Re: Is America still at a point....(Speed Racer)..
Going into jerk mode:
1) There aren't any black or Asian actors capable of blockbuster performances?
a) Sidney Pointier, Halle Berry, Lawrence Fishburne, Lena Horn, Richard Williamson, Isaiah Washington (grudgingly), Lee Thompson Young, CCH Punder, Kyla Pratt, Telma Hopkins: Ten other black actors/actresses who can deliver great performances.
b) Jackie Chan (when he actually bothers trying), Yun Fat Chow, Lucy Liu, Michelle Yeoh, Toshiro Mifune, Pat Morita, Bai Ling, Rosalind Chao, Joan Chen, Ming Na, and Susan Park: Some Asian actors/actresses, all of whom are famous for blockusters.
Wanna try that again?
2) It would be extremely difficult to imagine Harry Potter being black, especially given how well developed his, er, whiteness is. But you are right in that there needs to be more black scholarly characters; it's just that there hasn't been a whole lot of success with them, and that always makes Hollywood nervous about profitability.
3) You may want to consider that a lot of that pigeon-holing is due to the efforts of that community itself. In the Asian community, actors tend to show up in a lot of different genres; for some reason, American critics prefer actors to stay within one genre. It's not that hard for an Asian actor to portray a hero, a villain, a thug and a prostitute all within the same year, mostly due to sheer number of movies produced each year. In other words, there simply aren't any actors famous for the cooler dramatic roles because no one does ONLY dramatic roles (or, more accurately, few do roles that are only dramatic).
In the black community, there has been an emphasis on comedies (Spike Lee and Richard Townsend) and gangsta movies (John Singleton) over more critically important movies (Melvin van Peebles). It doesn't help that the NAACP itself has created some issues, such as the threatened strikes in the mid 90's (they wanted shows with black actors to have black writers; this backfired as black characters just weren't as popular after that (as noticed by the whitening of TV at the time)). In essence, there aren't a lot of non-gangsta non-comedic roles because either there isn't interest in the black community itself, or they are shot down when they appear from non-black writers.
Not trying to be a jerk, but the black community does a pretty good job of isolating itself from the rest of the art community. If you really want to see more mainstream success, then you need to stop doing the "We want to be silly gangstas" act and then getting annoyed when there aren't any serious movies for blacks; it's hard NOT to understand given black movies over the last decade or so...
RG
