"Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a reportedly grueling abortion drama set in Communist-era Romania"

Where does the line up start to get into that one?

...white?

I'm sure Jolie's adopted children have showed the world that--as the Dude says of the Big Lebowski--racially, she's pretty cool. But still. Andrew O'Hehir mentions the Cannes premiere of a new film in which Angelina Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl, wife of assassinated Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl, without mentioning what strikes me as obvious and noteworthy---namely Mariane Pearl is from Paris, of mixed Dutch and Afro-Cuban ancestry. Anyone who has seen her--whether on the cover of her memoir (from which the Jolie film is adapted) or in the HBO documentary about her husband's murder ("The Journalist and the Jihadi")--will recall that Mariane Pearl looks as though she is of mixed-race heritage.

I'm not raising this issue in tones of outrage or dismay---and it's pretty obvious that if Mariane Pearl had any qualms about Jolie taking on this role, we would probably have heard it---but I do think it's worth mentioning. Or inquiring about. I mean, Sen. Barack Obama is of mixed racial ancestry, but wouldn't people be a bit bewildered if Brad Pitt signed on to play him in a film? And I don't think the fact that Pearl is light-skinned, or French, makes it any less odd--I'd be equally bewildered if Brad Pitt signed on to do a bio-pic of Ralph Bunche or Aime Cesaire. (For any number of reasons, perhaps, but his self-evident whiteness would be up there.)

Really. Leaving all questions of racial politics aside...doesn't anyone else think that it's weird Angelina Jolie is playing Mariane Pearl? Am I crazy? Or at the very least, isn't anyone else curious if Halle Berry's agent knows about this?

I've seen pictures and video of Marianne Pearl, and until our letter writer pointed out that she has African ancestry, I assumed she was French, or perhaps Lebanese or Jewish. Curly hair and a tan complexion do not make someone "black" or even "biracial", regardless or who their parents or grandparents were. Jolie probably got the part because she is Politically Active Top Movie Star du jour. Physically Mrs. Pearl could be played by any number of "white" actresses.

I'm pretty sure AJ got the part because Brad Pitt's movie company had already acquired the story. In fact I think there was talk of Jennifer Aniston playing the part at one point before the divorce, so in that light AJolie makes more sense.

Larry Clark's skateboard movie=Ken Park.

But it was less about paranoia after accidentally killing a security guard and more about teenagers having graphic, on-screen sex and adults behaving miserably.

In Visalia.

The woman from Texas actually pronounced the "S" in Cannes! Oh. My. God. What a totally stupid rube. People like that make me sick. They don't even know how to pronounce Cannes.

I'm not a fan of Angelina Jolie, but seeing Norah Jones in an indie movie would be cool. Personally, I hope that my daughter, Amanda Brown, ends up going to Cannes with her new band. She's a singer, you see, young and beautiful, with a page on Myspace.com and UTube. She's really going places.

Oh, and, or course, I love indie movies.

"Leaving all questions of racial politics aside...doesn't anyone else think that it's weird Angelina Jolie is playing Mariane Pearl? Am I crazy? Or at the very least, isn't anyone else curious if Halle Berry's agent knows about this?"

Yes, you're crazy. Angelina Jolie may be white but her looks transcend race. She barely looks human. Ben Kingsley won an Oscar playing Gandhi. It's called "acting."

Ben Kingsley's probably not the best example to use in that example as he is, I believe, half Indian.

Regardless, I second your point.

"Yes, you're crazy. Angelina Jolie may be white but her looks transcend race. She barely looks human. Ben Kingsley won an Oscar playing Gandhi. It's called 'acting'."

Thanks for that, Rollerboyz. It seems like we're actually in agreement. Considering that Sir Ben Kingsley (he was knighted in 2000) was born with the name Krishna Bhanji. His mother is not Indian, his father is. So yes, his acting got him an Oscar for playing Gandhi. But presumably the fact that he is partly of Indian descent is what helped him to get CAST as Gandhi, back when he was a relative unknown.

For those who actually read my earlier posting, the question that I'm raising has nothing whatsoever to do with politically-correct axe-grinding. It wouldn't bother me one way or the other if they had cast Peter Sellers as Gandhi, reprising his comic Indian character from "The Party." Likewise Angelina Jolie can play the title role in "The Hattie McDaniel Story" for all that I care. But if she did do that, I'd certainly think it was worth noting and commenting upon. I wasn't complaining---I was simply surprised that more eyebrows had not been raised at the casting of Jolie in this role. And I was also a bit surprised that O'Hehir let it pass without mention, since I thought it was something that people might normally mention.

Why? Obviously an actor's job is to portray someone different from himself or herself. This can extend to racial difference as well. Olivier didn't have to be Danish to play Hamlet, nor to win an Oscar for doing so.

But at the same time, Sir Laurence Olivier played the title role in the 1965 film of "Othello". I think it would be relatively impossible to film "Othello" today with a white actor in that role. That doesn't mean that distinguished Shakespearean actors of whatever race don't want to play Othello. But it's worth noting that, in 1997, when Patrick Stewart wanted to play Othello at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC, he did so opposite an all-black cast (except for him). Why make the choice to stage it in that way? Stewart said in an interview that while he hoped to do the role at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but "when the time came that I was old enough and experienced enough to do it, it was the same time that it no longer became acceptable for a white actor to put on blackface and to pretend to be African."

That's really what I was trying to get at. These days actors tend to steer clear of choosing roles that are racially different---particularly when it seems like it might raise the issue of a white performer "blacking up". Whether it is done tastefully is beside the point---the issue seems to be that most white actors wouldn't want to take such a risk at all. (Particularly on the Hollywood A-List.) But at the same time, Jolie's film is based on Mariane Pearl's book, so presumably Pearl agreed to and signed off on the casting. So I'd just be interested to hear what each of them had to say about it.