There is undeniably still a lot of controversy concerning interracial marriage and mixed races, but as many people feel uncomfortable admitting to their 'inner racist,' it doesn't get talked about much. Marie Claire has a nice, succinct article on multi-ethnicity, and for those who feel the merging of two groups is something odd-looking, consider this:
When he proclaimed the importance of racial miscegenation to Brazil in the 1930s, the celebrated Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre could scarcely have imagined that he was hailing the future supermodel capital of the world.
“The most obvious thing is the mixture of races that we have here,” says top São Paulo fashion photographer Marcio Neves—who works extensively with “new faces”—of why Brazil seems to produce so many models.
As Freyre noted in his landmark work Casa-Grande & Senzala (Big House and Slave Quarters), racial mixing has always been part of the fabric of Brazilian life. From indigenous Indian to African slave descendents, to German, Japanese, Arab, and Portuguese immigrants, the diversity of Brazil’s gene pool has clearly influenced the country’s prodigious production of beautiful people, and never more so than now.
The dearth of racially appropriate casting in the U.S. simply means that fewer Asians were humiliated by appearing in what is surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic since Ralph Bakshi's animated desecration of The Lord of the Rings back in 1978. The actors who didn't get to be in The Last Airbender are like the passengers who arrived too late to catch the final flight of the Hindenburg.
To accomplish his air-bending, Aang assumes a series of highly balletic tai chi poses, twirling and bowing his body, curling his hands around like a boy dancer. The movie should have been called Crouching Billy Elliott, Hidden Air Pocket.
I was... pleased to see Jackson Rathbone as a non-vampire (he has been in the past three “Twilight” movies), as he was in a TV series I used to watch, “Beautiful People,” which ran from 2005-06.
