Titularless
Marvel Studios
How many people would be excited for an Indiana Jones film, without Indie? We may well find out, if Phoebe Waller-Bridge gets her way, but would you be excited? How about Mission Impossible, without Ethan Hunt; Iron Man, without Iron Man; or Black Panther, without Black Panther?
Oh, hang on a minute…Black Panther: Wakanda Forever does just that. After the passing of Chadwick Boseman, there's no King T'Challa, and no Black Panther. Just a second-rate bait 'n' switch stand-in—female, naturally, because that strengthens the virtue signal, and this is Disney after all. (rolleyes)
In any other circumstances, the character would've been recast. Because actors pretend to be something that they're not; it's what they do, or so I'm told. For example, Sir Michael Gambon pretended to be Richard Harris in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; Mads Mikkelsen played Johnny Depp in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore; while Depp himself, along with Jude Law and Colin Farrell, pretended to be Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Not to mention all the actors who've played Sean Connery down the years, in the Bond franchise. But, as the greatest black thespian who's neither Denzel Washington nor Morgan Freeman, Boseman is considered irreplaceable.
His brother, however, believes that he'd have wanted T'Challa to be recast, and to carry on after him. Instead, Disney Marvel tries to pull a fast one, by headlining Black Panther, but only presenting a panther-person in a black costume. They'll spin this as the passing of the torch, but it simply didn't need to be passed in the way that they've done it. This gender-swap may have occurred to Black Panther in the intervening years since I read the comics; it happened to Thor—for crying out loud—in the comics and, later, in Thor: Love and Thunder. But most normie cinema audiences prefer some degree of consistency…which might go some way to explain the box office performance of Thor: Love and Thunder.
Not that I'll waste money and 160 minutes of my life—closer to three of your earth hours at the picture playhouse—on Black Pander: Woke As Fuck. Even with the titular character present, the original was passable at best. The trailers and previews for the sequel are ham-fisted, cringeworthy, and dripping with divisive identity- and sociopolitical posturing. And Disney as a whole can go screw themselves.
Besides, Wakanda Forever
is a totally gay title for a film. (pipe)
For anyone thinking that Sir Michael Gambon pretended to be Richard Harris in more than just Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, this is not the case. In the subsequent films, he was playing himself from the previous installments. The torch is only passed on once. Except…
…For anyone thinking that any actor following George Lazenby was playing his predecessor, this is also untrue. Connery was clearly the best Bond, and all others merely followed his lead.
Our friend It'sAGundam shows up two batshit race hustlers, lecturing white allies
over rules for their engagement with a fantasy story about a fantasy hero in a fantasy land. I've seen both of these patronising whackjobs roasted separately before, but here he conflates them. The hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness is almost heroic. Yet I can't help but think that, should anyone advise them to check their privilege, they'd explode with indignation. (explode) (nuclear)
It might seem contradictory that disrespectful arseholes like these would have allies in the first place—you might even think, to misquote Oscar Wilde, that if this is the way they treat their allies, they don't deserve to have any. But allies seem to be self-loathing apologists who buy into the cope, so perhaps they deserve the disrespect. They may even get off on it.
One of the hustlers went so far as to direct her message to all the white people who have BLM in their bio
, which pretty much defines the bottom
in a BDSM relationship. She must think people are watching her, crying out: Yes, mistress, scold me harsher! I've been a very naughty boy!
It takes all sorts. (pipe)