#also im almost certain i made this post in 2015/2016 originally but im angry now again so Yeah

[svankmajerbaby]

yes i am complaining about a show i havent fully watched from the year 2015 i dont care

so there’s this amazing comic book i love called El Hipnotizador (The Hypnotist) which is Quintessentially Porteño. like, the streets, the architecture, the dustiness and early-twentieth century style of it feels extremely familiar and even comforting if you’re familiar with Buenos Aires, especially older areas like San Telmo that retain that sort of aesthetic

(the whole comic book is available to read here btw tho i recommend buying it and seeing the drawings in their full quality, it has a lot of superb detail and its just a nice thing to have available to read at certain times)

anyway there was this adaptation which was this big publizised thing that HBO Latinamerica wanted to be the first big project in the southern hemisphere of their reach. and, because it was cheaper or sth they decided to film most of it in Montevideo, Uruguay, instead of Buenos Aires. and, because HBO Latinamerica has offices in Brazil and not in, you know, the country that the comic book is set in, it decided to pad out the cast with brazilian actors.

so far, it’s ok. it’s a rather short comic book and its understandable that they would try to add more characters, especially when each episode is around an hour long??? (i think it was a bad decision, but that’s not the focus of this rant)

BUT. my issue is. The Casting

like. look at this. this is meant to be the main character, Arenas.

first of all the whole cast is like, easily ten years younger. but apart from that, the Absolute Lack of historical accuracy is what irks me the most. No Man With A Steady Job On Show Business In The 1930s would have stubble and badly combed hair. i get that hes meant to look disheveled and Tortured but like. fuck. also where’s the hooked nose. the jowl. the hunch. the way the guy looks like he was plucked from a crowd in an old photo. sbaraglia you’re a decent actor but here you’re so badly miscast

then there’s salinero who was also both thinned down and made younger. cowards

and then there’s this. which i hate even more.

i literally can only tell the women in this show apart from the hairstyles. and even these are extremely inaccurate period-wise, especially compared with the original very well researched comic book.... like guys, you should have the resources to properly research this shit.

and then livia. my poor livia. looking like exactly every daytime tv gossip show presenter. and Yes she has historically innacurate long straight hair at All Times, unnecessary nude/sex scenes that weren’t in the comic book, and even less of a personality than the comic book :^)))))

anyway this is all just to say we could have had an interesting concise adaptation but it was done dirty by bad historical research a need to “expand” the cast (tho with nary a person of color, even though it would make a lot of sense to cast actors that aren’t, yknow, white, especially since it’s a brazilian coproduction and clearly not set in Buenos Aires in the 1930s anymore). also HBO is terrified of old and fat people so fuck them