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WillKill4Food said:The Indian fellow I keep quoting had two problems with the villagers:
1. They did not even bare a superficial resemble to actual Himalayan villagers, in appearance or tongue.
2. They were helpless and survived only thanks to the "great White hero."
And as you should recall, the villagers ate bugs. Are those the Hindus you know?
1. Granted. The filmakers are geographically challenged. Of course, when you set a film in Himalayan India and then film it in Sri Lanka...
2. They were served moldy fruit. Willie says "I had bugs for lunch" to beg off eating the beetles she is being served. Bear in mind, their dinner at Pankot isn't even the same day.
But it was not a Saturday Morning Serial. It was not in black and white. It was two hours for a single sitting, not several hours for many sittings. It was a modern "fairytale" or sorts, in Lucas' own words. Why, then, should the portrayals not have modern or at the very least even slightly accurate.
Granted. BUT it was still the flavor they were trying to capture. I'm not really trying to defend this movie's inaccuracies, I just think it's awkward to try and recapture certain genres of film in, shall we say, more enlightened times. Imagine a remake of "Mask of Fu Manchu", for example.
And as I pointed out in my previous post,
And yet, Hindus revere monkeys (perhaps they should, or at least treat them with some respect, being that they're our evolutionary cousins).
Meanwhile, the eating of monkey brains is practiced by some Chinese, so why did they not include this unsettling dinner scene in China? They researched the Sivalinga, Nurhaci, and thirties musicals, so why not this?
And, quoted for truth:
Again, the dinner scene is stupid.
I almost brought up "Birth of a Nation" myself. The most frightening person (IMO)to feel it was factual in it's depiction of history was Calvin Coolidge.Of course, I agree, but does that justify the racist attitudes and caricatures in this movie?
Just as no one should take The Birth of a Nation seriously, they should not take Temple seriously. But ignorant people do.
Make no mistake, ignorance is a potentially dangerous thing. And those who use it to fuel the fires of hate and aggression are terrifying. Perhaps an argument could be made to find TOD analogous to the "Yellow menace" trend of the real 1930's (Cut short by our alliance with China against Japan), but unlike the Hearst-funded smear campaign against all Asians, TOD is really mostly guilty of giving people the wrong idea about 1) Indian food and 2) the particulars of a 19th Century murder cult.