Favorite Characters: Det. Misty Knight (Luke Cage)

Between expanding on Claire and adding Misty and Mariah, Luke Cage definitely does its part to contribute to Marvel’s BAMF Ladies Club.  While the tough, intelligent police detective is well-trod ground for compelling women on TV (pour some out for Abbie,) Misty is a wonderful example of the archetype (a few Misty-related spoilers.)

In the show’s pilot, I figured I knew where things were headed with Misty.  She and Luke share a mature meetcute at Harlem’s Paradise and spend a steamy night together, and we then get the reveal that Misty is a detective who’d been undercover at the club.  I thought we were on a clear trajectory to either love interest/detective ally to her vigilante beau, love interest/detective conflicted about trying to throw her unit off her vigilante beau’s scent, or love interest/detective who’s unaware that the vigilante she’s investigating is her beau.

But even though Misty’s storyline stays tied to Luke’s, as does most everything in the show, it’s still undeniably her storyline.  Her romantic encounter with Luke keeps him on her mind but doesn’t make him an immediate part of her life in that way.  Rather, it’s her repeated run-ins with him adjacent to her investigation into Cottonmouth and various associated dealings that really makes him stick in her head.  She knows he’s more connected than he pretends to be, and she can feel that there’s something off about his stories involving him being in rooms with a shower of gunfire and luckily never getting hit.  However, she also senses that, while he’s mixed up in something, he’s not the bad guy that some of her colleagues are interested in making him.

Misty is an excellent detective:  deeply intuitive, very brave, and plugged into the heartbeat of Harlem.  She’s a local girl who could’ve moved on to greener pastures long ago, but she chooses to stay in her neighborhood, doing her best to keep its people safe.  It’s also very much to her credit that, as she starts looking into Luke, she considers the idea of him being “special” very early on.  Granted, this is a world with the Avengers in it, and even though Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. really doesn’t cross over at all with the Netflix shows, I’m assuming Misty knows about the recent proliferation of Inhumans as well, but it still takes the right sort of person to see evidence that she may be dealing with an enhanced person and consider it a valid theory.  Misty is equally good at connecting the logical dots and entertaining the more “out there” possibilities.

As such, Misty doesn’t find out Luke’s secret through him telling her or stumbling onto the scene of blatant hero stuff that Luke can’t deny.  She doesn’t get it through an admission or a bombshell; she collects the scraps of clues she sees and puts it together herself, which is enormously refreshing for a non-powered person in a superhero story, especially a female potential love interest (who always seem to be kept in the dark way too long.)  And after she figures it out on her own, her response is reasonable.  She doesn’t recoil from the “freak” or fawn over the “hero.”  She gets what Luke is trying to do – to an extent, she kind of admires it – but she also recognizes that he’s an unstable variable offsetting the balance of how justice is supposed to work, and while she doesn’t want to see him brought down, she does want him out of the police’s business.  I like that.  It’s level-headed and understandable, and although it’s informed by her interest in him as a person/gorgeous wall of a man, her view is ultimately objective, influenced more by her convictions than her private feelings.

Moana (2016, PG)

I was excited for Moana even before the announcement that Lin-Manuel Miranda would be one of its composers.  (After?  Epic levels of anticipation.)  Disney has another beauty on their hands with a fine new princess to add to their collection.

Moana, daughter and heir to an island chief, has always longed for the sea, but her father has warned her away from it her entire life.  But when their ever-providing island starts to fail them, Moana digs deep to harness the spirit of her voyager ancestors and goes on an incredible journey to restore the island.  Her quest takes her to Maui, a demigod trickster who’s spent the past thousand years living on his own hype, and the unlikely pair braves monsters and unsteady seas, along with their own doubts about themselves.

Okay, so I love this movie.  I love that Moana can be self-assured and yet totally faking it within the same breath, talking herself into confidence she doesn’t quite feel.  I love her adventurous spirit, her love for her people, and her deep-rooted connection to her people’s history.  She’s brave and tough, and while she’s in way over her head, she learns quickly on the fly and doesn’t give up.  As Disney princesses go, she’s an admirable one.  Maui is pretty great, too – a demigod who’s very human in his defense mechanisms.  His vibe with Moana is somewhat reminiscent of the Genie with Aladdin (albeit a lot more unwilling,) which is always a good thing in my book. 

I know that other non-European Disney musicals have been called out for how they portray other cultures (see Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Mulan to varying degrees.)  I don’t claim any knowledge of Polynesian culture, but as an admitted layperson, this film strikes me as very true.  I enjoy the details of the islanders’ way of life, the animation on the boats is gorgeous, and overall, the tone feels respectful to me.  In addition to the aforementioned Miranda, the score also features songs by Samoan/New Zealand musician Opetaia Foa’i, who writes in his native Tokelauan.

Speaking of the songs?  They’re amazing.  I bought the soundtrack before seeing the movie but held off listening to it until afterwards.  I had a three-and-a-half hour car trip shortly after watching the film, and did I follow my initial plan to alternate between the soundtrack and other music?  Nope.  Solid Moana all the way!  “How Far I’ll Go,” Moana’s “I want” song, is the big-ticket item here, but Maui’s fun “You’re Welcome” and the beautiful “An Innocent Warrior” are also fantastic.  Really, the whole score is wonderful.  Miranda’s work just bleeds heart, making him a perfect composer for Disney, and Foa’i’s music adds to the film’s steeped-in-culture feel.

The Rock clearly has a blast playing Maui (along with surprisingly-decent pipes!), but Auli’i Cravalho is an absolute revelation as Moana in her first-ever role.  She’s fierce, funny, touching, and relatable, and her singing voice is glorious.  I feel like, any time a Hollywood executive justifies whitewashing by complaining that “there are no Asian movie stars,” they should be shown Moana to learn how to rectify that problem:  find some fantastic Asian talent, give her an amazing role, and make an Asian movie star, that’s how.

Warnings

Scary moments for kids and thematic elements.

Nothing But Pleasure (1940)

A little ho-hum, but decent.  While this week’s Columbia short doesn’t hold a candle to the fun of Mooching Through Georgia, it’s not half as unpleasant as His Ex Marks the Spot.  Very middle-of-the-pack.

Buster has just sold his car to buy a newer model, and rather than pay the freight costs to ship it from Detroit to Chicago, he decides that he and his wife will take a scenic bus trip to go and pick it up themselves.  Unsurprisingly, everything that can go wrong does, both before and after they get the new car.  It all comes to a head with a disastrous overnight stay on their drive back home.

Some good comic sequences of note.  There’s a nice setpiece involving the time-honored tradition of being hemmed in to a parallel parking spot and rocking endlessly between the two cars that are trapping you.  There are a few comic hijinks that arise fairly apropos of nothing and almost certainly for the sole purpose of letting Buster do a variation on the “putting the drunk wife to bed” sequence from Spite Marriage – although the gag isn’t as hilarious here, it’s still entertaining, and Buster uses a Murphy bed to put a little additional spin on it.  If I have a favorite gag, it’s probably an absurd little bit which Buster sets about making soup out of everything he’s pinched from a nearby farmhouse, including an entire string of garlic, a whole pumpkin, and (before he realizes his mistake,) a live kitten – silly but fun.

In general, though, there isn’t too much of real interest here.  The short is just sort of “there,” getting the job done but not going out on too many limbs.  I’m also not a huge fan of Buster’s wife in this short.  By and large, I prefer films where the girl (or woman, by now) is at least a little on Buster’s side, taking part in the action in some way.  Not so in this short – pretty much her entire purpose is to complain and occasionally cry.  Granted, Buster’s bus/roadtrip idea turns out to be pretty ill-conceived, so I can’t blame her for being unhappy, but at minimum, she could try to make a suggestion for how to make things better instead of just lamenting how terrible everything is and reminding Buster that it’s all his fault.  This makes her character really one-note and not especially fun to watch.

I’ve made a few remarks for the latest runs of reviews on silent vs. sound comedy.  This short gives us another entry in the “it’s much funnier when it’s silent” category.  Over the course of events, Buster contrives to get himself wedged into an oversized tire (a tractor tire, if I remember correctly,) and naturally, it winds up rolling down the street with him inside it.  If Buster did any tire-rolling in his silent work, I can’t call it to mind right now, but he definitely rolled in barrels, and this is very reminiscent of that.  However, Buster’s overdubbed grunts of pain and cries for help totally break up the rhythm of the gag and drain a lot of the humor out of the well-timed shots.  Even though you can’t see his expression in this scene, his shouts and cries “break the stone face” in an auditory way.  Yep – this one is much funnier when it’s silent.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, some gunplay, and alcohol references.

Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: Maria Jackson (The Sarah Jane Adventures)

No matter the configuration, I’ll always love the Sarah Jane crew.  Brave, devoted Maria, asker of Excellent Questions, won me over the moment she saw that Arcateenian in Sarah Jane’s garden.  For my money, here are her best moments.

Protecting Luke (“Invasion of the Bane” – Series 1, Episode 0)

When Maria meets Luke, he’s dressed in an odd white shift, majorly not with the program, and clearly repeating everything she says back to her as the first living being he’s encountered, but she doesn’t think twice about immediately helping him.  The image of them running through the Bubble Shock factory together is so iconic for both characters, and I get such a kick out of Maria’s idea to hide in the women’s bathroom because the men chasing them would never go in there.

Learning Bea’s Secret (“Eye of the Gorgon:  Part 2” – Series 1, Episode 4)

Maria’s under a huge amount of pressure here (her dad’s life is on the line,) and she has a herculean task before her (getting Bea to tell her how to save him.)  Because Sarah Jane and the boys are tied up elsewhere, she’s all alone, struggling to figure out how to reach this woman with severe dementia and get through to her.  It’s a massive job with huge stakes, and even though she’s freaked and desperate, Maria does incredibly well under pressure.

Stopping the Gorgon (“Eye of the Gorgon:  Part 2” – Series 1, Episode 4)

Yep, this is a big story for Maria.  It could be argued that this one is a bit of a freebie, since Bea is the one who tells her how to defeat the Gorgon and arms her with what she needs, but you’ve gotta love Maria’s last-second cavalry entrance, using a mirror to save Sarah Jane and destroying the Gorgon by turning her own power against her.

Taking Out Mr. Grantham (“Warriors of Kudlak:  Part 2” – Series 1, Episode 6)

I’m always a fan of “quick thinking in a dangerous pinch” scenarios, and Maria is great here.  As Mr. Grantham menaces Sarah Jane, Maria recalls what Sarah Jane told her in the previous episode about the alien metal in her attic (when touching both pieces simultaneously with one’s bare skin, it completes an electrical circuit that knocks them out for an hour) and uses them to temporarily incapacitate the baddie.  Clear!

Searching for Sarah Jane (“Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?:  Part 1” – Series 1, Episode 7)

If getting info from Bea was a tough situation, this one is all but impossible.  The Trickster has pulled Sarah Jane out of the world, and Maria’s the only one who can remember her.  Despite the evidence of her own eyes and everyone she knows telling her she’s wrong, lying, or crazy, Maria doesn’t give up, fighting to find out the truth behind what made everyone else forget.

Born a Crime (2016)

I would have posted this yesterday in lieu of a News Satire Roundup (Last Week Tonight won’t be back for a few months, and The Daily Show was off this week,) but I didn’t finish reading this excellent book until today.  I’d recommend Trevor Noah’s sharp, unflinching memoir to anyone who’s a fan of his, along with plenty who aren’t.

Born a Crime wanders the halls of Trevor Noah’s life from his birth (illegal under apartheid, hence the title) up through portions of his adult life and career as a comedian.  The chapters are arranged only sort-of chronologically, following theme more closely than time.  As much as it’s a book about his life, it’s also a book about South Africa and what it was like living there during the last years of apartheid and the tumultuous times that followed.  Noah doesn’t hold back, and his stories are hilarious, insightful, and devastating, sometimes all at the same time.

It’s kind of a whirlwind book because there’s so much packed into it, but it’s so well written that it doesn’t really feel that way when you’re reading it.  Some passages are surreal in their absurdity – Trevor’s reluctance to use the outhouse on a rainy day culminates in the entire neighborhood packing into his grandmother’s house to pray a demon away.  Others brim with warmth and determination – the way Trevor’s mother raises him as if he’s “white,” as if there are no barriers to what he can do.  Still others cut to the core of the lonely outside in which apartheid placed him – scene after scene of everyone congregating along racial lines and Trevor standing in the middle, not knowing where he’s supposed to go.

Noah does a really nice job weaving in explanations of how life operated under apartheid, providing historical context and examples for people like me who don’t know all this stuff.  He exposes its ludicrous finer points, like the fact that Chinese people were classified Black and Japanese people white, and it was up to the police to figure out who was who and make sure they were living according to their race’s laws.  He examines the procedure by which colored (light-skinned) people could apply to get “upgraded” to white, and he looks at the purposely-hobbled educational system that resulted in him not getting why it mattered that one of his friends was named Hitler.

What also shines through is the indomitable spirit passed onto Noah by his mother.  Despite poverty, despite hunger, despite racism and injustice and civil unrest, despite violence, despite the difficulty of living in a country where people like him weren’t supposed to have existed, his story is one of continually moving forward, not letting any of that define him, not letting his anger or shame about it own him. 

I’ve been impressed with Noah since I first started watching The Daily Show, and every new venture I see from him just increases that.  Now, with this book, I can say absolutely and without qualification:  Trevor Noah is pretty incredible.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements, violence (including domestic abuse,) sexual references, language, and drinking/smoking/drug references.

A Little TLC(w): Days of Being Wild (1990)

Note:  I wrote this review a while back, but when I started doing A Little TLC(w) posts, I decided to adapt it for that.  I’ve already done write-ups for every other Wong Kar-wai film Tony Leung Chiu-wai has been in, and if I want to include them as part of this series, I’ll probably do Favorite Character editions for the roles he plays in them.  However, as you’ll soon see, that isn’t really an option in the case of this film. 

Okay, so while I inadvertently watched this sort-of Wong Kar-wai “trilogy” backwards, I’m reviewing it out of all possible order.  I first wrote about In the Mood for Love, then 2046, and now am finally coming back to Days of Being Wild.  It’s my least favorite of the three, but that’s only because the other two are so tremendous.

On the surface, suave, handsome Yuddy is everything a woman could want.  He effortlessly fills shy Su Li-zhen’s head with thoughts of him, but when he’s ready to wander, he easily drops her for a passionate dancer (variously known as both Lulu and Mimi.)  Meanwhile, although Yuddy plays with the hearts of others with ease, his own house isn’t as firmly in order as he pretends it is.  He’s plagued by the knowledge that the woman who raised him isn’t his birth mother and is incensed that she refuses to tell him where he came from.  As he tries to find himself, Su Li-zhen and Lulu both try to get through a relationship with him with their own senses of self intact.

We’ll start with the connections to the later films.  Maggie Cheung (Su Li-zhen) plays a character with the same name as the one she plays in In the Mood for Love and 2046, though it’s not altogether clear whether or not it’s meant to be the same person.  Personality-wise, I think I could see it.  Carina Lau’s Lulu/Mimi also bears the same name as her character in 2046 and seems more explicitly a precursor to her character in that film, which includes references to her relationship with Yuddy.

But enough about In the Mood for Love and 2046.  What about Days of Being Wild?  It’s slow-moving but utterly gorgeous, the design and costumes dripping with that 1960s-era beauty that saturates the other two films.  As with all of Wong’s films, the music is absolutely vital, the characters are lightly-drawn but still feel devastatingly-specific, and the emotional vulnerability on display is searing.  I’ve always adored Su Li-zhen and the midnight confidant she finds in Andy Lau’s kind Tide, but watching it this time around, I also really loved Lulu – somehow, so guarded and so open at the same time. 

If I had to pick a reason this film doesn’t work as well for me as some of Wong’s others, I suppose it would be in Leslie Cheung’s Yuddy.  I can’t deny that, while somewhat of a cliché, he’s still a fascinating example of a playboy character, but I just don’t like him very much.  It’s harder for me to empathize with him than many Wong characters, which makes it harder for me to care about what happens to him.  Even as I see his struggles, I think more about his treatment of Su Li-zhen and Lulu, and I resent him for it.  Not that Leslie Cheung should receive any blame for this.  He’s magnetic in the role, and it’s to his credit that I want to try to relate to Yuddy.

And as for Tony Leung Chiu-wai?  This is his first film with Wong, and like Maggie Chang, he’s playing a character with the same name as the one he plays elsewhere in the trilogy:  Chow Mo-wan.  Is it the same guy?  Hard to say.  He only appears in one scene and has no lines.  That said, the scene somehow manages to be kind of compelling all the same.  It’s an intriguing way to end a movie, and Leung has a presence that draws your eye even though you don’t know anything about him.

Recommend?

In General – Yes.  Although it’s not one of my favorite Wong films, it’s still gorgeously shot and has some terrific performances.

Tony Leung Chiu-wai – In terms of acting, there’s very little happening here.  As the proverbial “start of a beautiful friendship” of stunning collaborations between a director and an actor, however, it might be worth a view. 

Warnings

Light sexual content (mostly implied,) brief scenes of violence, language, and drinking/smoking.

Queen of Katwe (2016, PG)

I’ve been interested in this movie since I first heard about it and decidedly-eager to see it since Lupita Nyong’o made me tear up in the first featurette I saw about it.  The film has a definite Disney air about it, but that’s not a bad thing.  It tells its uplifting story beautifully and well.

Phiona is a young girl living hand-to-mouth in Uganda.  Everyone needs to pitch in to keep the rent paid and food on the table, so school isn’t an option.  However, while working one day, Phiona and her younger brother stumble upon a sports/recreation outreach ministry, where an idealistic man named Robert is teaching children to play chess.  Phiona takes quickly to the game of cerebral strategy, and soon, Robert is scraping together money for her and her friends to attend competitions at larger and larger venues.  Many of them do far better than most would expect of “slum children,” but Phiona is in a class all her own.  As her star rises, she worries that her disadvantaged circumstances will forever hold her back from being truly great.

One thing I appreciate about this film is that Robert, like the rest of the main characters, is Ugandan (I know the movie is based on a true story, so it’s only reflecting who Robert really is, but still.)  There have been tons of movies about disadvantaged youths bettering their situations and learning an important skill with the aid of a compassionate adult, and usually in those films, we see a white adult and young people of color.  Whether we’re talking about education or sports, it’s a narrative we see over and over – Freedom Writers, MacFarland, U.S.A., Million Dollar Arm, The Blind Side, and Dangerous Minds are the first names that top into my head, but there are plenty more.  It’s refreshing to see this film, in which the guiding hand encouraging Phiona and showing her her potential is a Black Ugandan like her, someone similarly born into poverty who worked hard to get his education.

All the tropes of this sort of movie are on display, but for the most part, they’re done well.  We see the peaks and valleys of Phiona’s chess training, the well-to-do people who look down their noses at her and assume a poor girl from Katwe can’t have any real skill, the elation of beating those richer and more experienced than her, the self-doubt that comes from external sources treating her like she has no value, and the determination to keep fighting to better herself.  We also see an engaging lead in Phiona and a likable gaggle of youngsters in the form of her chess team, the Pioneers.  While it’s definitely Phiona’s story, I love watching all of them flourish as they learn chess and go to competitions.

Newcomer Madina Nalwanga is understated but earnest as Phiona, and David Oyelowo (who played MLK in Ava DuVernay’s Selma) hits all the right notes as Robert.  But most of all, I adore Lupita Nyong’o’s beautiful performance as Phiona’s mother Harriet, a young woman who wants the best for her daughter but who is terrified of losing Phiona to the allure of a world that Harriet doesn’t understand and knows she can’t provide.  Overall, it’s a lovely, enjoyable film, but in Nyong’o’s big moments, it transforms into something really superb.

Warnings

(Very) veiled sexual references, brief violence, and thematic elements.

Relationship Spotlight: Melinda May & Phil Coulson (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

I’ve always known I liked the friendship between Coulson and May, but going back over the first couple of seasons again, it really stood out to me.  They’re spies, so there’s always going to be secrets and a mutual awareness that there’s going to be secrets, and he’s her boss, so he’s going to pull rank at awkward times, but when you get down to it, these two have each other’s backs and each generally makes the other better at what they do (a few Coulson-May-related spoilers.)

I like this dynamic within a team, two seasoned pros with a long history together.  At the start of the series, the team is a bunch of new pieces fitting together for the first time, and Coulson-May and Fitz-Simmons are the only ones who already know each other.  I’ve talked about Fitz and Simmons before, and May and Coulson are similarly close, but they express it very differently.

Because May is often laconic, both naturally and as a result of a harrowing past mission, Coulson is the only one who really knows her for a good stretch of the first season.  And even after she starts to open up a bit more to the others, no one can bring her out like Coulson.  He’s the one most likely to reach out if she’s going through something rough, trying to break down her walls when she’s pushing people away and not dealing with her problems, and when she gets too all-business, he can sometimes coax a little amusement.  To the extent that May feels able to be herself after Bahrain, she can be herself with Coulson.

Meanwhile, May isn’t a blind follower and definitely calls Coulson out when she doesn’t like his decisions, but she’s absolutely loyal to him.  When it comes out that, since T.A.H.I.T.I., she’s been keeping an eye on Coulson and reporting to Fury, it kills her to lose his trust in her.  The incident is a great demonstration of the differences between them – she’s nearly always laser-focused on the mission (if the director says don’t tell Coulson, don’t tell Coulson,) while he gets more caught up in the personal (she’s his friend, how could she not tell him?)  Though it’s important to pay attention to both the work and the people, both can prioritize one at the expense of the other, and it’s by working together that they’re most able to cover all their bases.

Tied up in this idea is a sometimes-troubling wrinkle to their relationship, rooted in Coulson’s position as May’s superior along with his perception of her as less people-focused than himself.  Coulson has a tendency to rely on May for the “hard calls” – not in making them, but in carrying them out.  In season 3, he instructs May to be prepared to kill Lincoln if Hive takes him over (even though that’s totally not his M.O. with a certain other Inhuman under Hive’s influence – playing favorites, much?)  Even worse, back in season 2, when he’s making carvings of the Kree temple and worried that he’s going to lose it like Garrett did, he tells May to kill him if he gets too far gone.  I know it says something about Coulson that he has this trust in May to do what needs to be done, but it’s also awful that he expects this of her.  With Lincoln, he’s the one making the ruthless decision but he doesn’t want to be the one to carry it out, and with himself, he doesn’t stop to consider what an act like that would do to May.  It’s fair to say he’s her closest friend, and asking her to kill him (even if he thinks it has to be done) is way too much to ask of her.  Whenever he’s put these things on her, she’s 1) refused to do it (there are some orders she does not follow,) and 2) confronted him about why he thinks it’s okay to ask her to do that.  While he at least has responded well, I hope in the future, we see Coulson examining this behavior and realizing he shouldn’t expect her to do what he’s unwilling to do himself.

Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: A General Clarification

Recently, Matt Damon weighed in on the controversy surrounding The Great Wall (the war fantasy set in ancient China that he stars in, because of course he does,) and while I don’t want to do a second post specifically about The Great Wall, which is still months away from release, I do want to use his remarks as a jumping-off point for clarifying a few things about whitewashing in general.

Among Damon’s on-the-whole unimpressive comments, he said, of the whitewashing/White Savior accusations, “I was like, ‘Really, guys?’ To me whitewashing was when Chuck Connors played Geronimo. (laughs) There are far more nuanced versions of it and I do try to be sensitive to that, but Pedro Pascal called me and goes, ‘Yeah, we are guilty of whitewashing. We all know only the Chinese defended the wall against the monster attack.’”

Before I start, let me point out that Damon’s defense isn’t unique.  One of the many arguments made by films accused of racially-messed-up casting is that their film doesn’t count as an examble of whitewashing.  It’s all right for Tilda Swinton to play the Ancient One in Doctor Strange because she’s not playing an Asian character; the script changed the part to a white woman.  It’s all right for Scarlett Johansson to play Major Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell because the studio didn’t go so far as to alter her appearance using digital yellowface.  And so on and so on.

The prevailing attitude seems to be that there is one type of racially-insensitive casting, and it’s of the “Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s” variety.  But in fact, Hollywood, there are several distinct types of casting fails that you regularly employ to the disadvantage of actors of color (and I’m just talking about the ones that involve casting white people instead of PoC – I’m not even getting into stereotypes, colorism, and other issues plaguing roles that are open to people of color.)  Although each is a separate type of uncoolness, they all fall under the umbrella of “whitewashing” or “erasure.”

• Blackface/yellowface/brownface/redface:  casting a white actor to play a character who is specifically not white.  Often involves makeup, wigs, and/or prosthetics to make the white actor (badly) appear more “ethnic.”  Practiced far more often in “the old days” (Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Katherine Hepburn in Dragon Seed, Natalie Wood in West Side Story,) this type of erasure isn’t as prevalent these days, but that doesn’t mean it no longer happens.  Jim Sturgess in Cloud Atlas and Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger are examples from more recent years, and I’d count Emma Stone in Aloha here as well.
• Whitewashing:  taking a character who is supposed to be a PoC and changing it to be a white character, making the film less diverse.  Now, I know I said “whitewashing” is the name of the general term for all these practices, but it has its own separate definition as well.  This one still gets a lot of use and falls into two main categories – adaptations of previous-written works involving PoC characters (Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange, Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, Rooney Mara in Pan) and movies about real people who were PoC (Jim Sturgess (again) in 21, Ben Affleck in Argo, Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind.)
• White Savior:  framing a story about people of color from the perspective of a white protagonist, often the hero who comes in to save the PoC from circumstance or danger.  The white protagonist may or may not be taught a valuable lesson of their own by the PoC they encounter, but they’re almost always the main movers of the story.  Found in drama (Freedom Writers, The Blind Side, The Help) and action alike (The Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves, Glory).  It’s true that The Great Wall hasn’t come out yet, so we can’t say for sure if Damon’s character has a white-savior narrative, but the film’s promotional materials are sure doing their best to convince us that that’s the case.

So, yes.  It’s still entirely possible for white actors to be cast in roles that are racially tone-deaf without performing a minstrel act or pulling a Charlie Chan.  Hollywood, before you decide if a casting move is kosher, I encourage you to consider more than just whether or not you put dark makeup on a white actor, because there’s so much more going on than just that.