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From Variety:
By Zack Sharf
John Leguizamo took to Instagram to speak out against the recent casting of James Franco as Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro in the upcoming independent film, “Alina of Cuba.” …
“How is this still going on?” Leguizamo asked his Instagram followers about Franco being cast as the Cuban historical figure. “How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well? No more appropriation Hollywood and streamers! Boycott! This F’d up! Plus seriously difficult story to tell without aggrandizement, which would be wrong! I don’t got a [problem] with Franco but he ain’t Latino!”
Much like James Franco, John Leguizamo has been in a huge number of movies, most of them not very memorable. Perhaps his best movie was Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge, in which he played (quite well) French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, despite being neither an inbred French aristocrat nor disabled (due to his inbreeding, Toulouse-Lautrec suffered a congenital bone disorder that caused his legs to stop growing around age 13), nor a little person (Toulouse was said to be 4′-11″ while Leguizamo is said to be 5’6.5″). It’s almost as if talented actor can indeed play different roles.
Less well-regarded is the upscale mestizo Columbian Leguizamo’s casting as Luigi Mario in Super Mario Bros., alongside Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario, despite being not Italian, nor a plumber, nor digital.
From Leguizamo’s Wikipedia page:
Research by the genealogy show Finding Your Roots indicated that Leguizamo does not have Puerto Rican, Italian, and Lebanese ancestry, as he has sometimes stated.[1][7][8][9][10] His family is Colombian, and a DNA test found that his genetic ancestry includes European (mostly Spanish), Indigenous and some African roots.[1] His paternal grandfather was a wealthy Colombian landowner, and his great-great-grandfather, Higinio Cualla, was Mayor of Bogotá for sixteen years in the late 1800s, and was considered an important modernizer of the city.[1] Leguizamo had always declared that he was Puerto Rican on his father’s side, which was one of the reasons he was selected as the Puerto Rican Day Parade Global Ambassador of the Arts,[11] and marched in the parade on June 12, 2011.[12] Going further back in time, it was determined that Leguizamo’s maternal lineage includes the 16th-century Spanish conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar, as well as Jerónimo Betuma, a 17th-century indigenous Colombian of noble birth.
John Leguizamo, while clearly part Amerindian, is basically a Conquistador-American. This entitles him to affirmative action.
Back to Variety:
“Alina of Cuba” is slated to begin production on Aug. 15, with the crew shooting in Colombia. Franco will star opposite Ana Villafañe, who portrays the title character Alina Fernandez, Castro’s daughter. The script follows Alina’s life as Castro’s illegitimate daughter and a critic of his reign in Cuba before she left the country and defected to Spain in 1993.
Alina Fernandez is Cuba’s anti-Communist rebel princess.
Franco’s casting as Fidel Castro was supported by the real life Fernandez, who is participating in the film as an on-set creative and biographical consultant.
Leguizamo’s attacks on Franco’s casting were responded to by the Spanish movie’s producer John Martinez O’Felan:
“Finding and convincing James Franco to play Castro, was a fun and challenging process and has been the collaborative work of the universe,” O’Felan said. “Because our director’s original order was to find an actor who holds a close physical resemblance to the real Castro to build from, along with finding someone Alina Fernandez would strongly endorse.”
He added, “To get there on such a tough look to cast, we used Fidel Castro’s ancient Galician heraldry as our focal compass, and then combed through the entire ranks of actors with Latin roots in Hollywood to find someone who has a similar facial structure. In executing a close search into our hopefuls through the eye of Spanish and Portuguese genealogy which the Galicians held, we found that James, by far, had the closest facial likeness of our Industry’s leading actors, meaning that the focus would be to build out his character accent and we’d have a stunning on-screen match to intrigue audiences and bring the story to life with true visual integrity. Altogether, working with such a supportive and exciting cast has been a true blessing to our team and project.”
These references to “facial structure” led to fervid responses that the filmmakers were into phrenology and calipers.
Of course, in reality, casting agents have to care about facial structure. If they don’t, the make-up artists do.
Being a handsome white man, James Franco is vastly more similar in facial structure to Castro than most Latinos.
In general, you would need a movie star to play Fidel Castro, whom Jared Taylor, among many others, says was the most charismatic individual he ever met. John Leguizamo, for instance, is a fine character actor, but he’s not a leading man and Fidel was very much the leading man.
I like James Franco as a comic leading man (“First time?“), and I’d like to see him play Castro in a comedy, although this movie sounds like a heavy family drama. Whether Franco is ideal for that is uncertain. But you can’t deny that he plausibly looks like Castro.
Accents are a big issue in movies although hard to predict. Franco, as far as I can tell does not speak Spanish. Franco, who grew up in Palo Alto, speaks California English.
Castro spoke English like a less facile Tony Montana, with a stereotypic number of hand gestures. On the other hand, Castro, by all accounts, did not strike his fellow Cubans as weirdly accented while speaking Spanish. He went on forever in his speeches, but apparently the Presidente-for-Life struck many Cubans as hugely eloquent.
Nobody has ever really figured finally how to deal with movies in different languages. For example, Spanish tends to use more syllables to express a thought than English, so Spanish speakers tend to speak faster. But that doesn’t mean they sound like they are speaking faster to other Spanish speakers, since the number of ideas expressed per minutes is, apparently, roughly the same.
The American movie industry doesn’t really know how to deal with foreign languages. For instance, most Best Picture winners are nominally in English. In this century, I believe that all the Best Picture winners are said to be with the characters mainly speaking English with the exception of Gladiator (2000), which is, conveniently, in Latin, allowing actors to speak in whatever accent is most comfortable for them. Did for example, Amadeus (1984) attempt to mimic Austrian German? As far as I can remember, not really.
But is this movie, Alina of Cuba, which is directed by Spaniard Miguel Bardem, the cousin of movie star Javier Bardem, husband of Penelope Cruz, and the two cousins are scions of a family that has been famous in Spanish movies since silent movie days, going to be in English or Spanish or both? Bardem has cast a whole bunch of Spanish-surnamed actors.
Franco is an all-around talent as an actor, director, and writer, but he’s not assumed to be superb at any one of those jobs. So asking Franco to sync up his accent with the Spanish-speaking cast members is a challenge. On the other hand, he starred and directed in a pretty good 2017 movie, The Disaster Artist, as Tommy Wiseau, a weirdly accented Eastern European who directed The Room, a cult classic bad movie, so Franco may (or may not) have the technical gifts to pull off whatever Bardem asks.
Franco is not an exact double for Castro, but he’s quite close facially, and radiates that sense of smug handsome guy entitlement that helped make Castro irresistible to women (along with his life-or-death tyrannical power, which, as Henry Kissinger pointed out, is quite the aphrodisiac). According to Castro’s aides, the notches on his bedpost exceeded Wilt Chamberlain’s claim.
Franco isn’t as tall as Castro, but he’s not all that far off. CelebHeights a useful website where one guy has converted his hobby of having his picture taken with celebrities into the most useful crowdsourced estimates of how tall famous people are, estimates Castro as 6’1″, quite tall for impoverished Cuba at the time. Franco, it says, is 5′-10.5″ and Leguizamo 5’6.5″.
Fidel Castro’s father was born in Galicia in northwestern Spain, just north of Portugal.
His mother was born in the Canary Islands. A 2018 study of Canarians finds “it was estimated that the Canarian population is, on average at an autosomal level, 75% European, 22% North African and 3% Sub-saharan.”
The North African contribution apparently comes from the indigenous Guanches who were known in ancient times to Romans, but then apparently were cut off from the outside world during the Dark Ages. They appear to be related to the Berbers of Northwest Africa. These pagans were rediscovered by Christians in the proto-Age of Exploration when Mediterranean navigators began settling on the Canary Islands in the early 1300s. A small black element was later introduced via the African slave trade.
If Castro’s mother was exactly representative of the average Canarian in the 2018 study, that would suggest that Fidel was 1/64th black and the rest Caucasian, 88% European and 11% Guanche/Berber.
Fidel certainly looked all white. A popular meme is that Castro looked like actor Liam Neeson:
James Franco’s surname descends from his Portuguese ethnicity grandfather from Madeira in the Atlantic. His paternal grandmother was Swedish and his mother is Ashkenazi.
Madeiraians are mostly Portuguese (unlike the Canary Islands, Madeira was uninhabited when the Portuguese landed in 1418), but appear to be slightly more sub-Saharan than Canarians via the slave trade. So if the best single guess is that the wavy-haired Castro was, say, 1/64th sub-Saharan through his Canarian mother, my best guess would be that the curly-haired Franco is roughly that same fraction black through his Madeiraian grandfather.
Similarly, Franco is about a quarter Levantine (assuming Ashkenazis are roughly half descended from ancient Hebrews, half from Southern Europeans), while Castro was likely about 1/8th Berber.
My rough guesses (with fractions way too precise in order to make the arithmetic add up)
Castro Franco
Iberian 49/64 15/64
Other Southern
European – 16/64
Northern
European – 16/64
Non-European
Caucasian 14/64 16/64
Sub-Saharan 1/64 1/64
Amerindian – –
I wish I could find Leguizamo’s ancestry from Finding Your Roots.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
There’s a notion that the Isle of Thanet in Kent gets its name from Carthaginian traders. Presumably they went to Cornwall to buy tin and then explored a bit further. There’s also a notion that the names of some of the Hebridean islands come from their language.
So us whitest-of-whites will be some tiny portion Levantine. Therefore I am qualified to play Jesus in movies.
A version of what Castro delivered at his own trial.
Pretty eloquent and, frankly, awesomely badass:
https://www.marxists.org/history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16.htm
For my dead comrades, I claim no vengeance. Since their lives were priceless, the murderers could not pay for them even with their own lives. It is not by blood that we may redeem the lives of those who died for their country. The happiness of their people is the only tribute worthy of them.
What is more, my comrades are neither dead nor forgotten; they live today, more than ever, and their murderers will view with dismay the victorious spirit of their ideas rise from their corpses. Let the Apostle speak for me: ‘There is a limit to the tears we can shed at the graveside of the dead. Such limit is the infinite love for the homeland and its glory, a love that never falters, loses hope nor grows dim. For the graves of the martyrs are the highest altars of our reverence.’
… When one dies
In the arms of a grateful country
Agony ends, prison chains break – and
At last, with death, life begins!
“After leaving the cell they signed the certificate. I know they did so believing in good faith that this was the only way they could save my life, which they considered to be in grave danger. I was not obliged to keep our conversation secret, for I am bound only by the truth. Telling the truth in this instance may jeopardize those good doctors in their material interests, but I am removing all doubt about their honor, which is worth much more. ”
Just laughed really hard at the idea of Biden risking his life for his principles (or bothering to acquire principles) or being able to write that speech.
We’re not sending our best, folks.
Not many Americans really give a damn about the real Castro anymore, as anybody under 40 probably couldn’t care less who he was. So long as the Rebel Princess has a nice ass, I don’t think you need to make a big effort for authenticity with looks on the Fidel character. Hell, just throw a beret on either of these guys, or get that Myth Busters guy – he’s not working right now, is he?
If I knew the political angle would be honest, showing Castro as a guy who sentenced a formerly prosperous island of people to extreme poverty and misery for half a century, I might go see it. I’ll look for a review in these pages.
Finally, I wanted to point the readers to clip of Fidel Castro on Meet the Press in 1959, but NBC took the clip down. It must be embarrassing to them or something. Castro was interviewed by one Miss May Craig, reporter from the State of Maine, who asked some tough questions. Can you imagine a Meet the Press that wasn’t full of State Media toadies? A decade earlier, Whittaker Chambers denounced a man named Alger Hiss as a Communist on the show. A few years later, in 1951, Senator Joe McCarthy came on the show for the 5th time, with a pistol on his lap, he being worried about actual assassination, not just character assassination…
I don’t care about Fidel Casto’s genetic background so much as that it’d been better for all of us that this charismatic character had been introduced to a charismatic sniper round back in the 1950s.
In an age when kings of England are regularly played by sub-Saharan Africans, a drop more or less of Spanish/Amerindian./Berber blood hardly has much bearing on an actor’s suitability for a part.
I keep wondering why the F Hollywood agents aren’t telling their non-white clients to stfu about their white clients getting non-white roles. “Listen, John, if you’re going to b*tch about James getting a Castro role we won’t cast you in the new TV series as an Italian. Capice, bubbe?”
If I were a white talent with CAA and had any clout I’d be screaming at my agent to shut these ungrateful minorities up and play ball or else I wouldn’t do whatever crap project the CAA needed me to do to fulfill their deal with the studio.
Thank you, Piltdown Man for that 1st clip.
Regarding the 2nd one, that shows that Commie thing about these long-term Revolutions that never seem to end. Ya’ gotta keep the people motivated and resentful at somebody, or they might wonder more about the economy…
Peak Stupidity covered this deal in “Long Marches, never-ending marches, and Revolutions”.
“!Viva la Revolución! !Vamenos, Muchachos!”
.
.
“Zzzzz… oh… viva la Revolución .. vamenos to los especiale Early Bird!”
.
In the WWE, one of the reasons the league jumped out and promoted the heck out of Roman Reigns was not just his talent; it was the fact that they could check off the box of “big time East Asian/Pacific Islander wrestler.” Even when he was getting massively booed and was unpopular, they promoted him, just for the diversity pokemon points.
Separately, Rashida Jones’s career has been massively helped by being black and yet presenting as just a cute, tanner white girl. She was on Parks & Rec for years and yet critics consistently found that her character seemed superfluous and under used. Well, Leslie needed a black best friend, and Jones is black.
I had a similar thought watching the otherwise very good House of Gucci.
There are scenes in Italy where Italian characters speak English to each other with Italian accents. Better to have the actors learn their lines in Italian, and have subtitles. Maybe to Italian speakers it will sound like Americans butchering Italian but to English speakers it will sound like Italian.
Or maybe the actors will learn their Italian dialogue as well as Christoph Waltz learned his for Inglorious Basterds.
I turned to wiki to get some knowledge of Franco.
Well, I do not know how many notches he has on his bedpost but he has a long list of girls and women accusing him of what wiki calls sexual misconduct.
How many Hispanic ‘ideas per minute ‘ are there? Will I have beans or rice for dinner? How about beans AND rice?
I read a speech of Castro’s a million years ago and was blown away. Guy’s a poet. I had the impression that he had not prepared, he was able to just extemporaneize and hit it every time. When Battista had a “trial” in Castro’s hospital room, Castro quipped that it was a bad location because people might get the impression that justice itself is unwell.
Luckily for me I’m an ignorant American so I wasn’t bothered the way Spanish speakers were that a major character from Narcos (either Colombian or Mexican) was played by an actor with an apparently blatantly Chilean accent.
Rome and Game of Thrones using British accents made sense. You can convey class or geography with those accents. Plus Rome is historical, just like the British Empire!
Netflix has made dubbing for foreign shows a major thing. I don’t like it or use it but it makes sense. Previously in America foreign language material was reserved for prestige films (except for Kung Fu movies and anime, I guess). Dubbing was considered crass for that. But for popcorn streaming entertainment it makes sense people want to be lazier. One thing streaming has accomplished is that small foreign countries can now film stuff with real budgets. So if Americans will watch your Icelandic show, you can have a budget Iceland could never support.
Genocidal communist Justin Trudeau would probably be ecstatic in accepting a role as the monster who might be his father, the democidal Communist Fidel Castro and could convincingly spar in a fantasy friendly match up with a comsymp Ernest Hemingway. Steven Spielberg could lend the latter’s character a top-of-the-line shotgun and Alec Baldwin should serve as the set’s armorer.
However, there is no truth to the rumor that Alina of Cuba director Miguel Bardem plans to star Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men and the Sea.
Also see: Allina Health of North Cuba (Minnesota) & Western Wisconsin
In Biblical epics from 60 years ago, like “Ben-Hur” and “Sparatacus,” the standard was that Roman senators spoke Oxbridge English, Roman legionaries spoke Cockney English, and Hebrews spoke American English.
Obviously, the fact that girls submitted to James Franco without him then marrying them should disqualify him from playing Fidel Castro, who never _ever_ took advantage of girls without marrying them.
The WWE did have a bit of a hit with Roman Reigns’ cousin, the half-Pacific Islander “The Rock,” whom I saw in 2001 with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the front row to welcome him to the movie biz. Duane Johnson took a decade to make it as a movie star, but did have a really good second decade in the 2010s.
Leguizamo is correct on Franco being unable to play Castro. Natively born cuban Aña De armas is the only choice.
You know perfectly well America is more responsible for impoverishing Cuba than Castro.
Sanctioning Cuba, a tiny country swimming distance from America is like if the rest of the country to decided to build a wall around Nebraska and said, “stop impoverishing yourselves with bad policies!”
Perhaps for your next trick you’ll claim Irans rulers are less serious than the corrupt, moronic goatherder “princes” in the arab oil states and that’s why Iran has bigger economic hurdles.
Was there any good movie about famous recent history figures? I think yes- Downfall about Hitler & Darkest Hour about Churchill (haven’t seen this one), The Iron Lady about Thatcher. Patton yes, MacArthur- not sure
On the other hand, most films or series about Lenin, Stalin, Eisenhower, Che Guevara, … were not that good.
The Fidel movie should be in one language. The only very good film in two languages (Aramaic & Latin) was Gibson’s Christ movie.
And the whole “genealogy” stuff is not too important. In order to show a charismatic leader, you have to choose either a leading man or a character actor.
Bigger thing is that Latin America, it seems, can’t become a functioning modern continent. Even with whites. Artistic types tend to overlook boring & gradual, but necessary steps to create a functioning country; they prefer dramatic gestures, even when they lead to mass murder.
In “The Third Man”, the Welles character says: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
I would have retorted: Switzerland had produced Bernoulli brothers and Euler, who changed the world more than the Leonardo-Michelangelo bunch, and created the best conditions for living in history. Unfortunately, you artistic types relish in chaos which always ends in – misery and disaster.
My Dad is a few years younger than Castro; also 6′ 1″. When he grew a beard in his 20s, all his friends started to call him Fidel (they were not kidding; he could have been Castro’s body double). My Dad is 100% German (specifically Swabian). It would be silly to cast someone who looked Amerindian or Mestizo as Castro…
Apparently Mr Leguizano has never heard of “acting “ or “role playing.”
Wrestling is not known for its long-term commitment to make X a star. Especially Vince McMahon. No matter how good their pedigree. Plenty of sons and brothers of famous wrestlers have appeared and hyped only to be gone in a matter of months.
Its a ruthless business, all about drawing power NOW. Thus, the sticking with the unpopular Reigns was definitely motivated by race/ethnicity pokemon points.
Reigns did have the same problem that The Rock suffered early in his career: he was saddled with a babyface (good guy) persona that the fans hated.
The Rock was booed out of a lot of arenas when he first appeared with his uber-nice guy, rule-following smiling face routine. Facing being demoted, however, The Rock switched to a bad guy, wise guy jerk routine that worked amazingly well. The rest is wrestling history– The Rock was one of the greatest wrestlers of all time.
Most critics were crying for Reigns to go heel (bad guy) for years. He had the look, the attitude, the persona, it would’ve worked great. But unlike with The Rock, Reigns was stuck with being a babyface. It had to be management demanding it, the boobirds and lowered ratings were too loud to be ignored.
I’m sure there are people out there who’d think that a good idea.
Dubbing is crass & funny. I remember how hilarious it was when I watched Hawks’ “Red River” in Italy, with Montgomery Clift yelling “Avanti! Avanti!”; also, in Austria, when an Indian chief, cheering up Apaches in a battle with US cavalry, shouts:”Vorwärts Kameraden”.
Peter Falk played Castro – well, kind of – in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Franco is Jewish, and Leguizamo isn’t black. This complaint isn’t going anywhere.
James Franco needs to play convicted murderer Troy Kell.
John Leguizamo is stone-cold stupid. He did a stand up special on “being Latino” or something and repeatedly made statements like “we’re ALL 1/8 African,” “we’re ALL 1/16 Jewish,” etc (the “we” being Latinos). He had clearly looked up some (probably inaccurate) stats on average Latino ancestry and literally did not understand that it did not apply at the individual level. Guy is genuinely dumb.
Well, in fairness, Justin Trudeau’s mother was already married.
Regardless of the casting, this film sounds like a disaster in the making. A flop. I could be wrong.
The real issue with Franco is not looks but personality. It will be a test of his acting skills. While looking a bit like Castro, Franco exudes “East Coast” and “white” and “privilege” and “Ivy league”. I suspect he can’t pull off a larger than life figure like Castro, who should be played by Marlon Brando, or maybe, indeed, Liam Neeson.
In reality, though, nobody should play Castro. Any movie about Castro should highlight his evil and the damage he did to Cuba. But no movie made today would do that.
Da Rock is the worst wooden actor ever. His real claim to fame is his insanely effective workout routine. Every day for hours. On far off movie shooting locations, he brings the equivalent of two home gyms worth of weights and equipment to maintain this routine. Awful actor, but making tens of millions every year, because the worldwide movie going masses like him.
Speaking of impressive and less impressive politicians, are the five smartest nationally known politicians who can still run for president in the future: Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron desantis, JD Vance, and Blake Masters?
Who’s even on the Democratic bench that’s supposed to be smart? Mayor Pete?
Say what you want- American cinema is without competition. True, there are, historically, more artistic canonical films in other countries (France, Italy, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Japan,..) – but no one can compete with the US. American cinema covers all genres – and more. From blockbusters to drama, from sci fi to biopic, from fantasy to low budget cult classics.
I saw Franco in just one movie, “Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (a very good film):
Superfly Snuka was over in the 1980s. Pacific Islanders have been a mainstay of wrestling for decades.
You could, of course, also retort that cuckoo clocks were never produced in Switzerland. They are a German invention.
The reason anyone anywhere cares about Mr. Leguizamo’s opinion is what, now? Say what you will about Cuba, but every time the big stupid bully to the north tried to mess with his country, little Fidelito managed to give Uncle Sam a good swift kick in the nuts and survived, and that should earn anyone’s respect.
I’ve seen no good evidence that Ashkenazi are genetically related to “Hebrews” except where they’ve intermarried with Sephardic Jews. The politics of the issue makes some believe that unless Ashkenazi can trace an ancestor from 2,000 years back to the Roman province of Palestine they can’t have Israel.They own Palestine because they took it and can hold it. Ashkenazi are obviously an Eastern European people.
Yeats, on the eve of WWII said,
Castro was full of passionate intensity but he was also evil. As senile as Biden is (and Castro was senile too in the later years of his endless rule – no matter how senile Biden is, we get 8 years of him maximum) I would take him in a minute over the murderous Castro.
So much of our celebrity-driven culture is produced by and for women and gay men. I’m grateful to our host for writing about movies, movie stars, etc., in a way that normal straight men can understand and appreciate.
You’ve made a good case that if we must follow the inane new rules, then Franco is in fact a terrific fit.
Nonetheless, since I don’t think much of the historical Fidel Castro, I propose he be played by Will Smith, and the leading female role go to Kim Kardashian.
Cuckoo clocks aren’t even Swiss – they emerged from the Black Forest region of Germany.
The Swiss did invent Swiss cheese – I’ll give them that. Of course they just call it cheese.
I love it how actors playing Mexican characters will speak perfect English (except for the put-on accent of course) but now and then address someone as “Señor”. Sheesh. Someone who can say “The drought is bad this year” or “I have title to this land” will generally also have “sir” or “mister” in his English vocabulary.
I get the idea ‘Iron Lady’ was a deliberate insult to Thatcher, as you would expect from the people involved.
Castro is not brown enough to portray himself in our modern age!
Well, Yiddish accents would have been anachronistic.
Wokism lacks a commutative property.
Macbeth played by a Sub-Saharan – A-OK, no problem.
A “Latino” played by a racially similar “white” – oh hell no.
“No, gracias. Ya me voy obtener mis Depends.”
John Leguizamo Is 5’ 8”
OT: Why does it seem that a lot of the great minds are shorter than average?
Kurt Gödel: ~5’ 6 ½”
Ludwig Wittgenstein 5’ 6”
Enrico Fermi: 5’ 5 ½”
Albert Einstein: 5′ 8 ½”
John Von Neumann: 5’ 6 ¼”
J. Robert Oppenheimer: 5’ 10”
Richard Feynman: 5’ 10 ½”
Aristotle 5’ 5”
John Archibald Wheeler: 5’ 9”
Alfred Hitchcock: 5’ 6”
Isaac Newton: 5’ 6”
Voltaire: 5’ 4”
J.R.R. Tolkien: 5’ 5”
Ludwig von Beethoven: 5’ 6”
Alexander the Great: 5’ 6”
Certainly there are outliers, like Darwin at 5’11” and Alan Turing at 5’ 11½” and John Nash at 6’ 1”.
Meanwhile this Scientific American article says that taller people are more successful and healthier.
Leonard Nimoy’s first Mission Impossible episode as the team’s master of disguise had him posing as a Castro-type figure who has just emerged from the jungle after years of freedom-fighting. The son of Ukrainian Jews, Nimoy did a terrific tongue-in-cheek job with the role
Falk was a good actor, too bad he didn’t get a chance to make a bio pic about Castro, directed by John Cassavettes circa 1978, with Andy Kaufman as Che Guevara.
Classic TV shows usually have Latin characters speak English in a stilted, nobly theatrical tone.
MALE: I must go and fight beside my people!
FEMALE: Yes Rodolfo …. But … But … I am soon to bear your child!
MALE: Felinda, my love! (puts hand on her belly) You would have our son grow up as a slave to the tyrants?
FEMALE: You are right — Go, Rodolfo! You must go and lead our people to freedom!
Remember a few years back Blacktivists protested a white woman playing an Egyptian Queen in one of the Mummy films. Problem was the actress was Tunisian.
You mean like this?:
Great and true commentary written by >>> Screenplay by Graham Greene. I must watch that movie again.
It is depressing that a grown man would make such an idiotic statement as the one this guy Leguizamo has made. Mr. Sailer’s strength as a deflator of BS is hardly necessary for swatting this silly fly.
Agreed Jack, to a point. I’d rather have the senile old man up in Washington, FS, of course. However, some, maybe all, of the reason Biden and people like Pelosi, etc, aren’t as evil as Castro is that they haven’t been allowed to be. They don’t have absolute power – simple as that.
Hell, hasn’t Biden been in Washington about the same duration – 1/2 a century – as Fidel Castro was in power in Cuba? Imagine if Biden could have done whatever he wanted…
WhereIsMyHandle sounds like a Communist apologist. Would that you, WIMH, get to experience what the Cubans, Russians, Chinese, or Cambodians did.
A fellow Hibernan, as, in part, was “Che” – Enesto Guevara De La Cerna y Lynch.
Imagine being descended from conquistadors and larping as a wife-beater-wearing PR from the hood.
I guess his arc is ours.
If it’s cultural appropriation to play a character from another group, then it should be cultural appropriation to take the place of a person from another group in real life. By that logic all foreigners in America are illegitimate and should go home. I pretty much agree. Leguizamo and others saying similar things are geniuses and should go back to whatever places they or their ancestors called home and enrich those places. It’s a win-win situation!
Fidel could also order a mean lunch (the relevant quotes are at 3:50-4:15):
If you think it’s appropriate and “brave” for a black woman to play Anne Boleyn, then bitching about white guys playing other ethnicities is just a double standard that is rapidly diminishing in effectiveness with normal people. You can’t have it both ways.
I mean, it makes sense as an affirmative action program for people of Latin American ancestry, like Leguizamo. If you see it in terms of distributing resources (ie ‘gibs’) it makes sense-Franco is not part of a marginalized community, unlike Castro (lol!)so he doesn’t get to take a job that would go to a member of a marginalized community (Latinos in this case). It’s the same principle as the complaints over cis people playing trans and straight people playing gay but never the reverse (how many gay men have played straight characters over the years?)
The genetic argument reeks of white supremacy to these people (even though it might make sense to, say, a Japanese or Nigerian viewer who would notice mostly the similarity of the actors).
Your point was valid for maybe…. 4-5 years at most. But the longer he stayed in power, the more it became Castro’s fault. After around 1965, the person responsible for Cuba going in the shitter was Castro.
He could have easily stepped down and/or allowed free elections for the good of the Cuban people he always claimed to love so much, but instead he stayed in power and drove the damn thing into the ground and threw everyone who publicly disagreed with him in prison.
Yiddish?
I liked Franco in his role as Alien in Spring Breakers. It qualifies him to do Castro IMO. PS Spring Breakers is an insidiously transgressive movie.
What’s funny is that at the same time Cuban (And slightly dusky skinned) Ana de Armas, an almost completely Iberian like Castro is playing the WASP Marilyn Monroe. And she doesn’t really nail the voice (To the point that her Cuban accent is clear) but then it was so idiosyncratic that most actresses would struggle. de Armas is pretty and cute and so maybe reminds execs of their daughters but doesn’t have very much screen charisma.
But put the movie in black and white and de Armas’ light green eyes can just as well be blue. And like Franco, she has close enough to Monroe’s facial structure to make it work. (Though obviously it’s not as uncanny as with Franco, she looks more like a young Gwen Stefani doing Monroe cosplay but big name actresses with big round faces are hard to find) Is making a movie which exaggerates Monroe’s psychological breakdowns and meltdowns whilst putting her on a heroic pedestal such a good thing for impressionable BPD girls? Probably not. The big thing for them is controlling those impulses, making Monroe a tragic hero for being plagued by them and exaggerating her acting out isn’t so good.
And the big macro divide in phenotype in Europe is between neolithic farmer and hunter-gatherer/their herder cousins the Yamnaya and Franco has lots of neolithic ancestry from Iberia from his father and from the Levant through his mother.
You only really need the brown eyes and curly hair to get there. There is a reason the combination of dark eyes and dark hair (Sometimes also with ruddier skin) is so striking that ‘black Irish’ came to be a term since just those traits together made somebody look so different from the mostly white blue eyed Irish.
He even has the wiry patchy beard in the same places as Castro. Will he play a good impersonation of him? Probably not, he’ll just play him as James Franco dressed up as Castro. Also there is just no controversy over his treatment of women now? Shouldn’t it be ‘He’s not latino and he mistreats women!’? I really think the latter is the bigger issue.
Lautrec is one of my favorite outrageous persons. For instance, when Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, threw a party for some occasion & Toulouse Lautrec didn’t show up, some friends chided Henri for that. He pooh poohed them saying: When my ancestors were leading crusades in the medieval times, the Saxe Coburg were still peasants in Germany.
He is among post-Impressionist masters, along with his friends Seurat and Van Gogh (and Cezanne and Gauguin), and I enjoyed his paintings in Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Prague….
He was also a man of integrity who almost fought a duel over his deceased friend Van Gogh’s reputation.
James Franco did not ruin “Carlito’s Way” as Benny Blanco from the Bronx. Dice Clay got some miles out of mocking the shit out of Leguizamo about this. But for Broadway enexplicably giving him work and Hollywood’s need for Latinos, he would be waiting tables ; Franco for the win!
This is an astute observation, Achmed.
One might say that “Castro was a communist and progressive American politicians are not” but that’s a difference in name only. Communists and progressives have the same goals: the elimination of personal wealth and redistribution to favored constituencies, and government control of the economy for the supposed good of the whole. So they are the same.
Socialist regimes always – ALWAYS – devolve into totalitarian tyranny. Because you cannot control the economy and also allow free enterprise. You cannot redistribute without taking from someone else. Somewhere the actions of a socialist government – whatever you call it – run counter to the to the self-interest of some portion of the population, therefore that portion of the population is a threat to the government and must be coerced or removed. And as the economy gets worse, the coercion and repression becomes more severe in response to growing discontent. It’s a natural course of things.
And to some degree – the power and the coercion itself are a goal – so they pursue those policies that push them towards more power.
Hell – I’m not dumb – I know that all governments do this, but those that favor free elections and free enterprise keep the people just happy enough that they don’t revolt and therefore they don’t need as much heavy handed control.
But notice how as the American economy has worsened over the past 30 years and redistribution has increased – the tax system has become more progressive and regulations more burdensome – the coercive state has grown. It’s not a mistake.
There are still a certain limit of checks and balances in place and elections are still nominally “free”, but you are correct, that’s the only thing stopping Pelosi or Schumer or Biden (or Obama or Bush) from becoming more like Castro, and those protections are steadily eroding.
de Armas is not the least bit “dusky skinned” unless maybe she has been to the beach recently. Marilyn BTW was also a bottle blond.
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/ana-de-armas-1626771511.jpg?resize=980:*
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-89671c6704327895503211238f748a89-lq
BTW, Monroe’s mother was born in Mexico.
OT:
Everyone interested in movies must rejoice. Warner Bros made a movie so woke and bad that the new cost-cutting CEO just sh*t canned it after it wrapped filming and racked up \$90million in expense.
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/batgirl-movie-why-not-releasing-warner-bros-1235332062/
Apparently, the movie, directed by POC Belgian Moroccan film maker duo, won’t even make it to HBOMax streaming.
Thor Love and Thunder saw the biggest second weekend drop off of any of the Marvel films so far, apparently. 63% drop from 1st to 2nd weekend. In that movie, Thor takes a back seat to Jane Foster, the wiser, stronger Thor.
Incidentally, House of Gucci’s cast is so star-studded that an unrecognizable Jared Leto plays a supporting role as the Fredo of the Gucci family.
That is a very beautiful Yeats poem, but it was not “written on the eve of WWII”. It was written just after WWI in 1919, on the eve of the Irish civil war (a conflict between political factions within Ireland). The allusions are to that emerging conflict and the just-ended WWI, not to WWII.
I would pay money to see Justin Trudeau play Fidel Castro. The man seems more like an actor than anything else.
https://ethnicelebs.com/john-leguizamo
Granted, you seem way more familiar with professional wrestling than I, but could it have been a case of: bad publicity is better than no publicity at all?
In other words, booing is itself a form of fan engagement. And some people are going to be extremely skilled in generating that contempt from an audience. Didn’t the old school carnivals have people like that? Guys that were metaphorical professional punching bags with obnoxious voices and punchable faces for whom the crowd would pay good money to insult and throw tomatoes at?
It’s acting out some primordial instinct, one seemingly harbored by many, to derive psychic reward by picking on the detestable or “inferior”.
Leguizamo’s wiki pic shows him to be half Chekhov, half Zulu.
Short promo clips:
John Leguizamo Learns About His 9th Great-Grandfather | Finding Your Roots
Feb 17, 2022
Still Going… John Leguizamo’s Lineage is Traced Back More Than 15 Generations | Finding Your Roots
Feb 17, 2022
Found it! Looks like Nimoy threw in a little Che for good measure
Just so. For my money, the best “Castro” was Peter Falk in the role of the Castroesque, increasingly paranoid dictator in that early-1960s “Twilight Zone” episode. Leguizano may be fixated on external appearances, but Falk got to the heart of that evil bastard, and that’s more important even in this era of Wokeness ascendancy,
With the exception of Borges, Ortega y Gasset, and a handful of poets and novelists, not much of genuine interest has been said or written in Spanish since the days of Cervantes, Saint Juan de la Cruz and Lope de Vega.
I’m with Mr. Leguizamo on this. Hold him to his word: racial congruence for all acting roles! Which means of course no more negro Achilles or Anne Boleyn, and no more TV commercials featuring negro computer geniuses, windsurfers, or Grand Canyon hikers.
PITY THAT DOG DUDE IS NOT THER TO GUIDE HIM
Castro looked fully European to me.
More early Fidel:
https://www.vintag.es/2016/11/goodbye-fidel-castro-here-are-14-rare.html
The smug look on his face in many of the pics reminds me of the young Putin pics.
Apparently, Puerto Rico was settled, in the main, by Canarians.
Draw your own conclusions from that.
No one makes a better Roman senator than the late, great English Shakespearian character actor Michael Hordern.
Who, incidentally, narrated the originall BBC Paddington Bear animations.
As another plus in his career, John Mortimer had him in mind to play Rumpole of the Bailey, apparently a character based on Mortimer’s father.
Here’s a curious piece about Castro which no doubt will delight the readers of this website:
Was Fidel Castro Jewish?
https://thepurityspiral.life/was-fidel-castro-jewish/
This is very typical of Latinos – Conquistador father and Indian mother on one side and pure European on the other. The Middle Eastern/ N. African is probably on the Spanish side and a touch of black slave added in the Americas. There was no “one drop” rule in Latin America so everyone ended up with a little bit of black.
The mulattoes kept getting recrossed with whites until they just disappeared in many cases. Did you know that Mexico had slaves? The blacks just dissolved into the brown population.
Fidel was a schnorrer for money even then, though in those days he pestered Roosevelt instead of the Russians:
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2014/09/26/fidel-castros-childhood-plea-to-president-roosevelt/
Vaughn Meader’s career took a nosedive on Nov. 22, 1963 from which it never recovered. Basically he spent the rest of his life as an obscure piano player in local taverns and as a broken down alcoholic. Sad.
No need to guess then John Leguizamo will dislike that big rant about Fidel Castro.
https://archive.ph/1FlTU But with some drops of the F-word in that rant, viewer discretion is advised for a younger audience. 😉
Learned it from Steve:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-happened-to-mexico-s-blacks/
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/2002/05/08/Analysis-Mexicos-missing-blacks-Part-3/60621020910279/
No. USSR/Russia never sanctioned Cuba. Nor did China. Nor did the industrialized nations of Europe, Australia, Canada etc.
Cuba is poor because communism sucks.
Hah!
In Germany (and maybe in other non-English-speaking countries), the same voice actor usually dubs the same English-speaking actor in all films. This voice becomes as familiar to film watchers as the actor’s own voice is to English speakers.
Christian Brückner has been doing Robert De Niro since Taxi Driver. Coincidentally, he looks a bit like him.
Franco is a reprehensible turd, the kind of mediocrity Hollywood shits out reflexively nowadays. Whoever plays Castro, I’m sure the movie will suck. I did love ‘Che’ with Del Toro and with Bichir playing Castro.
Leguizamo was great in ‘Cronicas’ playing a scum bag reporter for a Miami-based news program covering a child murderer in Ecuador, and Leanore Watling is easy on the eyes.
Well, to be fair, negroes are frequently cast as people.
Do movie execs think of their own daughters as Monroe or want them to emulate her? If so, that’s really f**ked up. By all accounts, Monroe was handed around like a party favor.
Vaughn Meader’s career took a nosedive on Nov. 22, 1963 from which it never recovered. Basically he spent the rest of his life as an obscure piano player in local taverns and as a broken down alcoholic. Sad.
From Wikipedia:
Meader reportedly first learned of President Kennedy’s assassination after hailing a taxicab in Milwaukee. The driver, recognizing his celebrity passenger, asked “Did you hear about Kennedy in Dallas?” Meader thought the driver was telling a joke and responded “No, how does it go?” The driver then informed Meader of President Kennedy’s death. Meader then heard the breaking news bulletins over the taxi’s radio.
That’s also how Richard Nixon found out about the assassination, riding in a taxi from LaGuardia Airport to his Manhattan law office. He had boarded the plane that morning in Dallas, after giving a speech at a breakfast meeting of Pepsi dealers.
Regarding Vaughn Meader’s career, it would have faded soon enough in any event.
Ana de Armas gave a bewitching performance as Ryan Gosling’s beguiling virtual girl friend in Blade Runner 2049. I would enjoy Ana’s company for the weekend and then afterward put her on a plane for Havana where James Franco will meet her at the airport because his beard is just as shitty as Castro’s.
More Legui stuff.
I have a better idea. If a movie’s cast is, say, only 2% brown, then only 2% of browns should go see it.
Save the money. Don’t waste it on the usual hollywood trash.
But the best Caesar of all was Kenneth Williams. “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!”
This guy’s face is longer and narrower than De Niro’s New York City face. This guy looks like Max von Sydow’s younger brother who never made it out of Visby.
Here’s a story that is pure Theater of the Absurd:
Jewish man fatally shoots Chinese food deliveryman because he didn’t get enough duck sauce, gets out free as a bird on bail because it’s New York, decided he can’t live with what he’s done, takes the easy way out.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/diner-charged-in-nyc-delivery-worker-condiment-killing-found-dead-source/3812557/
Leanore Watling is easy on the eyes.
And how!
https://www.celebritymoviearchive.com/tour/movie.php/21744
“The smug look on his face in many of the [pix] reminds me of the young Putin [pix].”
In that pix Fidel looks eerily like his bastard, Justin. Fear not the Russians, young Pixo. The real threats to your life come from the palaces of the West. Btw: KGB taught Vlad to assume the look of a cipher to better disguise the wolf.
Brenda Dean (British union leader) spoke of her as “old tin knickers.” Perhaps the Russian meant something similar that was lost in translation.
Remember a few years back Blacktivists protested a white woman playing an Egyptian Queen in one of the Mummy films. Problem was the actress was Tunisian
Or the woke Tumblrinas who complained about a “white guy” playing a pharaoh in Night at the Museum. The white guy in question was Rami Malek, who is not only Egyptian but is also from a Coptic Christian family.
Nov. 22, 1963 was, of course, a Friday. Many restaurants, clubs, etc. didn’t open that evening, but some did, including a nightclub where Lenny Bruce was headlining. He went on that night, to a somewhat sparse audience. Supposedly he took the stage, stood in silence at the mic for about a minute, and said:
“Man…Vaughn Meader is fucked!”
The difference is that the ambitions of today’s tyrants or would-be tyrants are not primarily economic but demographic. They want to replace the population. They do redistribute wealth, but they also know that the very wealthy are best left alone.
There’s also the the drive to demoralise the population and promote all kinds of degeneracy. No communist country, however demented its ideologues, would have tolerated pride parades or drag queen story hours. These things don’t damage the economy in any direct way (which is why they are tolerated), but they are as destructive of civilisation as any kind of communism.
Peter Falk also played a schittload of Italian roles–mobsters, etc, not to mention his role as Columbo–even though Falk himself was a Hungarian Jew (There’s a statue of him, dressed as Columbo, in Budapest).
Lenny Bruce was right!
Well, he was a (substitute) drama teacher.
Nice pseudonym (?)
“Schopenhauer as Novelist: The Curiously Obscure Works of Machado de Assis”
https://counter-currents.com/2021/12/schopenhauer-as-novelist/
The mulatto population of Mexico is very concentrated in Vera Cruz state.
Mexico’s pure black population is exploding as Africans migrate there hoping to make it to the USA, but are stuck waiting. For now remain in Mexico policy + limited but still significant detention capacity blocks single african men from doing the “claim asylum at the border and disappear” thing. And they need a lot of cash for a coyote. In the past 5 years a common site in wealthier parts of northern Mexico are jet black skinny francophone West Africans riding bikes with DoorDash and UberEats deliveries. I don’t know how criminal or fertile they are for sure, but the ones under 30 dress like US hiphop thugs and the much less common young women are generally pregnant or holding a baby or both. On the positive side, I don’t think they are Muslims.
As a statement, it is indeed pretty impressive, for those of us who are fascinated with effrontery. But as controversial Swiss theologian Hans Kung said, as far as we know, when we die, we die. Yet we can live with the assistance of faith and hope (I’m paraphrasing). What sands out from Castro’s passage is the true-believing collectivist ideologue’s obsession with death. Unlike the Western Left, which denies the accusation of being a death cult, Castro makes it all too clear. Metaphorical life from literal death. With no cosmic travel of the soul as an entr’acte. I don’t believe this is what Schumpeter meant by his blithe phrase “creative destruction!”
It’s like how you can tell the film takes place in space by adding “space” to random words: space food, space pirates, space college, etc.
Ricky Ricardo?
Edward G. Robinson, “Dathan” in The Ten Commandments
“Nah, where’s ya God now, Moses?”
“ They want to replace the population. ”
While it doesn’t make a big practical difference, I don’t think most of the US and Euro overclass, mostly white themselves, actually wants to replace their white population. They just want more labor which makes their own financial and human capital more valuable. If mass brown migration depresses white fertility, they are OK with that tradeoff. But I also don’t think they’d be against a high white birthrate.
Some elements of both the overclass and underclass do actively hate whites like this, but that’s not my experience of them outside of diversicrats and humanities academics.
Best Castro ever was Tony Cardozo in Coleman Francis’ epic Red Zone Cuba. Cigar, beret, paste-on beard, good to go.
Shooting fast food staff over insufficient/excessive seasoning is a black thing. The poor guy just couldn’t live with his despicable act of cultural appropriation.
In that video Franco looks like the rapper Riff Raff and in his videos, Riff Raff looks like Justin Trudeau playing dress-up again.
I suppose it is all right to have a black man playing Heimdall, the Norse guardian of Asgard.
Or for that matter a Latino playing Hamilton.
In Spartacus, there were only three Englishmen among the leading cast – Lawrence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, and Charles Laughton. A number of the Roman patricians were played by Americans, including John Gavin, who played Julius Caesar. The chief Roman thug/bad-guy was played (ably) by American actor Charles McGraw.
I, for one, wouldn’t want to portray Fidel Castro; for James Franco to do so is a rather dubious honor. Conceivably, I COULD portray Castro, feeing on the psychic tension (and/or chasm) between my convictions and his. Guys like Tim Robbins, among others, have frequently done this, portraying characters whose convictions are polar opposites from his own. I honestly didn’t believe that Leguizamo would go mildly Woketarded over Franco’s putative role, as Leguizamo himself has portrayed non-Hispanic characters in some of his movies–no problem here. Since Franco’s lineage is largely Portuguese, what’s the problem? Are Those Other Iberians ostracized from the Hispanic galaxy? At any rate, Franco’s basic facial profile makes him suitable for the part, at least visually. As for Neeson, he, too could play the part. Spanish Galicia (not That Other Galicia) and, of course, Northern Ireland are on opposite ends of what was known as the Celtic Fringe. The folk music of Galicia was featured on The Chieftains’ Santiago album. Very similar to Celtic music of the British Isles–and to that of France’s Brittany, as performed by groups such as Kornog.
Nimoy was a good actor and a very entertaining actor (as opposed to William Shatner, who is a Ham actor and a very entertaining actor). It’s a shame he did not find more employment.
Here he is in a rare starring role, in a made-for-TV movie Assault on the Wayne (with unfortunately poor video quality), an entertaining and effective cold-war drama:
So many questions. Jews almost never commit suicide. How did this guy have a firearm in NYC?
How about neither?
BTW Biden is evil too–destroying his nation for status, graft and pats on the back and attaboys from his minders and patrons.
The minimum bar–not selling your nation out to foreigners; not actively wrecking it.
I’m not expecting George Washington every time out, but expecting reasonable republican competence–or at least honest effort–isn’t too much to ask. Dwight Eisenhower would be fine.
The movie’s producer, Mr. O’Felan, appears to have a Hispanicized Irish surname.
An Irishman was once prime minister of Spain and a half-Spaniard was long the president of Ireland.
Classic, indeed! Cue ABBA’s Fernando for the credits.
CS Lewis said that if we could hear ancient Celtic, we’d assume we were hearing some dialect of Spanish.
Agents want their 15% cut, they don’t care who plays whom. And if I was a white talent I’d quit Hollywood and go into game development.
“If I knew the political angle would be honest, showing Castro as a guy who sentenced a formerly prosperous island of people to extreme poverty and misery for half a century”
I think you should be fair. Cuba was subject to Russia-style US sanctions for half a century, and Cuba didn’t control a huge chunk of the world’s oil and gas supplies.
It’s not as if the Batista regime was all sweetness and light – they had secret police who you definitely didn’t want to cross. In Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana
https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Our-Man-in-Havana.pdf
Captain Segura is interested in our hero’s sixteen year old daughter:
Or Wiki:
Anyway, at the rate the US and the West in general is heading, extreme poverty and misery is increasingly going to be our lot. The small market town where I live now has two foodbanks.
Nimoy’s best performance was as a profet of doom, warning us about the coming ice age in this documentary. Before 1980, global freezing was all the rage, lol! Trust the science! Or soyence, as Fauci puts it!
I always thought Castro looked like an Arab. I think the black and white camera/video footage of him plus the curly black beard tended to emphasize an Arabian appearance.
Regarding accents, I couldn’t make it through House of Gucci because the accents were so bad. Lady Gaga was especially terrible as her accent sounded Russian. Al Pacino seemed like he would forget what movie he was in and start doing his American mafia guy accent.
That’s… not what he did, Steve.
He started an “acting school,” and proceeded to intimidate beginning actresses into disrobing for him, with the promise of getting them their first film credits and SAG card, which is almost impossible for the unconnected newbie to acquire, and you can almost never get an agent to give you the time of day in Los Angeles without one. He then went on to berate those who wouldn’t submit.
His history of abuse of underage girls is substantial. Attempting to lure a 17 year old girl to his hotel room in New York is one example… of many. Charges of abuse by female co-stars are lengthy. Knocking the air out of Busy Phillips is one example… of many.
And finally, I’m going to have to question your implied logic that because an actor’s lowbrow behavior reflects the rank behavior of the character he’s playing, he’s as much, if not more qualified to play the role over other, less lowbrow actors.
Franco is the reason Hollywood stinks, personified.
Unfortunately, Hollywood attracts narcissists, and people emeshed in assorted toxic pathologies, and actresses get stuck bearing the brunt of all their bullshit games. Women play the games too. The most underrepresented sociopaths operating in Hollywood today are batshit crazy old lesbians–and fags.
If you’re a straight woman who is strikingly beautiful, chances are some old skeezy lesbian is going to have at you, with the promise of this or that positive result related to your career. More of your favorite actresses have held their nose and “ate at the ‘Y’” than you’d want to imagine. Some of your favorite actors, even action stars, have made their way up the Hollywood food chain by closing their eyes, while thinking of better places, as some old fag gave service to their penis.
“He’s just blowing me, so I can’t be gay…”
Okay, big guy.
Anyway… parts of Hollywood are wonderful, with high-functioning adults playing at the top of their creative game. People you’d love to be friends with. Just top notch people, who are a creative joy to be around.
A smaller part of Hollywood is a vile cesspool too much of the time, and Franco getting his skank ass “cancelled” is a great advertisement for other sociopaths still going full steam ahead. Since all sociopaths believe they’re smarter than they are, Franco’s story won’t stop them, but they’ll be far less blatant in the future, and that’s an overall, small victory for everyone–and we need to greedily take them where we can get them.
A successful worm is still a worm. Don’t even passively defend worms. Please don’t assist in digging his wriggling little half-dead carcass back up.
He’s exactly where he should be: Out of the business. The dream-killing business.
Half Spanish-half Irish actor Martin Sheen (born Ramon Estevez) had a Galician father; he is often cast in Irish/Irish-American roles and has a very Kennedyesque look to him, albeit less JFK and more Ted as he has aged.
“James Franco’s surname descends from his Portuguese ethnicity grandfather from Madeira in the Atlantic.”
Seriously? Always thought that it was derived from Italy.
Bar none one of the funniest lines in the history of film.
Btw, doesnt the hood go on before the noose, otherwise it would come off when they drop?
I know about this movie, but I didn’t watch it. If it contains something like this
I’m OK with it.
If not- well, the movie sucks. It’s like portraying dog-loving Hitler or Stalin surrounded by adoring children.
It’s not about genealogy but looks. I searched Leguizamo and he looks a bit Mestizo. Castro looked white, just like Franco.
Is that a deal we should have taken? If everyone in America was 10% black and otherwise blacks would disappear, that would be the end of racial strife. OTOH, it would knock a coupe of points off of the average white IQ. Would it be worth it?
Maybe, like in Mexico and Brazil, there would be a small 100% white elite who would run big business, etc. In Mexico and Brazil these folks tend to be Lebanese (Maronite Christians). Three guesses as to what they would be in America.
OT
Back in 1960s UK, the singer Judith Durham was every dad’s favourite – the Kylie or Taylor Swift of her day, the pretty, non-threatening pop star. She left The Seekers at the height of their fame and went back to Oz.
I was always pleased that she’d realised there was more to life than a lot of money, and assumed she’d had a herd of kids (unlike Kylie or Taylor) and was living a quiet and contented life.
Alas, she’s just died at 79, childless, having in fact gone back to Oz to pursue a solo career. What a waste.
(Oddly, her biggest hit, The Carnival Is Over, would fit well in the monkeypox era, as the short-term Carnival lovers say goodbye and go their separate ways. I guess the difference was that Columbine had only one Pierrot at carnival time, not five or six)
Not that I disagree, but….aren’t all Hollyweirdos the same in that respect?
Among old-timers, James Cagney wasn’t, but if you look at them in the past, say, 40 years- they all are.
This sort of hissy over Franco is laughable.
The ridiculous casting we’re getting from Hollyweird is so obviously jamming blacks everywhere. Not just salt+pepper buddies and magic negro sages and rocket scientists, but perfectly normal husbands of white women or even wives of white men. But jamming blacks upon us so insistently they show up as friends and love interests of Victorian gentry. Heck they show up in Medieval England.
When you have this sort of whop upside the head, Orwellian, racially bogus casting, so bad it destroys suspension of disbelief–flat out takes it out back and beats it silly … and usually has me just turn off the TV–then complaining about anything else just looks silly and trivial.
Yeah, Wiki, well… I would agree that the corporatist government of Batista, beholden to the US in many ways, was not all sweetness and light. However, like lots of Latin American governments over the years, they became ultra-repressive BECAUSE there were Communists trying to take over society.
It’s been on and off like that for a century with those freakin’ people. This will relate very much to a reply I’ll make to another commenter, on how any country without a large middle class will be subject to that that sort of thing, so let me write about that there.
As for this part:
I don’t disagree*. You’ve made my point for me very well though. The US has nothing resembling free markets and freedom in general anymore. What would you expect when you have virtual Commies running your cities?
.
* Though I’ve written many times about the upcoming SHTF/dollar demise, I don’t think there will be starvation due to a lack of food in general. Some commenter asserted that we doomers were saying this, but I never have.
Once you get beyond the Basque Country, all of Northern Spain is still pretty Celtic – they play bagpipes, they built hill forts in olden times, they drink cider as they do in Cornwall and Brittany.
Here’s a Spanish version of Scarborough Fair sung by someone who really should have a rose in her teeth.
Here’s why it all seems different this time around, Rob. When have the Communists (los Resentidos, the sane Cubans called them) ever taken a country that had a big, much less White middle class?
Russia had the aristocracy and a lot of peasants mostly in 1917. China had nothing but broke-ass living-hand-to-mouth peons most of last century. Vietnam, I don’t know. However, as they take America from the inside (something most didn’t see coming), they know they have to first destroy the White Middle Class. Why? Because people with gumption, brains, disposable income, and some disposable time form their own political associations, form businesses that compete with Crony-Capitalist BigBiz and generally are able to seriously resist political change for the worse.
The White Middle Class must be destroyed before this country can be made Communist. You can’t shoot them all, because Amendment II still holds. So, you must replace them. Nobody wanted to admit this, but now they pretty much rub it in – of course, as we have all read from iSteve here, while telling us we are nuts for thinking it’s even going on.
Regarding your part about the wealthy being left alone. Is that so much different from the Stalinists and such? Yes, they destroyed the aristocracy (I read a book about them), but there were still people who ended up with lots of money.
Perhaps our rich elites will end up fighting it out like Lenin and Trotsky. Maybe we’ll hear about Gavin Newsome sticking an ice pick into Nancy’s Pelosi’s head one day. Now THAT’S something I’d pay to go see if they made a motion picture. (I’d still smuggle in gummies though – damned Capitalist Pigs charge \$3.50 for ’em!!)
I never thought Castro was a particularly handsome guy. (Something “off” around the eyes –I think.) Just a more or less average looking guy, with good size and apparently a ton of charisma.
But Castro darn sure did not age well. Check out some pics. As he ages he looks more and more Jewish. Near the end he looks like an aged version of Woody Allen in Bananas.
How about Yasiel Puig?
That death toll is twice the usual black rate!
Someone tell Legazebo that movies are generally cast BEFORE they’re shown in theaters.
Well, that is the Golden Age. Add in Unamuno to the first list, Calderon to the second and it would be a pretty adequate list for a human education.
You can assume Ashkenazis are roughly half descended from Arabs. “Ancient Hebrews” is a stretch.
I remember that too. In the spirit of the coming-ice-age era, I even found and bought that old movie about unearthing a caveman from a block of ice. Alas, it wasn’t as good the second time around.
Franco’s okay, but he’s no Jack Palance.
By that I suppose he meant ancient continental Celtic was pretty close to Latin, both in grammatical structure and vocabulary.
Sean Penn playing the Jewish wannabe-gangster lawyer was great.
Roman legionaries spoke Cockney English
Here’s a Roman legionary bucking the trend . . .
OT – A sad day – Judith Durham of The Seekers has passed away:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Durham
She brought a lot of joy and beauty into the World. RIP.
Never forget Bernardo O’Higgins. Or his mirror image, Éamon de Valera.
Great, perhaps, but hardly acting.
Meanwhile, a Latina with a Cuban accent is playing the whitest woman in history.
The casting of Franco as Castro is perfect; Castro was a jew and so is Franco. Jews are not White.
“Just laughed really hard at the idea of Biden risking his life for his principles (or bothering to acquire principles) or being able to write that speech.”
Write it? Hell, he’d have trouble reading it. At the height of his powers, Biden wasn’t capable of anything beyond “Where the white women at?” Now he’s reduced to “Where my sippy cup at?”
Undoubtedly the worst president ever.
How could anyone make The Pest and then not slink off and die from shame?
We won’t have true social justice until a dramatic film about Castro can have the lead played by … Whoopi Goldberg.
And no-one bats an eyelid.
Nimoy was always inexpressive, to the point of hardly being an actor at all, perfect for playing a robot, or an unemotional space alien, but not much else.
Remember, any white person can become a Latino if they want. They don’t even have to be a Sicilian like Al Pacino. A generic Northern European can pull it off with some work.
Scott Hall as Razor Ramon in the early/mid 1990s was very convincing.
Here was generic white Scott Hall in 1987 :
Here is Razor Ramon in 1992. Yes, they are the same person :
As this was before the Internet and real names were hard to unearth, a lot of viewers never even suspected he was anything other than a Cubano.
The only noteworthy thing about this fracas is that John Leguizamo immortalized himself as someone who is going to be seen as a big-mouthed ignoramus for all of eternity. Tons of people in Brazil look like James Franco, plus he has the same last name as one of Spain’s longest-reigning heads of state. Plus, remember that even Mitt Romney could be ‘Hispanic’ if he wanted since his father was in fact born in Mexico.
He almost looks Roman in that pic.
Merica.
Captain Queenan in The Departed.
Ironically, John Leguizamo is directly opposed to Ron Unz’s greatest wish. The two want exactly the opposite things. Remember the summary of Ron Unz’s ‘Hispanic Crime Series’ is the below :
“After adjusting for age brackets, gender balance, and US-born vs. foreign-born status, Mestizos from Mexico and Central America have a crime rate that is just 1.6x that of whites. 60% higher might seem like a lot, but when you consider that blacks have a crime rate 8x that of whites, the difference between 1x and 1.6x seems meaningless. When Hispanics replace blacks in a particular area, the entire aura of fear and menace in the air goes down a lot. Hence, Mestizo Hispanics will converge up to whites in crime rates, IQ, height, patents filed, female waist-to-hip ratio, and more!”.
“Castro was a jew and so is Franco.”
Francisco Franco was Jewish? Who knew? You learn something new every day here.
Biden was too busy doing what he was told to ever do what he wanted.
Jack D’s point about Castro and Biden is apt. A corrupt politician like Biden is probably better than a thug and dictator like Castro. Biden’s not likely to send you to a camp or have you stood up against a wall and shot (although – give it time – the Democrats seem to be headed that way).
And yet…………………
There is a sense in which liberal democracy is worse than dictatorship. Look at the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. 45 years of Soviet rule – as harsh and unjust as it was – did not make the Poles stop being Poles, the Czechs stop being Czechs, or the Hungarians stop being Hungarians. But 45 years of rule by the EU would probably turn those countries into something wholy unrecognizable. Viktor Orban at least recognizes this.
Lastly, James Franco vs. John Leguizamo is a sideshow. I am not interested in ‘Alina of Cuba’ unless they depict Fidel as being the biological father of Justin Trudeau through his affair with Margaret Trudeau. Otherwise, the biopic is not accurate.
Here is more of Scott Hall as Razor Ramon. He became Ric Flair’s tag team partner as well as cocaine supplier. Razor’s cocaine was a lot more potent than what even Ric Flair was accustomed to, so watch the very end to see Ric Flair go utterly insane on his cocaine high :
The last part is pure gold. Not to mention that it is very convenient that Razor’s early opponent was Randy Savage, so that Razor could say “Macho Mang” frequently.
Pure gold, chico.
Skipping ahead to 1:07:00 to see how this movie ends, we hear the order, “Belay that last order. Do not stand by to abandon ship.” The last order must have been, “Stand by [=wait in readiness] to abandon ship!” But then that “Abandon ship” order is belayed by the order “Do *not* stand by to abandon ship.” So the final order is “Abandon ship immediately!”
I love a military drama that features ambiguous and contradictory orders.
According to ancestry.com and 23&me, in addition to being more than 99% British Isles and Scandinavian in my DNA analysis, I am also less than 1% southern Bantu or west African. But then almost everyone I’ve spoken with also reports to having been identified as more or less one percent African. What a remarkable coincidence. I’m sure it has no relation to the anonymous insider at one of those organizations who boasted to a journalist that they throw that in there to “fuck with the bigots.”
https://ethnicelebs.com/james-franco
https://ethnicelebs.com/dave-franco
https://ethnicelebs.com/fidel-castro
https://ethnicelebs.com/raul-castro
https://ethnicelebs.com/francisco-franco
Or conversely a Latino Armando Pumarejo could become a white Frankie Williams:
“Timeline: History of WWE – Roddy Piper” Preview Clip: Frankie Williams
Piper’s Pit with Frankie Williams: Championship Wrestling
I didn’t know that she had died recently. RIP.
Your comparison with Swift is apt as far as level of fame, I suppose, but Judith Durham had more talent in her little finger than Taylor Swift has ever had, has, or will have. What a great voice.
“Spanish tends to use more syllables to express a thought than English, so Spanish speakers tend to speak faster. But that doesn’t mean they sound like they are speaking faster to other Spanish speakers, since the number of ideas expressed per minutes is, apparently, roughly the same.”
In Spanish classes, we were informed that the more educated Spanish speakers tend to speak slower, (comparatively speaking, as far as Spanish as a first language is concerned) due to having a larger vocabulary. In fact, one could make a comparison to English speakers, where the ignorant and less educated also tend to speak quicker since they have a smaller sized vocabulary, especially compared to university professors, public intellectuals, etc. since having a larger vocabulary and being on the right side of the Bell Curve, they are more apt to be thinking of how to state their thoughts in a precise manner before speaking. Hence the phrase “he speaks without thinking.”
Perhaps it’s more prominent in a state such as CA, with a sizable Mexican population, but those who protect the crops from rotting in the fields would probably speak the quickest of all Spanish speakers.
“According to Castro’s aides, the notches on his bedpost exceeded Wilt Chamberlain’s claim.”
Yeah whatever. Unless reliably documented, perhaps its best to chalk this up to male boasting. After all, how many males have had 20k women or more in a single lifetime? Realistically could count the number on a few fingers of a single hand. Now, if someone were to make this apply to Ghengis Khan, however, where quite a few million people on the earth have his DNA, then that’s a different matter.
Not saying that world leaders such as Fidel weren’t busy fraternizing with the enemy. Am saying that world leaders simply don’t have all the time in the world for extracurricular activities.
No.
Again, because of the lure of money and fame, Hollywood attracts narcissists and sociopaths across the spectrum. There’s a lot of great, extremely talented people who you would find to be a real pleasure to be around.
Many times, people who have grown up in the business match that descriptive. They’re not actors, directors, or screenwriters because they long for money and fame. They got into it because one or both of their parents were in the biz, and they grew up in some aspect of that industry being a part of their lives. Carrie Fischer notwithstanding, I personally knew one gal who’s father was a massive movie star, and an asshole, but she was a complete class act. Everyone on the crews liked her. I guess her dad taught her how not to behave. She also started in the production end and worked her way up with no dad-help.
My problem with Franco is he has no excuse. He had a good career going on, and he leveraged that to prey upon the weak and/or naive. Killing off girls dreams who are trying to start from square one, and before they even get their first real gig, leaving them on the side of the road, bitter. And for what? So that Franco may fuck? Hollywood’s got enough disappointment without the humiliation from creep shows like Franco on top of it.
Franco is what makes actresses quit the business. They shouldn’t leave. Franco needs to go.
Nobody has ever accused me of being a feminist. They annoy me.
That said, Franco’s a fucking asshole.
Castro?
He shouldn’t be cast as Bozo. He hasn’t got the emotional range.
I get what you say, but I think it’s different this time round in other ways. There’s racial hatred toward whites at play, for one thing, and a desire to neutralise them by reducing them to a minority in their own countries. I think it makes more sense to see things in terms of competition between races, not between ideologies.
True. People have varying motives for supporting mass immigration, and in many cases it’s just a matter of keeping wages down and importing new consumers for their products.
Disagree.
Mexico is run by a small white elite of spanish descent. By contrast, the USA is run by a small mixed-race elite of jewish ancestry.
Many people on your list aren’t so short for their time – ie they didn’t have ‘short’ genes. For example, Beethoven was born in 1770, so at 5-6 would likely have been a little taller than average. Born today, Beethoven might be anywhere from 5-11 to even 6-1. (Keep in mind back then your birth status had a significant effect on your height, with aristocrats often being 5 inches taller than peasants solely due to diet). There does appear to be a positive correlation between height and intelligence, but I wonder how much of that is due to what many people call the ‘funny looking kids’ being stunted in both IQ and stature. Regardless, I have met a lot of very smart and short Jews, including prior and current bosses.
A little of this, a little of that. The embargo/blockade is a problem, but also serves to excuse economic mismanagement by the government.
You see the same in Venezuela, where diehard Chavistas blame the country’s economic problems on foreign sanctions rather than the bad policies of their government.
Louis Aguirre, a 6’2” Miami TV news personality, met Fidel Castro while covering a conference marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. When Castro saw Aguirre and his cameraman, he remarked, “They must be Russian.” (Aguirre figured that this was a reference to their height.)
When Aguirre told Castro that he was a Cuban-American, Castro asked him about his background. Aguirre informed Fidel that his parents had attended Castro’s alma mater (Belen Jesuit Prep in Havana) and that he, too, had attended the school after the priests moved it to Miami.
Incidentally, Aguirre is gay.
His pic after the jump:
“After all, how many males have had 20k women or more in a single lifetime?”
You’ve got it backwards. Experientially, a man who has spent his life banging 20k women has not “had” a single woman, really. OTOH, a man in a solid marriage to a good woman and who stays faithful, has “had” 20k women easily, maybe more.
I don’t know of any actual Cubans who object to someone who looks like James Franco playing Fidel.
I wish that he were a better actor; but he certainly looks the part.
But Fidel was never a Communist himself.
If Cuba was a rock’s throw away from the Soviet Union and wanted to conquer Cuba, Fidel would be happy to have taken American help.
He aligned himself with the ones that allowed him to keep himself as the Cuban leader.
Now, Che, was a true communist, quite possibly the ONLY leader that was a real communist in every sense of the word.
Booing a heel–a character you’re supposed to hate — is far different from booing a face– character you’re supposed to cheer for. The former is desired, the latter is a massive problem.
With Reigns and The Rock (in his early years), both were booed even though they were babyfaces and thus supposed to be cheered. That’s a bad reaction.
In wrestling, the term used is “heat.” The more “heat” a heel gets, the better. However, if a face gets “heat”, its a problem—in that undesired case, its usually called “nuclear heat”, “go home” heat, “X-pac heat” or “Triple H heat.” (also the latter terms are used for fan active dislike of a wrestler overall and their refusal to buy is merchandise or pay for or watch his matches).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_(professional_wrestling)#Go_home
Basically, if a wrestler want the fans to react in one way and they react in another, that’s bad for business.
That’s actually just an overblown story. He uses steroids and has the studio pay for the gym trailer, which is common when an action/superhero movie is being filmed — you need all the actors and stuntmen keeping their buff looks. He does normal body-building workouts on a regular schedule and lets the juice and the makeup do the rest.
Arnold used to spread these same stories about his workout routines back in his heyday on sets. He would claim he would wake up on set every day at 4am and workout for 3 hours every day before shooting began. And transport a full gym to the location they were shooting.
Well, no shit. The selling point of the film is having a jacked Arnold run around with his shirt off. You think the studio won’t make sure you look buff each day of principal photography by paying for a gym?
“He’s just blowing me, so I can’t be gay…” I don’t care if you are batting or pitching; you are still playing baseball.
Shatner is a good actor. He just needs direction. https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1047436361664483329?s=21&t=Dm-PdzGr25IfkptlkbkBBQ
Did for example, Amadeus (1984) attempt to mimic Austrian German? As far as I can remember, not really.
Not at all. One reason why it still holds up. Everyone, including Jeffrey Jones as Emperor Joseph just speaks standard American English. F Murray Abraham speaks a little more fussily and theatrically (I.e. like F.Murray Abraham) but he does not attempt an Italian accent, even though presumably the real Salieri must have had an Italian accent when speaking German.
In Gibson’s Christ movie, Greek was wholly or nearly wholly absent, a major flaw. The lingua franca in Palestine at the time was Greek.
> “stop impoverishing yourselves with bad policies!”
Yeah, unlucky Fidel, blamed by the powerful establishmentarian Steve Sailer for things that were completely beyond his control.
For instance, the Sailerites foisted Che Guevara on the hapless Fidel, who was powerless to rein in his nominal subordinate’s delight in taking a personal role in the execution of hundreds of dissidents and gays. (Even PBS can’t fully whitewash Che’s unseemly conduct.)
If only the Great Man’s power had been even more total, Cuba would be even more of a Leninist paradise.
Nice essay. It seems you didn’t notice my earlier reply to you about it:
https://www.unz.com/jfreud/we-live-in-the-most-extraordinary-age-of-satanic-prophecy-come-true-ari-asters-hereditary-and-its-vision-of-paimonic-prophecy-and-the-problems-of-prosperity-prophecy/?showcomments#comment-5392720
However, this Fidel Castro/Jean-Pierre Trudeau/Margaret Trudeau/Justin Trudeau business is closer to “Dom Casmurro”.
Oh, bullshit. Cuba seized the assets of American investors in Cuba without compensation so of course there were economic sanctions – you can’t just steal people’s property and not expect to be punished. Communist regimes are fundamentally Mafias – they kill people, they steal, they hurt anyone who tries to speak out against them, etc.
Cuba was free to trade with almost every other country and received billions in subsidies from Russia. They were once one of the largest sugar producers in the world and now they hardly grow enough for their domestic needs. If the Communists took over Alaska, soon there would be a shortage of ice. There is nothing that Communism can’t ruin. They didn’t need American help.
Everybody looks darker and a bit more exotic in black and white photos. Even blondish types (not that Castro was a blond, I’m thinking more of photos of European nobles from the early 1900s).
Fun fact: In two movies, Sheen portrayed soldiers from my home state National Guard division, the 28th “Keystone.” In the family drama The Subject Was Roses, set in the Bronx Irish Woodlawn Heights neighborhood, he played a returning WWII vet trying to mediate their quarreling parents (Jack Albertson and Patricia Neal). In The Execution of Private Slovik, he portrayed the Detroit native and cynical, serial screwup Eddie Slovik, reportedly the only GI to be executed for desertion in WWII. The TV movie depicted him as a victim (of course), but the full story is, as they, say…complicated.
Anon – that menu is too bland.
I am having Fish Tacos tonight. With Alaskan Halibut, not that shitty tilapia.
Topped with Pico de Gallo with fresh cilantro from my garden.
It’s funny that Nimoy replaced Martin Landau on Mission Impossible, as Landau had been strongly considered for the role as Spock. (It seems Jewish actors were usually called upon when a Vulcan was needed, e,g, Mark Lenard as Spock’s dad)
Nimoy was well-cast for Mission, as his master-of-disguise character was utterly deadpan and came alive only in his role-playing assignments (such as the Castro-like “El Ledir”)
You are correct about the current trend of mis-casting blacks into movies where they do not belong. I am sick of it. Even the TV commercials these days have a made-in-Africa look. For a take on good films from the White perspective try this movie list:
http://the-eye-opener.blogspot.com/2007/02/yggdrasils-movie-list.html
“Why does it seem that a lot of the great minds are shorter than average?”
Because the average was a lot less in times past, due to presumably worse nutrition?
https://voxeu.org/article/height-world-war-i-servicemen
” like lots of Latin American governments over the years, they became ultra-repressive BECAUSE there were Communists trying to take over society”
Are you sure there weren’t communists/socialists BECAUSE they were ultra-repressive? Not that you need “ultra-repressive” to create socialism – you just need poverty and the idea that it doesn’t have to be this way.
Around 1900 Argentina and Italy had the same per-capita GDP. I’m pretty sure the Monroe Doctrine didn’t do the continent a great deal of good. Argentina was a craphole for most of the last century whereas Italy did quite well considering they fought in 2 world wars during that time.
When Tschiffely rode on horseback from Buenos Aires to Washington in the 1920s he witnessed among other unpleasant things an Argentine police officer raping an Indian girl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aim%C3%A9_F%C3%A9lix_Tschiffely
“She brought a lot of joy and beauty into the World. “
Agreed. But, like Kylie and Taylor, she didn’t bring any children into the world, so her beauty and her voice won’t be passed on.
A certain Caudillo de España says “ahem!”
Yawn. Lame.
Rashida Jones gets Double Diversity Bonus Points. Her Yiddishe Momma is Peggy Lipton. Jew.
https://ethnicelebs.com/peggy-lipton
Francisco was a White man. James Franco IS a jew.
https://ethnicelebs.com/james-franco
“There is nothing that Communism can’t ruin. “
To be fair, I remember a friend wandering by himself, a trifle drunk, through central Moscow at 2am around 1980, he said he felt safe as houses and he wouldn’t have done it in London.
And Communist wine was actually pretty good. In the 1970s – 1990s Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon was the wine of choice for impecunious types – great rich blackberry flavours for such an inexpensive wine.
When the Iron Curtain came down they very correctly returned the vineyards to the many descendants of the 1939 owners. But the vineyards were small and the descendants had lost the skills which now only resided with a few winemakers at the giant co-operatives of Communism.
Today Bulgarian wine is pretty mediocre. I really miss the Communist stuff. Literally Red wine.
(Oh, and I seem to remember that their arms production wasn’t bad either. The Katyusha is the mother of all the MLRS/HIMARS of today)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyusha_rocket_launcher
Terribly underrated actor. He also played Foreign Secretary Granville to Sir Ralph Richardson’s Prime Minister Gladstone in the epic “Khartoum”, which co-starred Lord Olivier as The Mad Mahdi (speaking of accents). Hordern, Oliver and Richardson. Quite a trio, no?
I am not sure, YAA. However, you answered that speculation the same way I would have. There’s not been a big middle class. You got your 1 or 2%, maybe 5% rich people living in compounds with walls topped with embedded glass shards (because they are rightly worried) and then the rest of the poor peons who’ve got nothing. Occasionally, they get really sick of that and listen to some bloviating Commie who tells them BS about what their problems really are.
Speaking of your exception from a century ago, Argentina became much more of a craphole because it stopped the immigration of White people from such countries as Italy itself, but probably more like Spaniards, Germans, English … I would say that it’s the latter ones that would have made it possible for Argentina to have the middle class, hence more free society that there’s been way up north.
I don’t see how the Monroe Doctrine did anything but help them – saving them on military budgets, and later on from foreign Commie influence (not like they couldn’t do it on their own).
I was in Buenos Aires almost 20 years back. I tried to find my way around a large freight yard near the water, and I ended up walking through the serious barrio for a few miles. It was pretty sad – not starving children in Africa sad, but one small hut after another – too many damn people for one thing. I walked 20 miles that day, I figured out, and realized the next day that “oh, yeah, that sun is right on up there in November.”
Ha, same shit, different century. I remember the Mao sack-hanger Godfree Roberts commenting to the effect of that the US embargoed Communist China, so that was their problem, not the beloved Chairman Mao! Haha, well, nobody says you have to sell quality manufactured goods to your arch-freaking-enemy.
OTOH, Americans felt sorry for the poor Chinese people themselves, and even in the midst of it all, we sent them a lot of corn. Sure, it was feed corn, but
beggarspeople living under hard-core Communism can’t be choosers.Speaking of corn, and the children of the corn, I imagine the hard-working White people of Nebraska could do alright for themselves, after a big adjustment period, with a wall around the State. First, they’d want to chuck the ghetto rats and Commies over the wall though. Would that be OK during an embargo?
The white population of Northern Mexico is about 10% sephardi Jewish by blood, but fully admixed and Catholic for the past 200 years.
Typical mestizo Mexican Americans are of about 4-5% Jewish blood, which is comparable to the most Jewy European groups: Hungarians, Dutch, and Poles.
The 10% Jewish blood is probably the highest in the world for a non-Jewish identified population, but is easy to explain. If Spain were 5% Jewish at the time of the Inquisition, and Jews (including conversos) were twice as likely to settle Latin America, that’s all you need.
We also know that the following groups were more likely to settle Latin America: (1) Southern Spanish (2) younger sons of the gentry. Both the South and the gentry were disproportionately Jew and converso.
Kind of ironic for Leguizamo to complain that Franco isn’t Latino, to play Castro.
In Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, Leguizamo had the lead Italian-American role … and I just couldn’t get over what a poor fit the character was. I’d thought that maybe ol’ Spike cast the mestizo as a poke at Italianos.
Chile’s first ruler after independence was Bernardo O’Higgins, a Basque-Irish hybrid whose grandfather was forced off his farm by Cromwell’s army and whose father prospered in the Spanish army.
Another Britainic-Catholic noble family to find a soft landing in Spain are the Stuarts, who married into so many different Spanish lines they are the richest noble family in Spain, with their leading title being Duke of Alba and surname FitzJames-Stuart.
Don’t forget about Neeee-ca-RAH-gwah!
Because Communist economies didn’t really have a mechanism for pricing goods and services*, some things were wildly overpriced and others were wildly underpriced.
*other than copying market prices. There is an old Communists economist joke – a Soviet economist wakes from suspended animation hundreds of years in the future. He asks, “Is the whole world Communist?” They reply, “Yes, the whole world except for Belgium.” “Belgium?” he says, “why Belgium?” and they answer “well we needed to keep someone around so we could know how much to charge .”
I had the same experience in Chinese cities – no fear of crime at any time of day or night (not to mention that Shanghai vies with NY for the “city that never sleeps” title – or at least it did pre-Covid).
Speaking of Fidel Castro, has anyone ever met a genuine White Hispanic before? I have, it was a young Mexican girl with blonde hair and green eyes that came as an exchange student at my school. I was shocked because I thought she was just joking, but she had a thick accent when speaking English and had a Spanish last name. That being said, nearly all the so called “White” Hispanics are light-skinned Hispanics and have Amerindian admixture to an extent or the White ones like Guillermo del toro or Jorge Ramos are renegades. They seem more connected to Brown Hispanic culture rather than think of their race.
Average height for American men is 5’9″ today (probably less in the 1940s) so Oppenheimer and Feynman were above average, not below average.
Is it true that Fidel Castro had Jewish ancestry?
I agree with the other commenters that Franco, with a beret a beard and a cigar, would be an acceptable Castro. Hate to see him play a skunk like Fidel. My favorite Franco movie, to date, is The Great Raid 2005. He plays a heroic American Ranger officer in WW2 on a secret and dangerous mission to rescue American POWs in the Philippines. He was great in that film.
The movie was panned by critics as racist for the negative portrayal of Japanese. The critics are ignorant – the cruelty by the japs in the war toward POWw was much much worse than was shown in the movie.
Look at (or don’t) Louis CK. Although he’s of course not “pure” Mexican.
Ditto Ted Williams. And actor John Gavin.
Too bad Justin Trudeau’s not available.
“Jewish blood”? Jews are a religion, not a race.
LOL and Thanks, Ian.
I’ve seen one. I was in a shopping mall in Phoenix, Arizona over twenty years ago. A little boy (3-5 yrs old) was playing at a water fountain, either dawdling or splashing instead of drinking. His mother came over, scolded him, grabbed his hand and walked away with him.
She had beautiful alabaster skin (not freckled) and long red/auburn hair. I would’ve thought she was an Irish pinup model, except she scolded her son in rapid fire Spanish
Castro was a surname carried by some Cuban Jewish converts to Catholicism (and also by others who were not Jewish at all). Whether Fidel was descended from the (formerly) Jewish Castro’s or not is unclear, at least to me. In any case, having one converted Jewish ancestor among your many hundreds of ancestors 500 years ago doesn’t exactly make you “Jewish”.
If you hang around unz, you will notice that certain commenters think of Jews as being bad people. To them, everything bad that happens must have a Jew at the bottom of it. It was said of Henry Adams that if he saw Mt. Vesuvius erupting, he would look for the Jew who was stoking the fire.
If you use flawed logic (as anti-Semites are wont to do), if all Jews are bad people, then all bad people must be Jewish. Therefore if you see a bad person (Castro, Hitler, etc.) who does not appear at first glance to be Jewish, it just means that you haven’t looked hard enough and if you dig deep enough you’ll find out that he is really Jewish just like all the other bad people.
Sure. You are just not going to meet a lot of White Hispanics among cleaning ladies and construction workers and so on. As was pointed out in a recent thread, the White Hispanics don’t slip across the border, they stay home and run things and own everything worth owning, generally speaking. At least in Mexico where things are generally stable. The only time they would emigrate here is when things have gone seriously wrong back home (Cuba, Venezuela, etc.) . You can however meet these folks as college students or at ski resorts or they might have a condo in Miami or a place in LA as a 2nd home but you ain’t meeting them at the chicken processing plant.
Going back to the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, both Castro and Franco were very typical Jewish names, as were indeed many other common “hispanic” names–Lopez, Rodriguez, Soto, Vega, Perez, etc. I believe over the years I heard the two dictators Franco and Castro, in some context or other, both express pride in their fraction of Jewish heritage. In our ethnic-victim-oriented culture, whatever your attitude toward Jews or Zionists or whatever, it is OK to be Sephardic. In fact, didn’t moronic Rep. AOC once claim she was of Sephardic ancestry? Not lately, however,
I’m surprised you’d compare Liam Neeson to Castro without mentioning the semi-mythical invasion of Ireland by the Milesian people of Iberia. This was long thought to be just a fable or an invention of medieval monks, but DNA testing shows a strong genetic link in the male line between Ireland and Northern Iberia where Castro’s Galician ancestors were from .
I think Vaughn had another 5 years left. Even if JFK lost in 64, his career could have gone on a graceful downslope instead of the crash that occurred.
Steve writing back in 2013:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/portuguese-americans-against-being/
The Pew link from 2009 automatically bounces to an updated 2021 page. Here’s an archived link to the original 2009 Pew page: https://archive.ph/QpfJ0