles. If they already had say, an Asian Iron Man or an Asian Black Widow or an Asian Doctor Strange, and many other Asian actors in supporting roles, and then they decided not to cast an Asian actor for the Ancient One to avoid stereotyping, that might have been fine since Asians would already be well represented. But they don't exactly have a lot of Asian actors in significant roles and now they've decided to take away an Asian role and give it to a white lady.
screenrant.com/doctor-strange-china-tibet-ancient-one/
The choice would be to default to the best person for the role.
The director has talked about this
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/02/doctor-strange-director-owns-up-to-whitewashing-controversy.html
"Didn't bothering trying" is kind of a ridiculous statement that I don't think any of us are qualified to make.
First, they did a really good job of going for the essence of the early doc strange comics in all their weird LSD inspired visuals without it looking goofy. I'll freely admit that I was worried that that would be a problem but it came away working well.
Second, there is the progression of Strange; they handle the arc of him discovering magic well and adapting his own understanding to it.
Third, There was some really good name drops in here. Nothing too extreme but the way they reference them was a nice nod to the fans.
This was a movie that could have very easily gone south super hard but They pulled it off really well; I'd give it an 8.5 out of 10.
The thing is that whitewashing doesn't require a racist motive. Changing a character to white in the hopes of getting more people to see the movie or avoiding the ire of a rich authoritarian country that's trying to cover up genocide isn't racist, it's capitalist. But it's still whitewashing.
And it just happens that white actors are almost always the best person for the role. What a wonderful coincidence.
Grin.
I got high af on this nice sativa edible and it was really enjoyable, but you're a braver man than me seeing it on anything harder, I feel like some of the effects on LSD would give me the worst vertigo.
Final boss spoiler talk
The ending looked like a Dr. Strange comic.
It seemed fairly appropriate that it had the color palette of a blacklight painting to me.
http://geektyrant.com/news/kevin-feige-says-doctor-strange-will-include-the-dark-dimension
Made me doubly mad at the decision not to cast Danny Rand as Asian. And the excuse given was because they wanted to tell a fish out of water story about a stranger in a land that people assume is their home. It's a good story, but I don't see why the same thing couldn't have been done with an Asian, it's not like NY doesn't have various Asian neighborhoods.
It's specifically upsetting because I felt like they stuck the landing with magic that borrows but doesn't really appropriate from the harmful tropes the comic was born in, nice subversion IMO
Overall, I liked the movie, but it had too much punching for a movie about wizards. And they really needed more show and less tell. The end wasn't set up right, it was more like a Deus Ex Machina moment. I was hoping the combat would be a bit like Avatar: TLA/LoK and Harry Potter, a dance of mental flashing spells that is a mental chess game of "Oh, you want to cause the floor to spin, I'll fly!" "Oh, you want to fly, I'll open up a portal to a hurricane wind storm!"
Effects/artistic design/visuals - holy hell yes, that was awesome. Unforunately a lot of the action and fast motion was a dim blur - and that's in 2D. I want to take this moment to once again say that it's well past time we moved the hell away from 24fps in movies with any kind of action. It's such an awful, outdated, and experience-ruining standard.
Tilda Swinton was fantastic. Best part of the whole movie if you ask me.
Semi-spoilery
I am actually assuming this is a movie that looks far worse in 2D.
To expand:
It also didn't make much sense how
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
To a degree, it was also necessity - she needed a new head for the sanctum and had just lost everyone there. She might also have been hoping that it would keep his ego in check to be recognized - as the master of a sanctum she'd have been the only one above him (and if she hadn't lost his trust with the whole dark dimensions bit... and things going literally all to hell... that would have probably worked out very well).
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Amazing movie for delivering Dr Strange to the big screen
Great Marvel movie that puts their standard formula to good use
Pretty decent movie on its own value, but should have had a lot of its flaws ironed out
Overall I loved it
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
He was doing the same accent Hugh Laurie did on House. It was his own take on it of course but there were moments where I had to keep myself from laughing at the idea of House being Dr Strange.
Being a Brit who was very familiar with much of Laurie's work (and his immense talent as both an actor and a comic) before House, his American accent didn't seem completely believable to me in House until probably about season 4 or so. By then it was pretty much perfect. I suspect Cumberbatch, as talented as he is, just needs a tad more practice with it.
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