Tea tweaking on “Breaking Abbey,” the Downton Abbey–Breaking Bad hybrid you never knew you needed until you considered the image of a person snorting a line of Earl Grey. Soon Downton will be “kicking it with mad bitches and Benjamins.”
From time to time, Grantland racial issues correspondent Andrew Ti stops by to discuss whatever's been blowing up the inbox at Yo, Is This Racist? Today, the Cloud Atlas epic gets its reckoning.
One nice thing about the film industry is the fact that, no matter how offensive any idea was the first time around, if you wait long enough, there's always someone willing to give it another shot. So imagine the delight around Yo, Is This Racist? headquarters this July when the trailer for Cloud Atlas dropped, featuring a bunch of characters played by actors in, let's call it, "racial makeup." That is, in this sprawling, postmodern collection of scenes jumping back and forth in time (roughly speaking, pirate ship times to rocket-ship times and more!), most of the principal actors reappear as multiple characters, often of different races. As a filmmaking technique, it was likely meant to evoke some kind of loose version of reincarnation that is one of the story's main themes, but in practice, it comes off more like the most expensively assembled improv troupe of all time. ("OK, now you're in ... postapocalyptic Hawaii!")
It should be said at this point that the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer's decision to use all of this race-bending makeup was clearly made with an awareness that this could be a sensitive issue. Thankfully, no one is made up in blackface, but there are no prizes for meeting the bottom-most rung of decency in Hollywood.
But did they do any better than not using blackface? Let's take a look at how they executed their potentially controversial tricks.
Chris Brown/Rihanna/Drake: "Chris Brown was soaking in the revelry" at W.I.P. with his girlfriend Karrueche Tran. He "sent a bottle of Ace of Spades champagne to Drake," who sent it it back with a note reading "I am fucking the love of your life." Thus began a bottle fight, which ended with Brown's cutting his chin and Tony Parker scratching his cornea. "They tore the club apart" and started "a bloody melee" fighting about Rihanna, who is on her Cleopatra shit. She even got a new ankle tattoo of an Egyptian falcon shaped like a gun. Rihanna heard about it and "was cracking up. Men fighting over her? Please. She loves the drama!" A friend of Brown's says, "These guys are fighting over Rihanna. She is the dude in this sitch and they are acting like girls." Yes, because men never have petty catfights (LOL).
