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June 17, 2005
On the inconsistency of ethnic policy in the entertainment industry
HBO On-demand is a beautiful thing. I will gain 80 pounds immediately from the movements I've stopped making.
So I've been watching the Sex and the City Aleksandr episodes I missed because I was actually in Russia meeting actual Aleksandrs. Poor Mishka Baryshnikov. (Did you know he has his own perfume line for women, Misha?) Reduced to playing the Laconic Slav, to speaking silly Russian half-truths ("In Russia, we sweeten our tea with cherry jam" - come on, not necessarily, sugar's kind of caught on).
One of the nicest things about now speaking Russian where once I did not is the new insight it gives me into Russian on tv and in films. And there's plenty of it, wherever a villain is called for. Gary Oldman spoke what seemed to me fantastic Russian in Air Force One with Harrison Ford; Pierce Brosnan and Denise Richards, in The World Is Not Enough, can not be said to have.
In general, though, Hollywood seems to make an effort to find genuine Russians to say genuine Russian things in movies, not something that can be said for films calling for orientals, apparently viewed as interchangeable (witness Ziyi Zhang as the lead in the upcoming Memoirs of a Geisha, and the oriental patchwork horror that is the screen adaptation of Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club), or, arguably worse, playable by second-generation Chinese in faltering possession of two of the six tones of Cantonese.
Surely Asian immigrants in America far outnumber their Russian counterparts. What could explain this inequality of policy?
Posted by michele at June 17, 2005 12:17 PM
Comments
Heh heh. The World Is Not Enough came out while I was in college, about halfway through earning my Russian major. I remember watching it an laughing hysterically at Brosnan and Richards as they tried to pretend they spoke Russian well...
Posted by: jane at June 17, 2005 9:01 PM