Friday, August 14, 2015
The Diversity Test: Captain America The Winter Soldier
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
If the Marvel films of 2013 were a disappointment, 2014's two entries were anything but. Captain America: The Winter Soldier had a somewhat bizarre April release date (I blame the Fast & Furious franchise), so its release threw me off a bit. And then in that first weekend, the "Hail Hydra" meme exploded, spoiling many who hadn't seen it initially, including myself. Disappointing as that is, the movie is still spectacular, a huge game changer in the MCU (and Agents of SHIELD, which found some footing once this twist occurred). Needless to say, after some of the capital the MCU squandered in 2013 was pretty much gotten back with this movie. And then the next, too...
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The Diversity Test: Thor The Dark World
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
I feel like that first year after The Avengers Marvel films faltered a little bit. I'd imagine plenty would disagree with me about Iron Man 3. Not sure as many would argue against my less than glowing opinion of Thor: The Dark World.
Test
Monday, March 9, 2015
The Diversity Test: Iron Man 3
Iron Man 3 (2013)
The Avengers ended Marvel's Phase 1 with a bang, ending an era in the franchise and in movies in general. A year later, it was time for the next step, beginning with the character who started it all. After the rousing success of the Avengers team up, could going back to movies focusing on single characters work? Would the follow ups feel like let downs? Iron Man 3 was the first to let us know.
The Diversity Test: The Avengers
The Avengers (2012)
We come to it at last! The movie event begun in that little extra scene at the end of Iron Man in 2008, that slowly scaled up with a second (not all that memorable) shot at the Hulk later that year, the mysterious Black Widow in 2010, and movies bringing us Thor and Captain America (along with a Hawkeye cameo) in 2011, reached its climax in 2012. And perhaps most surprisingly, it blew us all away. There had never been anything quite like it. Certainly we'd had major film franchises with giant payoffs by the end (see: Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter), but this was something unique. Various tentpoles from disparate stories converging into the biggest of them all, representative of the Avengers themselves. As a result, plenty of familiar faces, but new as well.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
The Diversity Test: Captain America The First Avenger
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Unlike Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, where part of their settings added to at least a larger visual diversity (even if their depictions may had issues), the first movie featuring Cap has the distinct disadvantage of taking place in the 1940s, a time of segregation of races and marginalization of women, or at least that's the general belief of the period. There is certainly some truth it. Segregation of the armed forces wasn't ordered ended until 1948. The work women did to support the war effort at home embodied in the iconic image of Rosie the Riveter was vital in transforming women's place in American society beyond the home. A number of women served in the armed forces and saw combat and few have had their stories told. But segregation remained and the vast majority of soldiers serving were men, so you might not expect the cast to show that much variation.
And if your expectation are low, you won't be disappointed.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
The Diversity Test: Thor
Thor (2011)
The extra scene at the end of Iron Man 2 hinted at it and May of 2011 brought it as the MCU expanded beyond Tony Stark and Earth and took us to Asgard, one of the Nine Realms. I liked it and its small scale. A lot didn't, but hey, it was another step toward the sprawling movie franchise we have today, set to become even more sprawling in the years ahead.
Thor also demonstrates one of the major modifications to Mike Cooper's method of calculating the Diversity Score. When he began tallying things up, much of what he was looking at centered around the Star Wars Expanded Universe, now Star Wars Legends, material that is primarily literature. If you've ever read much of that material, you'll once in a while come across books with the Dramatis Personae listed at the beginning and Mike noted that in many cases, a good fraction of the characters are described as "Human male". Add to the fact that many authors in every genre of fiction have a tendency to make a note in character description when they're meant to be pictured as a person of color (e.g. "dark skinned, tan, olive skinned, etc.). This could lead to a situation with some readers defaulting to imagining a character as white without such a description (As an aside: I myself as a reader have a strange quirk that I'll consciously imagine book characters as racially diverse if not described otherwise. This gets awkward when 100 pages in, I learn of my black protagonist's ginger locks and pale skin.)
In the Star Wars universe, it's strange to see such a human-dominated cast when the movie made such pains to illustrate so many kinds of aliens in settings like the Mos Eisley Cantina and Jabba's Palace. Even stranger that such a majority of the human characters are men. It was a problem that certainly existed in the original trilogy, though they are a product of their time. The prequel trilogy, while still demonstrating a problem with women in speaking roles, at least populated its vast crowds of extras, both real and computer generated, with a wealth of women and aliens. In Mike's case, it makes sense to chronicle the percentage of Star Wars characters who are and aren't white male humans.
Which brings us to Thor. As the character sheet below will demonstrate, a majority of Thor's major characters are Asgardians, beings who look identical to humans but are in fact a powerful alien race with abilities that made primitive humans see them as gods. If you're using "human" as a requirement for totaling up the diversity, then Thor has very few humans, let alone white human males. Thor, Loki, Odin... they're not human. The frost giant Laufey is clearly not human. The actors obviously are, though, and this study is about a number of things, but one is the idea of everyone seeing themselves represented in one of the largest media projects in the world. Thor may be Asgardian, but he looks like a white guy because he's played by a white guy and that matters. That being the case, this will be the first movie where I make separate tallies, one for actors, one for characters. In one tally, if it's a character being portrayed by a white guy, that won't count toward cast diversity. However, if the character is not a white human male, even if they appear to be identical to one, that will count toward that diversity tally, let's call it the Dramatis Personae tally. So, for example, Thor, in spite of looking exactly like a white male human is in fact Asgardian, a more powerful alien being. I'm not really doing this for him, though. It's more about for characters like Laufey and Thanos, roles portrayed by white men (at least voiced in Thanos' case) but at least getting points for throwing a little visual diversity into the characters. This will be a new statistic used with every Marvel movie from here on out with non-human characters, even if it does feel like cheating.
I went on longer than I meant to there on making that distinction, but I thought I would at least attempt to clarify. So, on to Thor...
The extra scene at the end of Iron Man 2 hinted at it and May of 2011 brought it as the MCU expanded beyond Tony Stark and Earth and took us to Asgard, one of the Nine Realms. I liked it and its small scale. A lot didn't, but hey, it was another step toward the sprawling movie franchise we have today, set to become even more sprawling in the years ahead.
Thor also demonstrates one of the major modifications to Mike Cooper's method of calculating the Diversity Score. When he began tallying things up, much of what he was looking at centered around the Star Wars Expanded Universe, now Star Wars Legends, material that is primarily literature. If you've ever read much of that material, you'll once in a while come across books with the Dramatis Personae listed at the beginning and Mike noted that in many cases, a good fraction of the characters are described as "Human male". Add to the fact that many authors in every genre of fiction have a tendency to make a note in character description when they're meant to be pictured as a person of color (e.g. "dark skinned, tan, olive skinned, etc.). This could lead to a situation with some readers defaulting to imagining a character as white without such a description (As an aside: I myself as a reader have a strange quirk that I'll consciously imagine book characters as racially diverse if not described otherwise. This gets awkward when 100 pages in, I learn of my black protagonist's ginger locks and pale skin.)
In the Star Wars universe, it's strange to see such a human-dominated cast when the movie made such pains to illustrate so many kinds of aliens in settings like the Mos Eisley Cantina and Jabba's Palace. Even stranger that such a majority of the human characters are men. It was a problem that certainly existed in the original trilogy, though they are a product of their time. The prequel trilogy, while still demonstrating a problem with women in speaking roles, at least populated its vast crowds of extras, both real and computer generated, with a wealth of women and aliens. In Mike's case, it makes sense to chronicle the percentage of Star Wars characters who are and aren't white male humans.
Which brings us to Thor. As the character sheet below will demonstrate, a majority of Thor's major characters are Asgardians, beings who look identical to humans but are in fact a powerful alien race with abilities that made primitive humans see them as gods. If you're using "human" as a requirement for totaling up the diversity, then Thor has very few humans, let alone white human males. Thor, Loki, Odin... they're not human. The frost giant Laufey is clearly not human. The actors obviously are, though, and this study is about a number of things, but one is the idea of everyone seeing themselves represented in one of the largest media projects in the world. Thor may be Asgardian, but he looks like a white guy because he's played by a white guy and that matters. That being the case, this will be the first movie where I make separate tallies, one for actors, one for characters. In one tally, if it's a character being portrayed by a white guy, that won't count toward cast diversity. However, if the character is not a white human male, even if they appear to be identical to one, that will count toward that diversity tally, let's call it the Dramatis Personae tally. So, for example, Thor, in spite of looking exactly like a white male human is in fact Asgardian, a more powerful alien being. I'm not really doing this for him, though. It's more about for characters like Laufey and Thanos, roles portrayed by white men (at least voiced in Thanos' case) but at least getting points for throwing a little visual diversity into the characters. This will be a new statistic used with every Marvel movie from here on out with non-human characters, even if it does feel like cheating.
I went on longer than I meant to there on making that distinction, but I thought I would at least attempt to clarify. So, on to Thor...
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
The Diversity Test: Iron Man 2
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Hard to believe in our age of two Marvels a year, when everything kicked off, not only was it nearly two years between films, but this one was the only one we got in all of 2010. Iron Man 2 is not without its controversy, as a large portion of online opinion isn't all that kind to the film. I agree that it's certainly unfocused, has too much going on, at times feels like set up for The Avengers, and comes up short in its inevitable comparisons to Iron Man. I don't think it's a bad movie, though and it does try to give Tony some more depth with his sickness. Plus, it's fun, though the final showdown with the villain, much like the first Iron Man, is underwhelming. It was certainly a step up from The Incredible Hulk at any rate.
This movie, though, is when the main vs. supporting character line begins to blur. Tony, Pepper, and Rhodey (recast) are back and seem easy enough to categorize. But what about the main villain, Ivan Vanko? He gets jailed and disappears for what seems like a good part of the movie. What about the debut of Black Widow? Does she have enough of a role to be considered main? Sam Rockwell's Justin Hammer, who most seem to forget was even in the movie? Happy Hogan in an expanded role? It all comes down to judgment calls, I suppose, which is a major part of this exercise. I do my best, but who knows if anyone reading this will agree?
Hard to believe in our age of two Marvels a year, when everything kicked off, not only was it nearly two years between films, but this one was the only one we got in all of 2010. Iron Man 2 is not without its controversy, as a large portion of online opinion isn't all that kind to the film. I agree that it's certainly unfocused, has too much going on, at times feels like set up for The Avengers, and comes up short in its inevitable comparisons to Iron Man. I don't think it's a bad movie, though and it does try to give Tony some more depth with his sickness. Plus, it's fun, though the final showdown with the villain, much like the first Iron Man, is underwhelming. It was certainly a step up from The Incredible Hulk at any rate.
This movie, though, is when the main vs. supporting character line begins to blur. Tony, Pepper, and Rhodey (recast) are back and seem easy enough to categorize. But what about the main villain, Ivan Vanko? He gets jailed and disappears for what seems like a good part of the movie. What about the debut of Black Widow? Does she have enough of a role to be considered main? Sam Rockwell's Justin Hammer, who most seem to forget was even in the movie? Happy Hogan in an expanded role? It all comes down to judgment calls, I suppose, which is a major part of this exercise. I do my best, but who knows if anyone reading this will agree?
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