The term “elevated horror” gets thrown around a lot these days, but you don’t hear much about “elevated action.”

no that’s exactly my point, it’s two sides of the same dumb coin.

That sentence basically removed any kind of credibility Gharavi had.

There is gaslighting. There was definitely racism and prejudice based on the color of the skin. But the issue at hand here is that Americans are projecting their own local model of systemic racism relying on slavery and discrimination onto the history of other countries, erasing their specificities, just to…

I do think the gaslighting on this is hilarious. Writers like Aristotle, Ovid, and others routinely wrote about black individuals in mocking and negative wording (“burned face people”) and spoke of them as outsiders. They did not see them as equals.

It would be like looking back at the US 2000 years from now and saying…

If you meet actual Egyptians from Egypt, and not just Americans with lots of opinions about what the rest of the world will like, they are all very clear on this issue and very tired of being drawn into what is, essentially, a political argument made by some African-Americans.

They, and north Africans generally, are an…

It’s only a mystery if you insist that the actual images of her made at the time are all wrong.

But if we’re tossing out any evidence we don’t like, everything is a mystery.

“Cleopatra was Greek!” Oh, Lawd! Why would that be a good thing to you, Amir? You’re Egyptian.”

You know she has some pull, no she isn't directing it but its her project one way or another. 

I’m focused on both and can all agree that the executive producer has a say in which actors are cast, thus she agrees with this casting.

But see, that would require actual work diving into history and all that stuff. That’s hard. Why do all of that when you can just glom onto something well known?

“The renewed debate is unlikely to solve this centuries-old mystery.” Correct, because there’s not a mystery.

I watched the whole thing and this doesn’t surprise me. It just wasn’t...fun. The movies are based around a ridiculous premise, but Nic Cage and co. sell it. This series took itself way too seriously (so many people die! What the heck??) and the characters were flat.

This is why you go the Disney animated Robin Hood route and make all the characters animals. 1: avoid thorny race issues by making Cleopatra a lioness; and 2: get a built-in audience of furries.

A woman who lived in ancient Egypt probably looked like a woman from modern Egypt. What’s so hard to understand about that?

Hotep is a word I think that needs to be shouted more at this project.  This is exactly what it is.

So, unless Amir is ethnically Greek but just happens to have been born and raised in Egypt, he’s as ethnically and genetically distant from Cleopatra as almost any random person you’d find in the Levant.

At this point, history filmmaking is about finding the loopholes.

“Amir in his bedroom in Cairo wrote to me to earnestly appeal that ‘Cleopatra was Greek!’ Oh, Lawd! Why would that be a good thing to you, Amir? You’re Egyptian.”

Don’t know what you are talking about, last week they posted an article that said Kevin Kline played Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. First time I’ve seen someone report the truth!