Cloud Atlas is close to unfilmable as it is. If they'd used different actors for each set of incarnations they could have re-titled it: You Cannot Follow This Movie
The more paramount comments on it, the longer the controversy section on the Wikipedia page gets
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Cloud Atlas is close to unfilmable as it is. If they'd used different actors for each set of incarnations they could have re-titled it: You Cannot Follow This Movie
I'm like 99% convinced that everyone complaining about Hugo Weaving in Cloud Atlas, has never seen Cloud Atlas. And has only actually seen the click-bait factory video going around facebook. Because even a 'read the wikipedia page' familiarity with the plot should make it readily apparent, why they couldn't have cast an entire extra crew of Korean actors.
e: Doubly so for all the GiTS 'originalists' in this thread. Because that movie is a very good example of one that tried to stay incredibly true to exceptionally intricate and confusing source material-although much tighter and less contradictory than the sum of the GiTS cannon at this point, And while lots of people liked it ambition and scope, and otherwise thought it was good, the general public took to it like kick to the nuts.
I don't have any particular confidence in anything about the movie, I am simply reacting against what appears to me to be unjustified certainty upon what are ultimately empirical matters and things which are manifestly underdetermined (or contraindicated) by the available evidence. As far as I know there's hardly any information about the movie available at present - a few publicity shots of Johansson as the Major, and not much else. Certainly the idea that there are a lot of clear and present indications of likely failure aren't clear - and furthermore my impression of the general fan echo chamber around most properties is that they have no idea/no concern for what makes a good movie (and I don't like most movies anyway).
Neutrality with productions like this remains confidence, though. Don't you think Hollywood has a bad history with race relations?
Of the things that I do know - it would be vastly more expensive to hire Caucasian actors and digitally correct them compared to simply hiring Asian extras AND that casting directors tend to be very concerned with establishing appropriate diversity in crowds (even if they don't achieve it, they want to do so) - it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the plan was to do anything that could be handled by simply hiring Asian actors instead of exploring CGI options.
If the movie company doing this were that competent or prioritizing diversity the issue wouldn't be anywhere near this bad right now. And no, there are no excuses for not hiring Asian extras for scenes like that. Casting directors saying that means little when the results are showing the opposite, on something that shouldn't be this hard to get the logistics on. They don't have to be actively racist for racism to effect their practices, and they'd be really, really stupid to openly admit they're doing this for racist reasons.
I don't know what you mean by the bolded as it doesn't apply to what I was saying.
Cloud Atlas is close to unfilmable as it is. If they'd used different actors for each set of incarnations they could have re-titled it: You Cannot Follow This Movie
I'm like 99% convinced that everyone complaining about Hugo Weaving in Cloud Atlas, has never seen Cloud Atlas. And has only actually seen the click-bait factory video going around facebook. Because even a 'read the wikipedia page' familiarity with the plot should make it readily apparent, why they couldn't have cast an entire extra crew of Korean actors.
e: Doubly so for all the GiTS 'originalists' in this thread. Because that movie is a very good example of one that tried to stay incredibly true to exceptionally intricate and confusing source material-although much tighter and less contradictory than the sum of the GiTS cannon at this point, And while lots of people liked it ambition and scope, and otherwise thought it was good, the general public took to it like kick to the nuts.
Say I agree with you, why is that one example enough evidence that Hollywood is going to do it again with GiTS? It's also a film about reincarnation to know which character is which. Theres no reason to do this in GiTS. It's also a very debatable topic about race in movies with Cloud Atlas, because under the best situations it's something that is a third rail by touching it. Ambition and scope are wonderful to have, but they are not excuses for doing things like this for any reason at all, especially in a industry with an obvious bad past and present with entrenched racist practices.
So again, your argument is just not to make the film. I can't agree with that. Cloud Atlas is a unique novel that deserved a big screen adaptation, and the filmmakers did a credible job adapting a nearly unfilmable novel.
You can't please everyone, and some people cannot be pleased at all.
So again, your argument is just not to make the film. I can't agree with that. Cloud Atlas is a unique novel that deserved a big screen adaptation, and the filmmakers did a credible job adapting a nearly unfilmable novel.
You can't please everyone, and some people cannot be pleased at all.
Sure they can make the film, but there is absolutely no way to get around doing something like that - it's a third rail for a reason. If CA had troubles with this, do you really want GiTS to test those waters?
So again, your argument is just not to make the film. I can't agree with that. Cloud Atlas is a unique novel that deserved a big screen adaptation, and the filmmakers did a credible job adapting a nearly unfilmable novel.
You can't please everyone, and some people cannot be pleased at all.
Sure they can make the film, but there is absolutely no way to get around doing something like that - it's a third rail for a reason. If CA had troubles with this, do you really want GiTS to test those waters?
Yes? It's much better to attempt something new/different/ambitious and fail than to never try it at all.
GiTS really is perfect for this whole controversy. It's almost delicious to see this outrage rise over a film that tackles core issues of humanity and identity. There's some irony there, if you're of the mind to see it.
I doubt they're going to handle this particularly well, I'd rather they give it the old college try than not try at all. Why wouldn't we want them to test these waters? If they very act of trying is concerning, than that is EVEN MORE reason to try.
So again, your argument is just not to make the film. I can't agree with that. Cloud Atlas is a unique novel that deserved a big screen adaptation, and the filmmakers did a credible job adapting a nearly unfilmable novel.
You can't please everyone, and some people cannot be pleased at all.
Sure they can make the film, but there is absolutely no way to get around doing something like that - it's a third rail for a reason. If CA had troubles with this, do you really want GiTS to test those waters?
Yes? It's much better to attempt something new/different/ambitious and fail than to never try it at all.
No? Ambition is no reason to continue horrible practices that are a hotbed of racism.
GiTS really is perfect for this whole controversy. It's almost delicious to see this outrage rise over a film that tackles core issues of humanity and identity. There's some irony there, if you're of the mind to see it.
No, its irony - about the people making the film. Those issues are excellent to explore, unfortunately they given no reason to believe they'll do correctly. Supporting people's assumptions that they'll tackle this issue as horribly as possible is a very bad idea for all involved and taints the GiTS brand in the process. I'd think the director would be concerned about being perceived as racist, even passively and he's done nothing to disprove it. Instead they've doubled down on the typical Hollywood bullshit. If they really wanted to do this right they wouldn't have had a white actress lead - that's the bar minimum they failed to pass about handling this subject correctly.
edit: This is how we got Sucker Punch.
I doubt they're going to handle this particularly well, I'd rather they give it the old college try than not try at all. Why wouldn't we want them to test these waters? If they very act of trying is concerning, than that is EVEN MORE reason to try.
It isn't when the people doing it have shown no proof they know what they're doing and have already proven themselves to be racially tone deaf.
So again, your argument is just not to make the film. I can't agree with that. Cloud Atlas is a unique novel that deserved a big screen adaptation, and the filmmakers did a credible job adapting a nearly unfilmable novel.
You can't please everyone, and some people cannot be pleased at all.
Sure they can make the film, but there is absolutely no way to get around doing something like that - it's a third rail for a reason. If CA had troubles with this, do you really want GiTS to test those waters?
I guess what I wrote was a bit confusing. I really don't want to try and parallel the race-change aspects of them, just because whatever race change was being tested for GiTS is both not going to happen, and of an intent or scope that is nothing more than speculation at this point. I was more just saying that the people who complain about CAs race-bending are myopic.
My comment relating CA to GiTS is more aimed at all the people arguing for rote filming based off the source material, because the issues that caused CA are numerous even if they were unavoidable. That doing a similarly rote script for GiTS where there is much more flexibilty-and less source cohesion- will end up with a better movie for adhering closely to the source material is pretty dubious.
Cloud Atlas's scope vs basic watchability and entertainment value is subject to a lot of divergent opinions from people who watch a lot of more complex than average movies. To the average movie goer it was basically a non-starter.
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I don't have any particular confidence in anything about the movie, I am simply reacting against what appears to me to be unjustified certainty upon what are ultimately empirical matters and things which are manifestly underdetermined (or contraindicated) by the available evidence. As far as I know there's hardly any information about the movie available at present - a few publicity shots of Johansson as the Major, and not much else. Certainly the idea that there are a lot of clear and present indications of likely failure aren't clear - and furthermore my impression of the general fan echo chamber around most properties is that they have no idea/no concern for what makes a good movie (and I don't like most movies anyway).
Neutrality with productions like this remains confidence, though. Don't you think Hollywood has a bad history with race relations?
Of the things that I do know - it would be vastly more expensive to hire Caucasian actors and digitally correct them compared to simply hiring Asian extras AND that casting directors tend to be very concerned with establishing appropriate diversity in crowds (even if they don't achieve it, they want to do so) - it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the plan was to do anything that could be handled by simply hiring Asian actors instead of exploring CGI options.
If the movie company doing this were that competent or prioritizing diversity the issue wouldn't be anywhere near this bad right now. And no, there are no excuses for not hiring Asian extras for scenes like that. Casting directors saying that means little when the results are showing the opposite, on something that shouldn't be this hard to get the logistics on. They don't have to be actively racist for racism to effect their practices, and they'd be really, really stupid to openly admit they're doing this for racist reasons.
I don't know what you mean by the bolded as it doesn't apply to what I was saying.
I misunderstood you. Forget about it.
No, I don't think neutrality with regard to the specific complaints are any kind of confidence. I don't even think it is a position to hold to be critical of the critiques apparently unjustified confidence and assumption. I don't know what you mean by "productions like this" - this seems to be yet another instance of assumption.
I certainly do not share the professed moral or pragmatic intuitions the vast majority of posters within this thread have exposed about race and representation, let alone the ethics of adaption vis racial and national changes. So, I don't think there is "a bad history" in the way you mean (not to mention that you've stake done of the more radical positions within the thread with regard to what are and aren't objectionable adaptions). I doubt it will satisfy the critics of race and representation within this thread but not due to any deficiency of the film.
While I very much, and very earnestly applaud you for the bolded - I think that misunderstanding is rife in controversial threads and it going unacknowledged is detrimental to discourse - I think your preceding passage has also misunderstood my point, which is very specifically about why it is unlikely that any issue that the production team had intended to solve is unlikely to have been equally well solved by hiring Asian extras.
The problem is, some characters just don't translate well to film. And that's a totally valid criticism. But just because you can justify putting someone in yellowface (or putting an Asian in whiteface, which also happens in Cloud Atlas), does not erase the one hundred years of historical evidence that yellowface is used to give lead roles to white people over minorities.
If the story had involved being reincarnated as black people, it still would be problematic if we had the white main characters in CGI and prosthetics to achieve ostensibly modern day blackface. We can come come up with a hundred reasons why canonical it's okay to do so, but would it not be cheaper to higher two actors that look similar instead of spending all that budget altering the race of the characters on screen?
The problem is, some characters just don't translate well to film. And that's a totally valid criticism. But just because you can justify putting someone in yellowface (or putting an Asian in whiteface, which also happens in Cloud Atlas), does not erase the one hundred years of historical evidence that yellowface is used to give lead roles to white people over minorities.
If the story had involved being reincarnated as black people, it still would be problematic if we had the white main characters in CGI and prosthetics to achieve ostensibly modern day blackface. We can come come up with a hundred reasons why canonical it's okay to do so, but would it not be cheaper to higher two actors that look similar instead of spending all that budget altering the race of the characters on screen?
Probably not. You'd pay the a listers the same for less work, pay the replacements more for the same work, delay production to find these people, and probably still do CGI to mask the imperfections.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The problem is, some characters just don't translate well to film. And that's a totally valid criticism. But just because you can justify putting someone in yellowface (or putting an Asian in whiteface, which also happens in Cloud Atlas), does not erase the one hundred years of historical evidence that yellowface is used to give lead roles to white people over minorities.
If the story had involved being reincarnated as black people, it still would be problematic if we had the white main characters in CGI and prosthetics to achieve ostensibly modern day blackface. We can come come up with a hundred reasons why canonical it's okay to do so, but would it not be cheaper to higher two actors that look similar instead of spending all that budget altering the race of the characters on screen?
Probably not. You'd pay the a listers the same for less work, pay the replacements more for the same work, delay production to find these people, and probably still do CGI to mask the imperfections.
Again, this doesn't feel like the right solution. What you said as a response is the same rationale used by studios to justify yellowface as okay to do. Cloud Atlas isn't some amazingly moving piece of thematic film, simply having characters reincarnated as another race is not a good justification for continuing the dated trend of whitewashing.
Hugo Weaving plays an Elf in LotR. Nobody gets mad about that because Elves do not exist in real life. Then, they get Hugo Weaving to play a Korean man. People get mad because Koreans exist in real life. You see the issue here?
The problem is, some characters just don't translate well to film. And that's a totally valid criticism. But just because you can justify putting someone in yellowface (or putting an Asian in whiteface, which also happens in Cloud Atlas), does not erase the one hundred years of historical evidence that yellowface is used to give lead roles to white people over minorities.
If the story had involved being reincarnated as black people, it still would be problematic if we had the white main characters in CGI and prosthetics to achieve ostensibly modern day blackface. We can come come up with a hundred reasons why canonical it's okay to do so, but would it not be cheaper to higher two actors that look similar instead of spending all that budget altering the race of the characters on screen?
Probably not. You'd pay the a listers the same for less work, pay the replacements more for the same work, delay production to find these people, and probably still do CGI to mask the imperfections.
Again, this doesn't feel like the right solution. What you said as a response is the same rationale used by studios to justify yellowface as okay to do. Cloud Atlas isn't some amazingly moving piece of thematic film, simply having characters reincarnated as another race is not a good justification for continuing the dated trend of whitewashing.
Hugo Weaving plays an Elf in LotR. Nobody gets mad about that because Elves do not exist in real life. Then, they get Hugo Weaving to play a Korean man. People get mad because Koreans exist in real life. You see the issue here?
Yeah, reality grounded fantasy is a farce. I'm not too hot on Cloud Atlas as a concept, but there is something lost if playing with actual race is off limits.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
The problem is, some characters just don't translate well to film. And that's a totally valid criticism. But just because you can justify putting someone in yellowface (or putting an Asian in whiteface, which also happens in Cloud Atlas), does not erase the one hundred years of historical evidence that yellowface is used to give lead roles to white people over minorities.
If the story had involved being reincarnated as black people, it still would be problematic if we had the white main characters in CGI and prosthetics to achieve ostensibly modern day blackface. We can come come up with a hundred reasons why canonical it's okay to do so, but would it not be cheaper to higher two actors that look similar instead of spending all that budget altering the race of the characters on screen?
Probably not. You'd pay the a listers the same for less work, pay the replacements more for the same work, delay production to find these people, and probably still do CGI to mask the imperfections.
Again, this doesn't feel like the right solution. What you said as a response is the same rationale used by studios to justify yellowface as okay to do. Cloud Atlas isn't some amazingly moving piece of thematic film, simply having characters reincarnated as another race is not a good justification for continuing the dated trend of whitewashing.
Hugo Weaving plays an Elf in LotR. Nobody gets mad about that because Elves do not exist in real life. Then, they get Hugo Weaving to play a Korean man. People get mad because Koreans exist in real life. You see the issue here?
So no movie that requires an actor to play multiplet ethnicities can ever be made? That's stupid. You've taken a reasonable and we'll meaning idea and turned it into a sacred cow that can't understand context. CA was not whitewashing.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
I am not saying "playing with race" is off the table as a concept... But Jesus Christ we have to acknowledge the systemic issue of racist portrayals of Asians and other minorities. We can't just plop white people down in a make-up chair and use the source material to justify yellowface, blackface and other problematic portrayals of minorities on film. Yes, Matoko is a cyborg. Yes, Goku is a space alien. Yes, Adam Ewing and Haskell Moore are reincarnated as Koreans in the book. None of these concepts justify furthering the concept of yellowface.
Cloud Atlas missed a great opportunity. The Korea story’s protagonist is an Asian man--an action hero who defies the odds and holds off armies of attackers," Guy Aoki, MANAA's founding president, said in a statement. "He’s the one who liberates [a clone played by actress] Doona Bae from her repressive life and encourages her to join the resistance against the government. It would have been a great, stereotype-busting role for an Asian American actor to play, as Asian American men aren’t allowed to be dynamic or heroic very often.
It appears that to turn white and black actors into Asian characters (black actor Keith David was also Asian in the 2144 story), the make-up artists believed they only had to change their eyes, not their facial structure and complexion," Aoki said.
There is also anger at the reverse racial transformations. In pointing out scenes in which Bae and another Asian woman in the storyline, Xun Zhou, are made to look Caucasian, Aoki added “obviously took more care to make them look convincingly white. The message the movie sends is, it takes a lot of work to get Asians to look Caucasian, but you can easily turn Caucasians into Asians by just changing the shape of their eyes."
Other racial transformations in the film include Halle Berry playing a white woman, and Tom Hanks taking a spray tan and haircut to appear as a Brit of Southern European descent. The purpose of having actors take on multiple roles, they directors have said, is to portray the continuity of souls.
Still, the MANAA believes that double standards were used. In one plotline concerning black slaves, each slave was played by a black actor.
"You have to ask yourself: Would the directors have used blackface on a white actor to play Gyasi’s role?” asked Aoki, referring to David Gyasi, the freed slave in the film. I don’t think so: That would have outraged African American viewers. But badly done yellowface is still OK."
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Cloud Atlas, like Hamilton, are both non-sequiturs for this discussion. Both used racism (and in Cloud Atlas, sexism) to point out the absurdity of racism/sexism. Niggling over the details misses the greater message being conveyed.
As has been pointed out many times in this discussion, neither isolated acts of goodness nor evil are compelling reasons to determine that systematic racism isn't at work. The proof is in the pudding, or in this case, pay equality and representation in films.
I am not saying "playing with race" is off the table as a concept... But Jesus Christ we have to acknowledge the systemic issue of racist portrayals of Asians and other minorities. We can't just plop white people down in a make-up chair and use the source material to justify yellowface, blackface and other problematic portrayals of minorities on film. Yes, Matoko is a cyborg. Yes, Goku is a space alien. Yes, Adam Ewing and Haskell Moore are reincarnated as Koreans in the book. None of these concepts justify furthering the concept of yellowface.
Cloud Atlas missed a great opportunity. The Korea story’s protagonist is an Asian man--an action hero who defies the odds and holds off armies of attackers," Guy Aoki, MANAA's founding president, said in a statement. "He’s the one who liberates [a clone played by actress] Doona Bae from her repressive life and encourages her to join the resistance against the government. It would have been a great, stereotype-busting role for an Asian American actor to play, as Asian American men aren’t allowed to be dynamic or heroic very often.
It appears that to turn white and black actors into Asian characters (black actor Keith David was also Asian in the 2144 story), the make-up artists believed they only had to change their eyes, not their facial structure and complexion," Aoki said.
There is also anger at the reverse racial transformations. In pointing out scenes in which Bae and another Asian woman in the storyline, Xun Zhou, are made to look Caucasian, Aoki added “obviously took more care to make them look convincingly white. The message the movie sends is, it takes a lot of work to get Asians to look Caucasian, but you can easily turn Caucasians into Asians by just changing the shape of their eyes."
Other racial transformations in the film include Halle Berry playing a white woman, and Tom Hanks taking a spray tan and haircut to appear as a Brit of Southern European descent. The purpose of having actors take on multiple roles, they directors have said, is to portray the continuity of souls.
Still, the MANAA believes that double standards were used. In one plotline concerning black slaves, each slave was played by a black actor.
"You have to ask yourself: Would the directors have used blackface on a white actor to play Gyasi’s role?” asked Aoki, referring to David Gyasi, the freed slave in the film. I don’t think so: That would have outraged African American viewers. But badly done yellowface is still OK."
The protagonist in the Korean Story wasn't a man, it was the clone played by Doona Bae. In fact that was one of the good parts of CA: the main characters in each story was of the right ethnicity. White protagonist for white stories(Tom Hanks post apocalyptic story), black for black stories(Halle Berry's reporter story) and Doona Bae for the Korean story.
They only shifted race when they where in somebody else's part of the story/movie. Like the white guy playing the action hero in the Korean story, he is a supporting character in that story. In the boat story he is the main character and Doona Bae who plays is wife in the end is in whiteface. By seeing both we get a deeper understanding of why he is willing to go to such lengths to free a slave and Doona Bae especially. They had been married in a past life.
That is what made the racelift acceptable to me: Every main character is of the right ethnicity in their storyand everybody else is cast according to their relationship to the main character in that story and the overall story of the movie, switching races to match the main character in their story.
The purpose is to follow each character as they interact over the centuries and take turns being the protagonist.
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
I am not saying "playing with race" is off the table as a concept... But Jesus Christ we have to acknowledge the systemic issue of racist portrayals of Asians and other minorities. We can't just plop white people down in a make-up chair and use the source material to justify yellowface, blackface and other problematic portrayals of minorities on film. Yes, Matoko is a cyborg. Yes, Goku is a space alien. Yes, Adam Ewing and Haskell Moore are reincarnated as Koreans in the book. None of these concepts justify furthering the concept of yellowface.
Cloud Atlas missed a great opportunity. The Korea story’s protagonist is an Asian man--an action hero who defies the odds and holds off armies of attackers," Guy Aoki, MANAA's founding president, said in a statement. "He’s the one who liberates [a clone played by actress] Doona Bae from her repressive life and encourages her to join the resistance against the government. It would have been a great, stereotype-busting role for an Asian American actor to play, as Asian American men aren’t allowed to be dynamic or heroic very often.
It appears that to turn white and black actors into Asian characters (black actor Keith David was also Asian in the 2144 story), the make-up artists believed they only had to change their eyes, not their facial structure and complexion," Aoki said.
There is also anger at the reverse racial transformations. In pointing out scenes in which Bae and another Asian woman in the storyline, Xun Zhou, are made to look Caucasian, Aoki added “obviously took more care to make them look convincingly white. The message the movie sends is, it takes a lot of work to get Asians to look Caucasian, but you can easily turn Caucasians into Asians by just changing the shape of their eyes."
Other racial transformations in the film include Halle Berry playing a white woman, and Tom Hanks taking a spray tan and haircut to appear as a Brit of Southern European descent. The purpose of having actors take on multiple roles, they directors have said, is to portray the continuity of souls.
Still, the MANAA believes that double standards were used. In one plotline concerning black slaves, each slave was played by a black actor.
"You have to ask yourself: Would the directors have used blackface on a white actor to play Gyasi’s role?” asked Aoki, referring to David Gyasi, the freed slave in the film. I don’t think so: That would have outraged African American viewers. But badly done yellowface is still OK."
The protagonist in the Korean Story wasn't a man, it was the clone played by Doona Bae. In fact that was one of the good parts of CA: the main characters in each story was of the right ethnicity. White protagonist for white stories(Tom Hanks post apocalyptic story), black for black stories(Halle Berry's reporter story) and Doona Bae for the Korean story.
They only shifted race when they where in somebody else's part of the story/movie. Like the white guy playing the action hero in the Korean story, he is a supporting character in that story. In the boat story he is the main character and Doona Bae who plays is wife in the end is in whiteface. By seeing both we get a deeper understanding of why he is willing to go to such lengths to free a slave and Doona Bae especially. They had been married in a past life.
That is what made the racelift acceptable to me: Every main character is of the right ethnicity in their storyand everybody else is cast according to their relationship to the main character in that story and the overall story of the movie, switching races to match the main character in their story.
The purpose is to follow each character as they interact over the centuries and take turns being the protagonist.
Actually the actors don't play the same "soul" through each period, and we know this because the protagonist of each story has the same birthmark, despite being played by a different actor in each period.
Let's continue with this train of thought. How incensed should we be over the American version of The Ring?
I'm not the one being incensed here. I was merely saying it'd be great if more adaptions were more recognizable rather than the trite Hollywood formula where America is the only county that matters. America is not restricted by other countries with the film industry and it can cause enormous change with its influence. Would it really be that bad for Hollywood to make an All You Need is Kill movie?
What about film adaptations of novels, such as All You Need Is Kill into Edge of Tomorrow? Are we only allowed to be mad about adaptations of foreign novels, or can we complain about domestic ones as well? I certainly didn't like how Henry Wu's character was cut down to almost nothing in the film version of Jurassic Park compared to the novel... or does that balance out because he died in the novel but got to show back up in Jurassic World? Help me out here.
You're ignoring the nuance in my argument, I wasn't saying it's all or nothing. Surely it'd be ok with more foreign adaptions to have minority protagonists and diverse casts and in places more than America? America all the time, every time is boring. Pacific Rim may not be an adaption, but at least it tried something new by setting it in Hong Kong.
Edge of Tomorrow does not take place in America, it's set in the UK and France. The characters present in the film are multinational, and while Tom Cruise's character is American, Emily Blunt's is British. Guess what? In the original novel, Rita Vrataski was American! Had the original ethnicity of the characters been preserved, would you be here complaining about how Hollywood made it so the American taught the Japanese how to fight, despite that being literally how it happens in the Japanese-penned original?
I hadn't missed the nuance in your argument because none was present as you had presented it.
I now understand the nuance you had intended to present, thanks to this subsequent post of yours where you've clarified that you meant to say that you wanted Hollywood to make films that were more oriented towards foreign audiences (in this particular case, Asian audiences, but I suppose it would depend based on where the source material originates, yes?). That is a more understandable position. I don't disagree with that sentiment, but I do disagree with the idea that all Hollywood adaptations of foreign properties need to be made with the originating country in mind as an audience.
Actually, had they kept the ethnicities as they were in the novel, I'd be cheering because that would have meant they kept the geeky female Native American engineer, instead of replacing her with Generic Male British Scientist.
Cloud Atlas, like Hamilton, are both non-sequiturs for this discussion. Both used racism (and in Cloud Atlas, sexism) to point out the absurdity of racism/sexism. Niggling over the details misses the greater message being conveyed.
As has been pointed out many times in this discussion, neither isolated acts of goodness nor evil are compelling reasons to determine that systematic racism isn't at work. The proof is in the pudding, or in this case, pay equality and representation in films.
This whole discussion has been about breaking down each detail of these works. The story of Cloud Atlas is about racisim, yes. It does not mean we can't critique the depictions of minorities in the film. It may be a socially aware story, and trying to tackle it is definitely something I want to see more of in Hollywood. But again, I don't find the solution of putting many actors in prosthetics a good one. Having a white British actor named Jim Sturgess play a Korean guy named Hae Joo-Im is pretty not okay, even if it's to make a point about racism.
We can cut slack if it feels appropriate. But we live in reality, where whitewashing and yellowface have a history going back a hundred years. Ignoring that context is folly.
Look at the recent Cloud Atlas, a movie coincidently director by the Wachowskis, the people who made the Matrix- which is explicitly inspired by Ghost in the Shell. It had Hugo Weaving in yellowface via CGI. It doesn't seem like we can give Hollywood the benefit of the doubt here when they have made these same mistakes in the past.
Cloud Atlas isn't really the same situation, the entire point of the movie was that these same people and ideas are repeating throughout history regardless of race, class or time period, and everyone in the cast went through race changes as the story progressed.
There's not a lot of movies that can do this. Mainly Sci Fi and Fantasy movies with a focus on transhumanism.
That doesn't make it not whitewashing to change the race of the character from non-white to white.
Catching up on the thread and this stood out for me. Let's take another look at that kind of story.
Altered Carbon, a story about people being able to 'sleeve' into other bodies. As I recall from the book, 'renting' ones body out can be done to pay off debts, and people can be forcibly removed from their body as punishment. People can be digitized and transferred across vast (even interstellar) distances. As such, identity becomes more fluid; a person can be a white man one minute, a black woman the next, a disabled war vet a few hours later, and back to their original body by dinner. There are even accurate simulations where a person can 'exist' in whatever form they wish or are forced into, and time can be manipulated; you can live out an entire life as X across a few hours or days in this manner.
As such, while the books do describe the protagonist in detail, and their multiple forms (usually male, but not always, of various ethnicities at different points across the books that make up the series), if Hollywood were to make a movie based on it I would be shocked, shocked, if the main lead wasn't generally a white male, perhaps playing with the identity matter, but let's be real; most of the time being one guy.
Now, apparently Netflix IS making a series based on the book(s?). They optioned it mid last year, and at a glance they pushed to have a 10 episode series produced (announced early this year, no set release yet). Now, Netflix has done some pretty great things, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But IF (not when, IF) the 'male lead' is announced as a Caucasian actor and the series has him playing said role 80 or 90% of the time, with token nods/flashbacks/momentary (maybe a whole episode!) as someone else, it'd get an eye roll and just be another case where 'the star power of _____ was necessary to draw viewers' or whatever.
To be clear, again, I do hope Netflix allows for diversity and embraces the themes of the book and all that would entail (and there is some dark shit in there; body swapping is not always a good thing), but as per the topic of the thread, I wouldn't remotely be surprised if it stumbled or fell a little short there either.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
All this talk of Ghost in the Shell has the very real effect of me finding it online to watch this weekend.
Well, on the bright side, in the chance that you've never seen it before--we've had the effect of exposing you to more art. And it didn't cost of tens of millions of dollars.
We can cut slack if it feels appropriate. But we live in reality, where whitewashing and yellowface have a history going back a hundred years. Ignoring that context is folly.
Look at the recent Cloud Atlas, a movie coincidently director by the Wachowskis, the people who made the Matrix- which is explicitly inspired by Ghost in the Shell. It had Hugo Weaving in yellowface via CGI. It doesn't seem like we can give Hollywood the benefit of the doubt here when they have made these same mistakes in the past.
Cloud Atlas isn't really the same situation, the entire point of the movie was that these same people and ideas are repeating throughout history regardless of race, class or time period, and everyone in the cast went through race changes as the story progressed.
Good intentions only get so far, though. Sure it was one of the better attempts, but this technique isn't for any idiot with big ideas in Hollywood - and it'll still have bad implications they can't avoid.
There's not a lot of movies that can do this. Mainly Sci Fi and Fantasy movies with a focus on transhumanism.
That doesn't make it not whitewashing to change the race of the character from non-white to white.
Catching up on the thread and this stood out for me. Let's take another look at that kind of story.
Altered Carbon, a story about people being able to 'sleeve' into other bodies. As I recall from the book, 'renting' ones body out can be done to pay off debts, and people can be forcibly removed from their body as punishment. People can be digitized and transferred across vast (even interstellar) distances. As such, identity becomes more fluid; a person can be a white man one minute, a black woman the next, a disabled war vet a few hours later, and back to their original body by dinner. There are even accurate simulations where a person can 'exist' in whatever form they wish or are forced into, and time can be manipulated; you can live out an entire life as X across a few hours or days in this manner.
As such, while the books do describe the protagonist in detail, and their multiple forms (usually male, but not always, of various ethnicities at different points across the books that make up the series), if Hollywood were to make a movie based on it I would be shocked, shocked, if the main lead wasn't generally a white male, perhaps playing with the identity matter, but let's be real; most of the time being one guy.
Now, apparently Netflix IS making a series based on the book(s?). They optioned it mid last year, and at a glance they pushed to have a 10 episode series produced (announced early this year, no set release yet). Now, Netflix has done some pretty great things, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But IF (not when, IF) the 'male lead' is announced as a Caucasian actor and the series has him playing said role 80 or 90% of the time, with token nods/flashbacks/momentary (maybe a whole episode!) as someone else, it'd get an eye roll and just be another case where 'the star power of _____ was necessary to draw viewers' or whatever.
To be clear, again, I do hope Netflix allows for diversity and embraces the themes of the book and all that would entail (and there is some dark shit in there; body swapping is not always a good thing), but as per the topic of the thread, I wouldn't remotely be surprised if it stumbled or fell a little short there either.
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
The main character is called Takeshi Kovacs and IIRC is half asian... in his original body. He dies in the first couple pages and spends 99% of the first novel in the body of a generic white male police officer. The other 1% he spends in a ninja body. Literally a body built for the purpose of being a ninja. Oh, and I guess 0.1% of the plot was spent as a digital women in a virtual Islamic torture cell.
So when they cast a white actor and have him spend all of his time as a white actor, they will have been utterly true to the novel. When the only identity shenanigans that occur are "problematic" they will once again be completely faithful to the source material.
+5
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
edited April 2016
Fun fact about Cloud Atlas: Bae Doona's characters were originally offered to...Natalie Portman.
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
It's been a few years since I read them, perhaps the body hopping is less prominent than I'd recalled.
But it would be an opportunity to cast something other than a white male as the lead, regardless of how it ended up in the books.
Perhaps even moreso than GitS, it's a setting based around ones physical body being entirely fluid.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
It's been a few years since I read them, perhaps the body hopping is less prominent than I'd recalled.
But it would be an opportunity to cast something other than a white male as the lead, regardless of how it ended up in the books.
Perhaps even moreso than GitS, it's a setting based around ones physical body being entirely fluid.
Fluid if you're really rich, if you're not your going to get shoved in whatever body they give you.
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
It's been a few years since I read them, perhaps the body hopping is less prominent than I'd recalled.
But it would be an opportunity to cast something other than a white male as the lead, regardless of how it ended up in the books.
Perhaps even moreso than GitS, it's a setting based around ones physical body being entirely fluid.
Fluid if you're really rich, if you're not your going to get shoved in whatever body they give you.
Fluid if you don't have any sort of religious proscriptions or medical conditions either.
Plus, even if you don't, switching a body in Ghost in the Shell is substantially more difficult than switching your car. This isn't Surrogates, there's no readily accessible industry for renting artificial bodies in any continuity. People are not that rich, a nuclear world war will do that.
If your body got hacked, it's probably not because they actually wanted your specific cyberbody. It's probably because they wanted to kidnap you.
EDIT: Put another way--you know what's more common than complete cyberization in the manga and TV series? One of these jalopies.
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
It's been a few years since I read them, perhaps the body hopping is less prominent than I'd recalled.
But it would be an opportunity to cast something other than a white male as the lead, regardless of how it ended up in the books.
Perhaps even moreso than GitS, it's a setting based around ones physical body being entirely fluid.
Fluid if you're really rich, if you're not your going to get shoved in whatever body they give you.
Fluid if you don't have any sort of religious proscriptions or medical conditions either.
Plus, even if you don't, switching a body in Ghost in the Shell is substantially more difficult than switching your car. This isn't Surrogates, there's no readily accessible industry for renting artificial bodies in any continuity. People are not that rich, a nuclear world war will do that.
If your body got hacked, it's probably not because they actually wanted your specific cyberbody. It's probably because they wanted to kidnap you.
EDIT: Put another way--you know what's more common than complete cyberization in the manga and TV series? One of these jalopies.
Ehh that's a rich industrialist though.
Also this quote tree is talking about Richard K. Morgan's stuff. Where there is an industry for renting bodies across solar systems.
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
It's been a few years since I read them, perhaps the body hopping is less prominent than I'd recalled.
But it would be an opportunity to cast something other than a white male as the lead, regardless of how it ended up in the books.
Perhaps even moreso than GitS, it's a setting based around ones physical body being entirely fluid.
Fluid if you're really rich, if you're not your going to get shoved in whatever body they give you.
Fluid if you don't have any sort of religious proscriptions or medical conditions either.
Plus, even if you don't, switching a body in Ghost in the Shell is substantially more difficult than switching your car. This isn't Surrogates, there's no readily accessible industry for renting artificial bodies in any continuity. People are not that rich, a nuclear world war will do that.
If your body got hacked, it's probably not because they actually wanted your specific cyberbody. It's probably because they wanted to kidnap you.
EDIT: Put another way--you know what's more common than complete cyberization in the manga and TV series? One of these jalopies.
Ehh that's a rich industrialist though.
Yeah, and even he was considered insane for doing it (willingly giving up the functioning body he was born with for--a marketing pitch? A quick profit?). A number of professional judges on a panel use them too.
There's a reason why the vast majority of people have limited cyberization: for the postwar consumer, the options mostly suck.
I honestly only know Morgan because of his involvement in Crysis 2, which was badly written (like all the other Crysis games).
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
It's been a few years since I read them, perhaps the body hopping is less prominent than I'd recalled.
But it would be an opportunity to cast something other than a white male as the lead, regardless of how it ended up in the books.
Perhaps even moreso than GitS, it's a setting based around ones physical body being entirely fluid.
Fluid if you're really rich, if you're not your going to get shoved in whatever body they give you.
Fluid if you don't have any sort of religious proscriptions or medical conditions either.
Plus, even if you don't, switching a body in Ghost in the Shell is substantially more difficult than switching your car. This isn't Surrogates, there's no readily accessible industry for renting artificial bodies in any continuity. People are not that rich, a nuclear world war will do that.
If your body got hacked, it's probably not because they actually wanted your specific cyberbody. It's probably because they wanted to kidnap you.
EDIT: Put another way--you know what's more common than complete cyberization in the manga and TV series? One of these jalopies.
Ehh that's a rich industrialist though.
Yeah, and even he was considered insane for doing it (willingly giving up the functioning body he was born with for--a marketing pitch? A quick profit?). A number of professional judges on a panel use them too.
There's a reason why the vast majority of people have limited cyberization: for the postwar consumer, the options mostly suck.
I honestly only know Morgan because of his involvement in Crysis 2, which was badly written (like all the other Crysis games).
In SAC he's eccentric for sticking with an old model, not necessarily for being fully cyberized. IIRC the most popular level of cyberization is full brain case in original body, but full prosthetic body isn't super rare.
In the first volume of the manga after Batou and Motoko are on the run with her body destroyed, they steal the (male) body of a criminal for her to use. And these are just random criminals. In SAC full prosthetic seems sort of rare, Arise adds some interesting ideas to this as Motoko isn't worried about having maintenance covered but rather outright does not own her own body, but in the comic full prosthetic does not seem as rare.
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
It's been a few years since I read them, perhaps the body hopping is less prominent than I'd recalled.
But it would be an opportunity to cast something other than a white male as the lead, regardless of how it ended up in the books.
Perhaps even moreso than GitS, it's a setting based around ones physical body being entirely fluid.
Fluid if you're really rich, if you're not your going to get shoved in whatever body they give you.
Fluid if you don't have any sort of religious proscriptions or medical conditions either.
Plus, even if you don't, switching a body in Ghost in the Shell is substantially more difficult than switching your car. This isn't Surrogates, there's no readily accessible industry for renting artificial bodies in any continuity. People are not that rich, a nuclear world war will do that.
If your body got hacked, it's probably not because they actually wanted your specific cyberbody. It's probably because they wanted to kidnap you.
EDIT: Put another way--you know what's more common than complete cyberization in the manga and TV series? One of these jalopies.
Ehh that's a rich industrialist though.
Yeah, and even he was considered insane for doing it (willingly giving up the functioning body he was born with for--a marketing pitch? A quick profit?). A number of professional judges on a panel use them too.
There's a reason why the vast majority of people have limited cyberization: for the postwar consumer, the options mostly suck.
I honestly only know Morgan because of his involvement in Crysis 2, which was badly written (like all the other Crysis games).
In SAC he's eccentric for sticking with an old model, not necessarily for being fully cyberized. IIRC the most popular level of cyberization is full brain case in original body, but full prosthetic body isn't super rare.
In the first volume of the manga after Batou and Motoko are on the run with her body destroyed, they steal the (male) body of a criminal for her to use. And these are just random criminals. In SAC full prosthetic seems sort of rare, Arise adds some interesting ideas to this as Motoko isn't worried about having maintenance covered but rather outright does not own her own body, but in the comic full prosthetic does not seem as rare.
It might not have been clear, but the Jameson-type owner was definitely considered weird for having gone with that particular model (as oppose to just "squandering" a working body for an artificial one, which Kusanagi and Batou lament during the organ smuggling case). In SAC, full cyberization like what we see in Section 9 is definitely suggested to be rare outside of specific professions (across the population mind you)--for things like the military, nuclear industry, etc., bodies end up being issued as part of an employment contract (which was a major point of a Togusa-centric episode). Chief Aramaki declares more than once "Hands off, she's government property," and means it fairly literally.
"You don't sit down and write a story and say, ‘I'm going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog' — right?" said Joel Coen, calling the question he'd been asked on whether he'd commit to diverse casting "idiotic." His brother Ethan concurred: "It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity — or it might not."
The problem is that, for the Coens, and for most big-budget studio producers and all too many indie filmmakers, "it might not" means "it rarely, if ever does."
The question isn't how the story in your head looks; it's how the story on screen looks. Hey, white male indie director: Might the white male characters in your head possibly be portrayable by black, Hispanic, Asian or female actors without you losing your beloved auteurist narrative control? Does the fact that you can only imagine your stories with white protagonists say more about the lack of "A-list actors" of color, or about your personal predilections, cultural myopia, and lack of storytelling range?
That's a bigger issue to me, in a lot of ways, than whitewashing. I call it "prewashing": When directors can't even imagine Asian characters or, God forbid, protagonists. Yes, it sucks that the handful of substantial Asian roles are often yanked out of reach to Asian actors. But it sucks even more that those roles are so far and few between, because screenwriters aren't writing them and filmmakers aren't envisioning them. Remember that the issue for Asian Americans in the #OscarsSoWhite controversy wasn't that we weren't being nominated — it was that there literally were no Oscar-worthy Asian-American performances, because no one had written, directed, produced or cast roles to legitimately give Asian performers the chance to compete at that star-making level."
"You don't sit down and write a story and say, ‘I'm going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog' — right?" said Joel Coen, calling the question he'd been asked on whether he'd commit to diverse casting "idiotic." His brother Ethan concurred: "It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity — or it might not."
The problem is that, for the Coens, and for most big-budget studio producers and all too many indie filmmakers, "it might not" means "it rarely, if ever does."
The question isn't how the story in your head looks; it's how the story on screen looks. Hey, white male indie director: Might the white male characters in your head possibly be portrayable by black, Hispanic, Asian or female actors without you losing your beloved auteurist narrative control? Does the fact that you can only imagine your stories with white protagonists say more about the lack of "A-list actors" of color, or about your personal predilections, cultural myopia, and lack of storytelling range?
That's a bigger issue to me, in a lot of ways, than whitewashing. I call it "prewashing": When directors can't even imagine Asian characters or, God forbid, protagonists. Yes, it sucks that the handful of substantial Asian roles are often yanked out of reach to Asian actors. But it sucks even more that those roles are so far and few between, because screenwriters aren't writing them and filmmakers aren't envisioning them. Remember that the issue for Asian Americans in the #OscarsSoWhite controversy wasn't that we weren't being nominated — it was that there literally were no Oscar-worthy Asian-American performances, because no one had written, directed, produced or cast roles to legitimately give Asian performers the chance to compete at that star-making level."
The fuck?
For starters the idea that say the Coens are capable of writing a black or asian character is a pretty huge assumption. I mean obviously they could make a character that is superficially a minority. But that a couple of Jewish guys from Minnesota could actually capture what it is to grow up as a Korean American in San Francisco-and then convey it to an audience is a reach. Not saying it can't be done, but it's a bit more involved than 'imagine if this character was Asian instead'. Unless you are reducing a character being Asian or Black or Hispanic down to nothing more than their phenotype. Then yeah you can take the power rangers approach - the black one is black, the pink one is a girl, the yellow one is asian. and that's fine(or really racist) for an after school cartoon. But if all that describes the character is the color of the costume, your movie is already sunk on the narrative front "auteurist" or not.
Secondly, actual great writing is so rare and seemingly precarious that forcing the people who struggle to achieve it to try and shoehorn changes in the characters from how they envision them is asinine. As a non-writer the alchemy that they need to create a story that is great- not just a competently put together response to a writing prompt about some lotto drawing of enough identity traits to be suitably diverse- is completely unknown to me. Hell I don't think it is known to most writers themselves. I like the the article that contains
The question isn't how the story in your head looks; it's how the story on screen looks. Hey, white male indie director: Might the white male characters in your head possibly be portrayable by black, Hispanic, Asian or female actors without you losing your beloved auteurist narrative control? Does the fact that you can only imagine your stories with white protagonists say more about the lack of "A-list actors" of color, or about your personal predilections, cultural myopia, and lack of storytelling range?
also includes
I remember meeting with a potential executive producer early on in the process and he wanted me to write a role for a white actor in "Spa Night," someone who could bring name value. If it made sense for the story, I would have tried it, but it didn't.
So you know, white writers if you can't fit a minority into your story- it's because you are a bad writer. On the other hand MY story didn't work without a mono-ethnic cast.
And finally, were I a writer of such thing. I don't know that I would want to take on the risk of trying to write in a manage of ethnic characters. While certain writers have the luxury of just taking as much time to research and learn about the groups they are writing about, the majority aren't the Coens or Tarantino. So they are explicitly writing characters from a culture that at best they have limited first hand experience with, if not they are mostly just mirroring back what they get about that culture from other media. That's a recipe to get your name in the next "6 totally racist things in movies this year" buzzfeed post. The entire concept just begs to have "CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!" or "STEREOTYPING!" screamed at it.
Write what you know is a terrible cliche, but "Don't write ethnic characters whose ethnicity you have at best a passing understanding of" is pretty prudent advice.
For starters the idea that say the Coens are capable of writing a black or asian character is a pretty huge assumption. I mean obviously they could make a character that is superficially a minority. But that a couple of Jewish guys from Minnesota could actually capture what it is to grow up as a Korean American in San Francisco-and then convey it to an audience is a reach. Not saying it can't be done, but it's a bit more involved than 'imagine if this character was Asian instead'.
It is, but to get there the creatives involves need to actually make it a priority - which the Coens certainly don't.
Unless you are reducing a character being Asian or Black or Hispanic down to nothing more than their phenotype. Then yeah you can take the power rangers approach - the black one is black, the pink one is a girl, the yellow one is asian. and that's fine(or really racist) for an after school cartoon. But if all that describes the character is the color of the costume, your movie is already sunk on the narrative front "auteurist" or not.
It's not reducing as much as cutting a topic down to the bare bones, which of course has nuance. And yes, there are more to those character than written well, but it isn't a bad thing to, y'know, think maybe this character should be x rather than y, after all it's not like Hollywood is lacking in roles about white men. Shake it up a little, life isn't that clear cut with white people errywhere. Not everywhere is Friends, and who is in the story is up to the writer's discretion. If the Coens want a movie with an Asian female lead, they'll write it. But to do this they actually have to open their minds to making stories from other perspectives, and since they're Hollywood writers and director's you'd think they'd be up to the task.
Secondly, actual great writing is so rare and seemingly precarious that forcing the people who struggle to achieve it to try and shoehorn changes in the characters from how they envision them is asinine. As a non-writer the alchemy that they need to create a story that is great- not just a competently put together response to a writing prompt about some lotto drawing of enough identity traits to be suitably diverse- is completely unknown to me. Hell I don't think it is known to most writers themselves. I like the the article that contains
The question isn't how the story in your head looks; it's how the story on screen looks. Hey, white male indie director: Might the white male characters in your head possibly be portrayable by black, Hispanic, Asian or female actors without you losing your beloved auteurist narrative control? Does the fact that you can only imagine your stories with white protagonists say more about the lack of "A-list actors" of color, or about your personal predilections, cultural myopia, and lack of storytelling range?
also includes
I remember meeting with a potential executive producer early on in the process and he wanted me to write a role for a white actor in "Spa Night," someone who could bring name value. If it made sense for the story, I would have tried it, but it didn't.
So you know, white writers if you can't fit a minority into your story- it's because you are a bad writer. On the other hand MY story didn't work without a mono-ethnic cast.
They don't need to great writers to do this, mediocre writers can do this properly. This isn't "forcing" anything, it's about accepting that the world does not revolve totally around white people and they have interesting stories to tell as well. Only bad writers do this like your description about tackling minorities in stories/casting, people who do that are dragging their feet rathe than opening their minds about accepting different point of view worthy of respect.
The reason for not including other ethnic groups in the cast had better have fucking good. Not every story has to do this, of course, but writing off ethnicities because ? is very bad writing.
And finally, were I a writer of such thing. I don't know that I would want to take on the risk of trying to write in a manage of ethnic characters. While certain writers have the luxury of just taking as much time to research and learn about the groups they are writing about, the majority aren't the Coens or Tarantino. So they are explicitly writing characters from a culture that at best they have limited first hand experience with, if not they are mostly just mirroring back what they get about that culture from other media. That's a recipe to get your name in the next "6 totally racist things in movies this year" buzzfeed post. The entire concept just begs to have "CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!" or "STEREOTYPING!" screamed at it.
Write what you know is a terrible cliche, but "Don't write ethnic characters whose ethnicity you have at best a passing understanding of" is pretty prudent advice.
There is no excuse for this to occur in this day and age. There's books, internet, consultants to hire, minority actors/directors/writers to talk to etc. Practice, listen and learn. This isn't impossible.
edit: Write non-white characters as people, not caricatures or erase them entirely from stories.
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Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I'm like 99% convinced that everyone complaining about Hugo Weaving in Cloud Atlas, has never seen Cloud Atlas. And has only actually seen the click-bait factory video going around facebook. Because even a 'read the wikipedia page' familiarity with the plot should make it readily apparent, why they couldn't have cast an entire extra crew of Korean actors.
e: Doubly so for all the GiTS 'originalists' in this thread. Because that movie is a very good example of one that tried to stay incredibly true to exceptionally intricate and confusing source material-although much tighter and less contradictory than the sum of the GiTS cannon at this point, And while lots of people liked it ambition and scope, and otherwise thought it was good, the general public took to it like kick to the nuts.
Neutrality with productions like this remains confidence, though. Don't you think Hollywood has a bad history with race relations?
If the movie company doing this were that competent or prioritizing diversity the issue wouldn't be anywhere near this bad right now. And no, there are no excuses for not hiring Asian extras for scenes like that. Casting directors saying that means little when the results are showing the opposite, on something that shouldn't be this hard to get the logistics on. They don't have to be actively racist for racism to effect their practices, and they'd be really, really stupid to openly admit they're doing this for racist reasons.
I misunderstood you. Forget about it.
Say I agree with you, why is that one example enough evidence that Hollywood is going to do it again with GiTS? It's also a film about reincarnation to know which character is which. Theres no reason to do this in GiTS. It's also a very debatable topic about race in movies with Cloud Atlas, because under the best situations it's something that is a third rail by touching it. Ambition and scope are wonderful to have, but they are not excuses for doing things like this for any reason at all, especially in a industry with an obvious bad past and present with entrenched racist practices.
You can't please everyone, and some people cannot be pleased at all.
Sure they can make the film, but there is absolutely no way to get around doing something like that - it's a third rail for a reason. If CA had troubles with this, do you really want GiTS to test those waters?
Yes? It's much better to attempt something new/different/ambitious and fail than to never try it at all.
GiTS really is perfect for this whole controversy. It's almost delicious to see this outrage rise over a film that tackles core issues of humanity and identity. There's some irony there, if you're of the mind to see it.
I doubt they're going to handle this particularly well, I'd rather they give it the old college try than not try at all. Why wouldn't we want them to test these waters? If they very act of trying is concerning, than that is EVEN MORE reason to try.
No? Ambition is no reason to continue horrible practices that are a hotbed of racism.
No, its irony - about the people making the film. Those issues are excellent to explore, unfortunately they given no reason to believe they'll do correctly. Supporting people's assumptions that they'll tackle this issue as horribly as possible is a very bad idea for all involved and taints the GiTS brand in the process. I'd think the director would be concerned about being perceived as racist, even passively and he's done nothing to disprove it. Instead they've doubled down on the typical Hollywood bullshit. If they really wanted to do this right they wouldn't have had a white actress lead - that's the bar minimum they failed to pass about handling this subject correctly.
edit: This is how we got Sucker Punch.
It isn't when the people doing it have shown no proof they know what they're doing and have already proven themselves to be racially tone deaf.
I guess what I wrote was a bit confusing. I really don't want to try and parallel the race-change aspects of them, just because whatever race change was being tested for GiTS is both not going to happen, and of an intent or scope that is nothing more than speculation at this point. I was more just saying that the people who complain about CAs race-bending are myopic.
My comment relating CA to GiTS is more aimed at all the people arguing for rote filming based off the source material, because the issues that caused CA are numerous even if they were unavoidable. That doing a similarly rote script for GiTS where there is much more flexibilty-and less source cohesion- will end up with a better movie for adhering closely to the source material is pretty dubious.
Cloud Atlas's scope vs basic watchability and entertainment value is subject to a lot of divergent opinions from people who watch a lot of more complex than average movies. To the average movie goer it was basically a non-starter.
No, I don't think neutrality with regard to the specific complaints are any kind of confidence. I don't even think it is a position to hold to be critical of the critiques apparently unjustified confidence and assumption. I don't know what you mean by "productions like this" - this seems to be yet another instance of assumption.
I certainly do not share the professed moral or pragmatic intuitions the vast majority of posters within this thread have exposed about race and representation, let alone the ethics of adaption vis racial and national changes. So, I don't think there is "a bad history" in the way you mean (not to mention that you've stake done of the more radical positions within the thread with regard to what are and aren't objectionable adaptions). I doubt it will satisfy the critics of race and representation within this thread but not due to any deficiency of the film.
While I very much, and very earnestly applaud you for the bolded - I think that misunderstanding is rife in controversial threads and it going unacknowledged is detrimental to discourse - I think your preceding passage has also misunderstood my point, which is very specifically about why it is unlikely that any issue that the production team had intended to solve is unlikely to have been equally well solved by hiring Asian extras.
If the story had involved being reincarnated as black people, it still would be problematic if we had the white main characters in CGI and prosthetics to achieve ostensibly modern day blackface. We can come come up with a hundred reasons why canonical it's okay to do so, but would it not be cheaper to higher two actors that look similar instead of spending all that budget altering the race of the characters on screen?
Probably not. You'd pay the a listers the same for less work, pay the replacements more for the same work, delay production to find these people, and probably still do CGI to mask the imperfections.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Again, this doesn't feel like the right solution. What you said as a response is the same rationale used by studios to justify yellowface as okay to do. Cloud Atlas isn't some amazingly moving piece of thematic film, simply having characters reincarnated as another race is not a good justification for continuing the dated trend of whitewashing.
Hugo Weaving plays an Elf in LotR. Nobody gets mad about that because Elves do not exist in real life. Then, they get Hugo Weaving to play a Korean man. People get mad because Koreans exist in real life. You see the issue here?
Yeah, reality grounded fantasy is a farce. I'm not too hot on Cloud Atlas as a concept, but there is something lost if playing with actual race is off limits.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
So no movie that requires an actor to play multiplet ethnicities can ever be made? That's stupid. You've taken a reasonable and we'll meaning idea and turned it into a sacred cow that can't understand context. CA was not whitewashing.
Here's a press release from Media Action Network for Asian Americans:
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
As has been pointed out many times in this discussion, neither isolated acts of goodness nor evil are compelling reasons to determine that systematic racism isn't at work. The proof is in the pudding, or in this case, pay equality and representation in films.
The protagonist in the Korean Story wasn't a man, it was the clone played by Doona Bae. In fact that was one of the good parts of CA: the main characters in each story was of the right ethnicity. White protagonist for white stories(Tom Hanks post apocalyptic story), black for black stories(Halle Berry's reporter story) and Doona Bae for the Korean story.
They only shifted race when they where in somebody else's part of the story/movie. Like the white guy playing the action hero in the Korean story, he is a supporting character in that story. In the boat story he is the main character and Doona Bae who plays is wife in the end is in whiteface. By seeing both we get a deeper understanding of why he is willing to go to such lengths to free a slave and Doona Bae especially. They had been married in a past life.
That is what made the racelift acceptable to me: Every main character is of the right ethnicity in their storyand everybody else is cast according to their relationship to the main character in that story and the overall story of the movie, switching races to match the main character in their story.
The purpose is to follow each character as they interact over the centuries and take turns being the protagonist.
Actually the actors don't play the same "soul" through each period, and we know this because the protagonist of each story has the same birthmark, despite being played by a different actor in each period.
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Actually, had they kept the ethnicities as they were in the novel, I'd be cheering because that would have meant they kept the geeky female Native American engineer, instead of replacing her with Generic Male British Scientist.
This whole discussion has been about breaking down each detail of these works. The story of Cloud Atlas is about racisim, yes. It does not mean we can't critique the depictions of minorities in the film. It may be a socially aware story, and trying to tackle it is definitely something I want to see more of in Hollywood. But again, I don't find the solution of putting many actors in prosthetics a good one. Having a white British actor named Jim Sturgess play a Korean guy named Hae Joo-Im is pretty not okay, even if it's to make a point about racism.
Cloud Atlas isn't really the same situation, the entire point of the movie was that these same people and ideas are repeating throughout history regardless of race, class or time period, and everyone in the cast went through race changes as the story progressed.
Catching up on the thread and this stood out for me. Let's take another look at that kind of story.
Altered Carbon, a story about people being able to 'sleeve' into other bodies. As I recall from the book, 'renting' ones body out can be done to pay off debts, and people can be forcibly removed from their body as punishment. People can be digitized and transferred across vast (even interstellar) distances. As such, identity becomes more fluid; a person can be a white man one minute, a black woman the next, a disabled war vet a few hours later, and back to their original body by dinner. There are even accurate simulations where a person can 'exist' in whatever form they wish or are forced into, and time can be manipulated; you can live out an entire life as X across a few hours or days in this manner.
As such, while the books do describe the protagonist in detail, and their multiple forms (usually male, but not always, of various ethnicities at different points across the books that make up the series), if Hollywood were to make a movie based on it I would be shocked, shocked, if the main lead wasn't generally a white male, perhaps playing with the identity matter, but let's be real; most of the time being one guy.
Now, apparently Netflix IS making a series based on the book(s?). They optioned it mid last year, and at a glance they pushed to have a 10 episode series produced (announced early this year, no set release yet). Now, Netflix has done some pretty great things, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
But IF (not when, IF) the 'male lead' is announced as a Caucasian actor and the series has him playing said role 80 or 90% of the time, with token nods/flashbacks/momentary (maybe a whole episode!) as someone else, it'd get an eye roll and just be another case where 'the star power of _____ was necessary to draw viewers' or whatever.
To be clear, again, I do hope Netflix allows for diversity and embraces the themes of the book and all that would entail (and there is some dark shit in there; body swapping is not always a good thing), but as per the topic of the thread, I wouldn't remotely be surprised if it stumbled or fell a little short there either.
Well, on the bright side, in the chance that you've never seen it before--we've had the effect of exposing you to more art. And it didn't cost of tens of millions of dollars.
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Good intentions only get so far, though. Sure it was one of the better attempts, but this technique isn't for any idiot with big ideas in Hollywood - and it'll still have bad implications they can't avoid.
I've read the first book, and personally consider Richard K. Morgan overrated and that series in particular pretty lackluster (it toys with interesting ideas then quickly abandons them for rule-of-cool, things-happen-because-the-plot-demands-it attempts at badassery instead) but man, you're really setting yourself up for disappointment here.
The main character is called Takeshi Kovacs and IIRC is half asian... in his original body. He dies in the first couple pages and spends 99% of the first novel in the body of a generic white male police officer. The other 1% he spends in a ninja body. Literally a body built for the purpose of being a ninja. Oh, and I guess 0.1% of the plot was spent as a digital women in a virtual Islamic torture cell.
So when they cast a white actor and have him spend all of his time as a white actor, they will have been utterly true to the novel. When the only identity shenanigans that occur are "problematic" they will once again be completely faithful to the source material.
It's been a few years since I read them, perhaps the body hopping is less prominent than I'd recalled.
But it would be an opportunity to cast something other than a white male as the lead, regardless of how it ended up in the books.
Perhaps even moreso than GitS, it's a setting based around ones physical body being entirely fluid.
Fluid if you're really rich, if you're not your going to get shoved in whatever body they give you.
Fluid if you don't have any sort of religious proscriptions or medical conditions either.
Plus, even if you don't, switching a body in Ghost in the Shell is substantially more difficult than switching your car. This isn't Surrogates, there's no readily accessible industry for renting artificial bodies in any continuity. People are not that rich, a nuclear world war will do that.
If your body got hacked, it's probably not because they actually wanted your specific cyberbody. It's probably because they wanted to kidnap you.
EDIT: Put another way--you know what's more common than complete cyberization in the manga and TV series? One of these jalopies.
Also this quote tree is talking about Richard K. Morgan's stuff. Where there is an industry for renting bodies across solar systems.
Yeah, and even he was considered insane for doing it (willingly giving up the functioning body he was born with for--a marketing pitch? A quick profit?). A number of professional judges on a panel use them too.
There's a reason why the vast majority of people have limited cyberization: for the postwar consumer, the options mostly suck.
I honestly only know Morgan because of his involvement in Crysis 2, which was badly written (like all the other Crysis games).
In SAC he's eccentric for sticking with an old model, not necessarily for being fully cyberized. IIRC the most popular level of cyberization is full brain case in original body, but full prosthetic body isn't super rare.
In the first volume of the manga after Batou and Motoko are on the run with her body destroyed, they steal the (male) body of a criminal for her to use. And these are just random criminals. In SAC full prosthetic seems sort of rare, Arise adds some interesting ideas to this as Motoko isn't worried about having maintenance covered but rather outright does not own her own body, but in the comic full prosthetic does not seem as rare.
It might not have been clear, but the Jameson-type owner was definitely considered weird for having gone with that particular model (as oppose to just "squandering" a working body for an artificial one, which Kusanagi and Batou lament during the organ smuggling case). In SAC, full cyberization like what we see in Section 9 is definitely suggested to be rare outside of specific professions (across the population mind you)--for things like the military, nuclear industry, etc., bodies end up being issued as part of an employment contract (which was a major point of a Togusa-centric episode). Chief Aramaki declares more than once "Hands off, she's government property," and means it fairly literally.
The fuck?
For starters the idea that say the Coens are capable of writing a black or asian character is a pretty huge assumption. I mean obviously they could make a character that is superficially a minority. But that a couple of Jewish guys from Minnesota could actually capture what it is to grow up as a Korean American in San Francisco-and then convey it to an audience is a reach. Not saying it can't be done, but it's a bit more involved than 'imagine if this character was Asian instead'. Unless you are reducing a character being Asian or Black or Hispanic down to nothing more than their phenotype. Then yeah you can take the power rangers approach - the black one is black, the pink one is a girl, the yellow one is asian. and that's fine(or really racist) for an after school cartoon. But if all that describes the character is the color of the costume, your movie is already sunk on the narrative front "auteurist" or not.
Secondly, actual great writing is so rare and seemingly precarious that forcing the people who struggle to achieve it to try and shoehorn changes in the characters from how they envision them is asinine. As a non-writer the alchemy that they need to create a story that is great- not just a competently put together response to a writing prompt about some lotto drawing of enough identity traits to be suitably diverse- is completely unknown to me. Hell I don't think it is known to most writers themselves. I like the the article that contains
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So you know, white writers if you can't fit a minority into your story- it's because you are a bad writer. On the other hand MY story didn't work without a mono-ethnic cast.
And finally, were I a writer of such thing. I don't know that I would want to take on the risk of trying to write in a manage of ethnic characters. While certain writers have the luxury of just taking as much time to research and learn about the groups they are writing about, the majority aren't the Coens or Tarantino. So they are explicitly writing characters from a culture that at best they have limited first hand experience with, if not they are mostly just mirroring back what they get about that culture from other media. That's a recipe to get your name in the next "6 totally racist things in movies this year" buzzfeed post. The entire concept just begs to have "CULTURAL APPROPRIATION!" or "STEREOTYPING!" screamed at it.
Write what you know is a terrible cliche, but "Don't write ethnic characters whose ethnicity you have at best a passing understanding of" is pretty prudent advice.
It is, but to get there the creatives involves need to actually make it a priority - which the Coens certainly don't.
It's not reducing as much as cutting a topic down to the bare bones, which of course has nuance. And yes, there are more to those character than written well, but it isn't a bad thing to, y'know, think maybe this character should be x rather than y, after all it's not like Hollywood is lacking in roles about white men. Shake it up a little, life isn't that clear cut with white people errywhere. Not everywhere is Friends, and who is in the story is up to the writer's discretion. If the Coens want a movie with an Asian female lead, they'll write it. But to do this they actually have to open their minds to making stories from other perspectives, and since they're Hollywood writers and director's you'd think they'd be up to the task.
They don't need to great writers to do this, mediocre writers can do this properly. This isn't "forcing" anything, it's about accepting that the world does not revolve totally around white people and they have interesting stories to tell as well. Only bad writers do this like your description about tackling minorities in stories/casting, people who do that are dragging their feet rathe than opening their minds about accepting different point of view worthy of respect.
The reason for not including other ethnic groups in the cast had better have fucking good. Not every story has to do this, of course, but writing off ethnicities because ? is very bad writing.
There is no excuse for this to occur in this day and age. There's books, internet, consultants to hire, minority actors/directors/writers to talk to etc. Practice, listen and learn. This isn't impossible.
edit: Write non-white characters as people, not caricatures or erase them entirely from stories.