We could never get away with doing this to them, even under the guise of ‘creativity’.
Let’s make a movie about slavery in the American South, but without the whipping, the chains, or the cotton picking. Just, you know, happy people in a rural environment. I’m sure no one would protest that it diverged from the source material.
Lordy dem Rangz
There are female dwarves with beards. Yep, they have trans-dwarves.
Tolkien admired the Norse legends and intended his works to serve as a type of mythology for England.
This current Rings prequel looks like a woke mess.
I “get” why people get offended by this sort of thing.
BUT... I have been thinking about this. And have determined the race of the actors in most cases isn’t important.
The problem is .. we Americans tend to view the entire world through the lense of .. America!
we wouldn’t expect a Bollywood movie to have a bunch of white people in all the rolls would we? So when other countries (or in this case cultures) make a movie, they make it with the best actors that they have available nearby.
Recently, one of my millennial age nephews, who also saw the films as a child, read the original books and he was blown away by how much better the book version was.
I have no plans on seeing this more recent bastardization of LOTR.
As an aside, if there are any "Game Of Thrones" fans out there of the TV show, you would do well to read the "A Song Of Ice And Fire" books by George R.R. Martin. Those are the books the TV series is based on (five volumes so far with two more on the way). For me anyhow, it was a very satisfying read. But it will take you a while - it's over 4,000 pages of reading (so far).
So the Left reads all literature the same way they read the Constutution?
I highly recommend that Tolkien fans buy themselves copies of his novels and DVDs of the brilliant Peter Jackson films before the Perverts Of Media (POM™) insist they be edited to change the various characters into transgenders and BIPOCs. BTW, create libraries for yourselves of all soon-to-be-banned literature (i.e. Gone With The Wind, Huckleberry Finn. etc.) and films (Holiday Inn (Bing Crosby in blackface), Swing Time (Fred Astaire in blackface, etc.)). The Left is coming after great works of art that trigger them. Publishers and movie sellers will bend the knee in microseconds.
Wolkien
Kevin Hart is kind of funny. Plus, you're right. It's not new and wasn't political in the old days. You realize that none of the four main actors in the 1986 movies was Jewish either.
Hollywood is all about copying, and I don't think anybody had any serious trouble with "The New Odd Couple" (which nobody watched) being African-American. It's on par with remaking a French or Japanese movie with an American cast or vice versa.
There's a difference between recasting movies about contemporary life and "nontraditional casting" in historical dramas. Hollywood overdoes it now, but it wasn't always a terrible thing.
WTH? Anyone care to translate this?
I can’t make heads or tails of the article.
Tolkien's "privileged" race of men, the Numenoreans, sailed to other places in Middle Earth, initially as teachers, bringers of medicine, etc.. This included sailing to lands further south where there were people "of color".
But over time, many Numenoreans became corrupted and greedy, and began enslaving other people in Middle-Earth for their own benefit. Eventually, those other people in Middle-Earth rebelled against the Numenorians. The Faithful, those Numenoreans who stayed loyal to the Valar, oppose that slavery and exploitation.
So crap, you have this great potential storyline of oppressed people rebelling against those who would try to enslave them. Great roles for "actors of color" right there in the source material. That background is especially key because it explains why Sauron was later able to recruit the descendents of those people to his cause.
Instead, they go full woke. We now have black elves, black dwarves, and romantic/sexual relationships between elves and men, directly contradicting Tolkien's own statement that there were only three unions of elves and men prior to Aragorn and Arwen.
Utter crap.
Don't acknowledge it, don't talk about it, pretend it doesn't exist.
And you will certainly hear the "Lamentations off da vymen", whatever the manifestation of a "woman" is to the left.
Bkmk
Christopher Tolkien died in January of 2020. As an editor himself he guarded LOTR canon closely because he knew what would happen to it in the wrong hands. And so it has. As the author of this piece put it:
The show is D&D fan-fiction pretending to be Tolkien.
It's a little unfair to expect a group of screenwriters hired under criteria other than talent to produce the sort of luminous prose Tolkien spent decades to craft. And it's a mistake to think that one has to understand something before it's "reimagined" - in fact, the opposite is true, and it shows.
But it's particularly gratifying to note the ferocious blowback this scrap of literary Newspeak has elicited. It's imitative crap. That's all it could ever be.
I’ve already seen a docu-drama about Queen Elizabeth I on the BBC which cast a black man as head of her privy counsel, and an Asian woman as one of her ladies in waiting.
Or I should say, “saw the first 10 minutes.” That was as long as I could hold out before running to the bathroom to projectile vomit.
I wish Jackson would have had Tom Bombadil in the trilogy. God knows what the woke world would have made of him.