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i'll just leave this here

A New Iron Man 3 Poster & Our First Look At Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin

by Jill Pantozzi | 2:20 pm, October 22nd, 2012


Is Tony Stark doing his own press again? Over the weekend we got the first teaser trailer for Iron Man 3, this morning we saw some official stills from the upcoming superhero film, and now we’ve got both a new poster and our first image of Sir Ben Kingsley as Mandarin. 

Well?

(via MTV and MTV)

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  • Jamie Jeans

    So.. anyone going to comment on the whitewashing of the Mandarin by having a white guy portray him?

    Or how problematic a villain the Mandarin was, being an evil Chinese guy out to rule the world?

  • Anonymous

    I don’t know how “white” Ben Kingsley really is, considering his real name is Krishna Pandit Bhanji.
    And I’m pretty sure that means the Mandarin is no longer Chinese. The original character would probably be too offensive today.

  • http://www.facebook.com/AgentFoo Mark Foo

    Well, Kingsley (birth name: Krishna Pandit Bhanji) isn’t exactly “white”. He’s half-white. Maybe this is half-washing?

    Also, being Chinese and evil doesn’t make Mandarin automatically troubling. Bad guys can be Chinese. What’s perhaps more troubling is that he was a giant pastiche of scary orientalism with a Fu Manchu moustache and beard.

  • http://twitter.com/jade__dragon Heather

    I hadn’t realized it was coming out in May, that’s slightly less of a wait than I was anticipating. o/ I really only know Ben Kingsley from my favorite film adaptation of Twelfth Night, but I really liked him in it, so also yay!

  • Anonymous

    I know “mandarin” is a Chinese dialect but does the word mean anything else? I’m french so I don’t know but I’m wondering if it could have a bad connotation because of that.

  • http://www.facebook.com/AgentFoo Mark Foo

    A Mandarin is a little orange.

    Just kidding. It’s a scholar-bureaucrat from China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_%28bureaucrat%29

  • Anonymous

    Bureaucrat, government official.[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat) ]

    If they link the name to service (or pretense to service) as an authority figure, that’d be interesting.

  • Anonymous

    I agree. There’s something to do with that path.

  • Adam R. Charpentier

    1. Kingsley made his career playing Gandi, so you’re a bit late to complain about his choice of roles now.
    2. The Mandarin is clearly a Fu Manchu clone, so it isn’t simply that it’s “problematic.” Since Fu Manchu was created in direct response to the anti-Chinese movements in the late 19th century, and you pretty much nailed the description of the so-called “yellow peril”, evil Chinese out to rule the world.

    …it’s actually really, really shocking that the character (either character) has hung on this long.

    But if you really want to change things up, then Germans, Russians, and Asian peoples should all be off limits, since they’re generally the adversary in the earliest comic books and therefore in translating those comics to screen…you end up with Rourke’s character from the last film, or this guy.

    Rourke, by the way, isn’t exactly a native born Russian, but he’s white (and we’re all the same), so that’s fine.

    3. I’m really not digging Kingsley’s goat beard.

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