In the end, with or without an Asian protagonist, I don't think Ghost in the Shell had a chance to be anything special. Part of the problem with these remakes is that they fawn over the premise the whole time instead of accepting it, letting it play out as realistically as possible, and drawing new conclusions from a journey of thought. The movie business simply isn't set up to give substance - intellectual property is bought for style and cashed out as soon as they get an iteration of the script that is barely shippable.
Casting can only save a film made with some kind of vision and experience the writers and directors wish to share with an audience, something new and real they want to teach us. Not some superficial reaction they have when handed an IP to toy around with. It's a problem with modern improv comedies and it's a problem with franchise sci fi. Ambling from pastiche to pastiche with the sole goal of turning fandom into a remaster subscription begs for stagnation and failure.
I think well researched original ideas still exist, but any remainder of vision from the cerebral age of Japanese animation will never survive the trip across the ocean.
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.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
The biggest obstacle that GiTS has, regardless of everything, is that the basic premise has been picked clean like a plate of delicious hot wings in the subsequent 22 years since the original came out.
So, either do something drastically different or anything you do will be a bit boring...
I think adapting Appleseed would work better for the US audience. You have a blonde white protagonist who is much more of a "rogue cop" archetype than Kusanagi that audiences would be familiar with thanks to buddy cop movies. In fact Appleseed is pretty much a buddy cop story with Deunan as firebrand character who likes to break the rules if it gets the job done and Briareos as the more conservative by the book character. There's even less ambiguity than the Ghost in the Shell manga as far as how the characters fit into the universe and their reactions to corrupted systems around them.
A direct adaptation of the 1988 OVA would fit right in with other US action movies. You have a "bad cop" who has rejected society after the suicide of his wife helping terrorists against characters who are essentially Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon (if Riggs and Murtaugh were a romantic couple). The only thing I can think off the top of my head that would clash with Hollywood is that the main characters are an interracial couple (Briareos is a full cyborg body, but he's from North Africa).
In the end, with or without an Asian protagonist, I don't think Ghost in the Shell had a chance to be anything special. Part of the problem with these remakes is that they fawn over the premise the whole time instead of accepting it, letting it play out as realistically as possible, and drawing new conclusions from a journey of thought. The movie business simply isn't set up to give substance - intellectual property is bought for style and cashed out as soon as they get an iteration of the script that is barely shippable.
Casting can only save a film made with some kind of vision and experience the writers and directors wish to share with an audience, something new and real they want to teach us. Not some superficial reaction they have when handed an IP to toy around with. It's a problem with modern improv comedies and it's a problem with franchise sci fi. Ambling from pastiche to pastiche with the sole goal of turning fandom into a remaster subscription begs for stagnation and failure.
I think well researched original ideas still exist, but any remainder of vision from the cerebral age of Japanese animation will never survive the trip across the ocean.
The casting isn't about saving the film, though it wouldn't hurt it. Plus this is more than casting it's respecting and acknowledging how the politics within GiTS works and how inherently Japanese it is - which they don't necessarily need to go totally in-depth with it to have a good movie or a movie franchise. It'd be great, if they tried their best rather than ignore the implications because they're only doing this for a paycheck. If this was a generic sci-fi franchise they'd be able to get away with the former, except this is GiTS so expectations will be higher with the story and characters.
Movies don't tend to have substance, but there's no reason they can't try. Sure they won't all be Christopher Nolan (makes me wonder what he'd do with this) films yet they don't have to be this hollow, either. There more than two options here.
And it's not like Spielberg himself can't make great film with substance when he is motivated, RE: Saving Private Ryan,Minority Report,Jurassic Park,Munich,Schindler's List - if Hollywood was as dire as you suggest none of these would have gotten made. I'm not saying GITS has to be anywhere near these in depth, merely not brain dead. Unfortunately Spielberg doesn't give a fuck about GiTS to do this.
The first move behind the scenes to make a movie like GiTS have substance and high quality is not with casting, it's with hiding the director, writer and relevant consultants. Once they hired the guys who ended up with this movie was doomed to be a mediocre film that completely misunderstood, or care about the IP they're making. What we're asking is not impossible, we've had a few films already this year who were able to do both without falling on their face: Logan,Life, Kong: Skull Island. They did that because they genuinely tried and cared about what they make.
I don't think it is impossible as you suggest that GiTS depth was always beyond Hollywood, they wouldn't give it the depth of say the '95 movie of course but it needn't be completely lost. Unfortunately this was a lost cause with Ambling Entertainment - give the rights to someone who actually wants to explore the franchise with respect, talent and the movie adaption will improve tremendously. And it wouldn't kill Hollywood to give it to an Asian director, rather than expendable white director #5 who's in this just for the paycheck.
The biggest obstacle that GiTS has, regardless of everything, is that the basic premise has been picked clean like a plate of delicious hot wings in the subsequent 22 years since the original came out.
So, either do something drastically different or anything you do will be a bit boring...
Nah, they can still do interesting stories with the premise. That material is right there for inspiration if they bothered to check it out and they're not doing anything new with this plot. Recycling the plot from Robocop into GiTS isn't innovative, it's an example that they're not trying. The movie also was inspired by plots from SAC, except like with the original movie all they did was make them a checklist to tick off, rather than do anything intriguing or creative with them. They can also do something drastically different without misunderstanding the entire premise or insulting the fanbase.
In the end, with or without an Asian protagonist, I don't think Ghost in the Shell had a chance to be anything special. Part of the problem with these remakes is that they fawn over the premise the whole time instead of accepting it, letting it play out as realistically as possible, and drawing new conclusions from a journey of thought. The movie business simply isn't set up to give substance - intellectual property is bought for style and cashed out as soon as they get an iteration of the script that is barely shippable.
Casting can only save a film made with some kind of vision and experience the writers and directors wish to share with an audience, something new and real they want to teach us. Not some superficial reaction they have when handed an IP to toy around with. It's a problem with modern improv comedies and it's a problem with franchise sci fi. Ambling from pastiche to pastiche with the sole goal of turning fandom into a remaster subscription begs for stagnation and failure.
I think well researched original ideas still exist, but any remainder of vision from the cerebral age of Japanese animation will never survive the trip across the ocean.
The casting isn't about saving the film, though it wouldn't hurt it. Plus this is more than casting it's respecting and acknowledging how the politics within GiTS works and how inherently Japanese it is - which they don't necessarily need to go totally in-depth with it to have a good movie or a movie franchise. It'd be great, if they tried their best rather than ignore the implications because they're only doing this for a paycheck. If this was a generic sci-fi franchise they'd be able to get away with the former, except this is GiTS so expectations will be higher with the story and characters.
Movies don't tend to have substance, but there's no reason they can't try. Sure they won't all be Christopher Nolan (makes me wonder what he'd do with this) films yet they don't have to be this hollow, either. There more than two options here, as well.
And it's not like Spielberg himself can't make great film with substance when he is motivated, RE: Saving Private Ryan,Minority Report,Jurassic Park,Munich,Schindler's List - if Hollywood was as dire as you suggest none of these would have gotten made. I'm not saying GITS has to be anywhere near these in depth, merely not brain dead. Unfortunately Spielberg doesn't give a fuck about GiTS to do this.
The first move behind the scenes to make a movie like GiTS have substance and high quality is not with casting, it's with hiding the director, writer and relevant consultants. Once they hired the guys who ended up with this movie was doomed to be a mediocre film that completely misunderstood, or care about the IP they're making. What we're asking is not impossible, we've had a few films already this year who were able to do both without falling on their face: Logan,Life, Kong: Skull Island. They did that because they genuinely tried and cared about what they make.
I don't think it is impossible as you suggest that GiTS depth was always beyond Hollywood, they wouldn't give it the depth of say the '95 movie of course but it needn't be completely lost. Unfortunately this was a lost cause with Ambling Entertainment - give the rights to someone who actually wants to explore the franchise with respect, talent and the movie adaption will improve tremendously. And it wouldn't kill Hollywood to give it to an Asian director, rather than expendable white director #5 who's in this just for the paycheck.
The biggest obstacle that GiTS has, regardless of everything, is that the basic premise has been picked clean like a plate of delicious hot wings in the subsequent 22 years since the original came out.
So, either do something drastically different or anything you do will be a bit boring...
Nah, they can still do interesting stories with the premise. That material is right there for inspiration if they bothered to check it out and they're not doing anything new with this plot. Recycling the plot from Robocop into GiTS isn't innovative, it's an example that they're not trying. The movie also was inspired by plots from SAC, except like with the original movie all they did was make them a checklist to tick off, rather than do anything intriguing or creative with them. They can also do something drastically different without misunderstanding the entire premise or insulting the fanbase.
I think that the way this has been set up is too fraudulent to allow a good movie to happen for quite some time, and I finally understand why.
They want to repeat the success of the comic book industry taking over tentpole blockbusters with manga and anime. There are a wealth of unique Japanese comic stories that have value to execs because they are comics, And they are trying to rekindle the fire. There are a ton of Japanese stories out there that are great and untapped by Hollywood production values.
But they're going about it wrong. The introduction has to capture the public spirit with the joy of comics, a la Iron Man. Without that, you are doomed to isolated reboots forever.
I believe it is too late. A lot of money will be spent purely on business motive by companies rushing to buy all the Japanese IP and resell it to the public for incremental profit. Why let people who understand the work and can bring something new to it own it when you can leech off a trend? Why make a truly great movie when there is no extended universe to exploit? Why bother getting the original creators involved in sharing their vision when they don't care and you don't care?
That last point is the knife edge. The creators don't care. They won't help write the story because this isn't their country or their audience. Who among us understands the vision of these storytellers?
I don't know. It's not Steven Spielberg. It's not Asian American directors. I think the best we can hope for is stripping the story of all but the bare concept and starting fresh - like Edge of Tomorrow. I don't think the Japanese influence cam survive this process without the nurturing of its creator, and we didn't really miss it. Excise it completely if you don't understand it and the story will be better for it.
Where do Asian American directors and actors fit into this manga and anime exploitation? They probably don't. Asian American culture isn't Asian culture. I can't think of a single manga that focuses on Asian American culture at all - that I've read. A Google search turns up Eagle, which I guess was good? I've never heard of it.
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.
I don't know. It's not Steven Spielberg. It's not Asian American directors. I think the best we can hope for is stripping the story of all but the bare concept and starting fresh - like Edge of Tomorrow. I don't think the Japanese influence cam survive this process without the nurturing of its creator, and we didn't really miss it. Excise it completely if you don't understand it and the story will be better for it.
I've never read the original, but I think Edge of Tomorrow did it exactly right - localize, but maintain the interesting ideas that the original played with. I've seen Edge of Tomorrow described as the first movie that really gets video game logic, that iterative process of dying and restarting at a save point and trying again. Which makes sense, since it was a light novel, published smack dab in the middle of Japanese nerd culture. The characters are changed a lot, and the ending is different, but the movie still treats the original core idea with respect.
And really another example of that is of course The Matrix, which takes a lot of ideas from Japanese anime, not only philosophical, but using animation's flexibility of time, the way animation can pause or slo-mo time while still moving the camera. The original pitch for The Matrix was the Wachowskis pointing at Ghost in the Shell and saying they wanted to do that. The Matrix borrows not only a lot of visual elements, but it also kind of repackages a lot of those GitS themes about identity in a more pop action setting. And of course then there was The Animatrix, which was basically the Wachowskis giving work to a bunch of the auteurs who had first inspired their movie.
By contrast, at least according to Emily Yoshida, 2k17 GitS is more of a cyberpunk themed female Jason Bourne story... Which like, normally I would think sounds fucking awesome, fuck yeah I'll watch scarjo as a cyberpunk Jason Bourne! But those aren't the ideas of GitS, it's using GitS as set dressing for its Jason Bourne story.
Kana on
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
However, "representation is important" is a different mindset than "this story is intrinsically Japanese." I've seen a lot of people retweet or embed Tsuei's claim without any exegesis. I've asked folks to explain it ("what makes GitS intrinsically Japanese?") and I've never gotten an actual explanation.
Well, there's the fact that one of the most, if not the most, commercially-successful adaptations of the franchise both in Japan and abroad, the two television series and full-length film Stand Alone Complex, directly deals with Japan's history as an aggressive world power in the Pacific War (later the Second World War), its expansionist empire, its defeat at the United States and its role as a vanquished power partnered with its vanquisher, the United States (and that country's subsequent disintegration into three separate nations at war with one another)--and in turn, how all of that wartime baggage implicates Japan's role in a massive refugee crisis from mainland Asia, particularly the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asia, two areas that are historic victims of Japanese Imperialism. Oh, and a revanchist right-wing ruling faction that views its American alliance as having evolved the country into a normal (and potentially aggressive) military power, and the possiblity of a right-wing coup in Japan. Oh, and left-wing intellectuals whom, after their defeat, leave metaphorical unexploded bombs as their final revenge against the ruling structures they opposed. That's the "post" in the "post-cyberpunk" genre, after all.
So yes, in some adaptations (all of the above points are touched upon in both Stand Alone Complex and, somewhat less, the original GITS manga, Mobile Armored Riot Police) the story is uniquely Japanese by virtue of dealing directly with Japanese history and politics, nevermind Japanese culture. It's worth noting the Oshii film does not address these topics much beyond Japan's role as an American "shield" against the Soviets in the Cold War, and the potential cynical exploitation of that resentment by nefarious types, but both as a matter of Oshii's own directing style and the film's condensed plot of the Puppeteer Arc left very little time to explore that.
It's not all about cybernetics, internet culture, telecommunications and counter-terrorism. A lot of it's history too--the fact that some people seem so easily inclined to completely dismiss the huge, in-your-face historical warning about rightist politics (and leftist disenchantment) in Japan (and abroad--particularly the TV series' critique of American Central Intelligence) because it's getting in the way of watching robotic maids get hijacked and turned into bullet shields kind of leaves me wondering if they haven't kind of missed the point. Then again, an adaptation of Ghost in the Shell is probably not obligated, inherently, to embrace those major themes--but just like people can critique Batman v. Superman for having missed the point of what makes Batman or Superman beloved, so to can anyone criticize the 2017 film for having ignored practically everything that makes Ghost in the Shell a political thriller on top of an interesting exploration into a transhuman future. Sure, you can have one--but why the hell shouldn't we have both?
(Interestingly enough, Stand Alone Complex's movie Solid State Society's other major plotline--the aging of Japanese society faster than can be coped by the country's social welfare system, courtesy of a funny observation by Masamune Shiro concerning the nature of communism and socialism, isn't uniquely Japanese--it's a major concern in Taiwan and South Korea, and to a lesser extent China and, yes, the United States, re: the Baby Boomers.)
The Departed, I'd argue, has an intrinsically Irish-American story--the historic Irish immigrant culture of Boston, and its modern day heirs, both inside the law and out. It doesn't change the fact that it is, in fact, a regional adaptation of the Hong Kong crime-thriller Infernal Affairs. The Departed did it well...and so far, it really seems like 2017 Ghost in the Shell has not. As I've said before, if you're going to do an adaptation, make it your own--though Scorsese himself, as I understand it, is the product of Italian-American culture, rather than Irish-American, The Departed seems to show a pretty comprehensive appreciation of that--as far as I can tell as an outsider. Even more so now many would argue, America has its own demons with revanchist and right-wing politics, and I would argue back in 2015 when the film was announced had no shortage of blood on its hands from concealed foreign wars and potential refugee crises. All of this would be perfect material for a transhuman criminal and political drama--but instead it seems like we bunch of shot-for-shot remakes of the Oshii film (I'd argue not even the strongest adaptation itself) because, hey, that's what Americans saw back in the 1990s.
And now the film's actually out. And the response has been...well, not exactly ecstatic so far.
EDIT: Gosh, now I just want a procedural crime thriller dealing with the domestic side of expansionist American neoliberalism in an age of transhumanism, and how government enforcers attempt to maintain their own moral standards in that age. Maybe with Margot Robbie in the lead...or Joseph Gordon Levitt...
If you missed Almost Human when it was on it wasn't tremendously far off.
Lots of awful live action stuff that guts the source material and tries to cash in on a hot actor or genre gets made all the time. That anime is somehow uniquely offensive when it happens or it's more insulting because "Japanese Culture" isn't a very convincing position.
The Lone Ranger shit up all kinds of things and was grossly offensive, but for some reason it's always anime that's the most sacred of art forms when it can be argued it's one of the most diverse and open to interpretation. Much like American comics, entire universes and plots vanish and reappear, characters die and then don't.
The issues with GiTS making obvious casting problems actually main stream news is fantastic. I don't begrudge ScarJo for taking the part. I hope moving forward the next time they Hollywoodize a comic or manga it's done by people who love the source material.
Lots of awful live action stuff that guts the source material and tries to cash in on a hot actor or genre gets made all the time. That anime is somehow uniquely offensive when it happens or it's more insulting because "Japanese Culture" isn't a very convincing position.
The Lone Ranger shit up all kinds of things and was grossly offensive, but for some reason it's always anime that's the most sacred of art forms when it can be argued it's one of the most diverse and open to interpretation. Much like American comics, entire universes and plots vanish and reappear, characters die and then don't.
The issues with GiTS making obvious casting problems actually main stream news is fantastic. I don't begrudge ScarJo for taking the part. I hope moving forward the next time they Hollywoodize a comic or manga it's done by people who love the source material.
And lots of adaptions do excellent work with the material, so maybe they should try harder? It's not like doing that can't be financially profitable.
No one is saying this is uniquely offensive or more insulting when its done with Japanese culture, I don't know where you're getting that from. Its bad with any culture.
Anime is a third rail due its origins being aboard and the culture being noticeable when it's Americanized. Not that this is true for everything, Live Die Repeat got excellent reception despite being very different from the source material and having a white cast. It's difficult to tell which foreign IP will galvanize the populace and which won't until it's already occurred with absolute certainty.
American comics has its own problems with inherent racism built into its bones from inception. The adaptions usually fare better win they update it and focus on more inclusiveness rather than acting like the casting should stay 100% as if it was made like the IP's were in the 60's or 70's. They're also heavily Americanized already, so they don't need to do deeper research or care about being seen as racially tone deaf.
The casting problems are not the whole picture with the complaints. They're only the most obvious rally point, the rest of the thread has gone over the relevant side issues relating to Japanese culture with GiTS.
I am disappointed that Scarlett did accept, though she likely was the best choice for the role among the white actresses. Cashing this check comes with ethical consequences she won't get with roles like Black Widow, as well as being obligated contractually (whether she believes it or not) to promote whitewashing as a "good thing" for Hollywood productions.
They're ok, some are better then others. Final fight spoilers
I felt the tank fight was a let down, the '95 movie makes it look silly in comparison. What you don't see in the trailers is that the tank gets controlled by the big bad, because reasons.
edit: A big difference I picked up on with the Major was that she didn't have massive weight that she does in other adaptions, none of the cyborgs do. She fights like Black Widow.
I keep seeing the blue eyes thing mentioned a lot and I think it's worth pointing out that the Major's eye colour is inconsistent between the different adaptations. In the manga she has orange-red eyes, in the anime film she has blue eyes, then in Stand Alone Complex she has red eyes, and then Arise has her with blue eyes.
So I mean, I am unsure if the eye colour in any of the pre-hollywood film franchise is terribly relevant unless you're discussing comparisons with one specific version.
Like, I'm gonna expand on the "toy store" example because it's a fantastic example of prejudicial capitalism at work.
Toy stores, and toy sections of department stores, are almost universally gender segregated in the Western world. In some cases they're not, usually for early childhood toys (toddlers and the like) or toys that are considered to have "safe universal appeal" (board games, puzzles, that sort of thing).
But dolls go over there (in all the pink), and action figures go over here (they can be any color but are usually green, blue, or red for the most part because of how toys are packaged that target boys)
If you want to buy your child a doll, regardless of the gender of your child, you gotta buy it from the girl's section of the store. You can avoid this by buying online or some bespoke small time toy store maybe, but if you don't have those options available to you or they'd be needlessly cumbersome just to get your kid a frickin' dolly, you gotta go into the Pink Zone.
Which means, tacitly, you're endorsing this practice. It means when Toys R Us and Wal-Mart look at their sales numbers, they go "well clearly this toy we market to girls is selling well, so clearly marketing to girls is effective. Continue to do so"
Not only is this a self-fulfilling prophecy that consumers can't entirely "opt out" of without declining to buy the products whatsoever, it also leads to practices that help reinforce the concept.
For example: when Avatar: The Last Airbender was on TV, there were action figures for the majority of the male cast. Zuko, Aang, Sokka, etc. they all got toys. Katara or Toph? Nothin'. The creators of the show were mad about this, as those characters are important to the show and huge fan-bases!
They were told by Mattel, the toymaker, that "action figures of girl characters don't sell", and that some toy retailers won't even put toys of female characters in with the other action figures (aka the "boy section"), if they carry them at all they'll go in with the dolls.
If they carry them at all, they'll be limited run, hard to find, because stores don't want to make a large inventory purchase of a product they feel won't move. End result? No Katara or Toph.
No Black Widow action figures. No Thor dolls (look at that hair. Are you telling me a Thor doll would be unpopular? You're out of your mind). No crossing the streams.
The Young Justice television series was cancelled, in large part because of the failure on the part of WB to get it a good toy deal. Why? A few factors, one of which Green Lantern had recently bombed at the box office so stores were gunshy about carrying that stuff. But another huge part of it was YJ had a diverse cast that was often 50% female, and that was a kiss of death for action figures.
Time. Is. A. Flat. Circle.
It is just so weird to me that the people who make the big decisions about merchandise could not wrap their head around figures for Toph, when Toph was easily the most amazing character on the show.
In addition to being hilarious, she stole, like, every action scene she was in.
The executives making these decisions are some of the most thick-headed fuckers in the industry.
It is just so weird to me that the people who make the big decisions about merchandise could not wrap their head around figures for Toph, when Toph was easily the most amazing character on the show.
In addition to being hilarious, she stole, like, every action scene she was in.
The executives making these decisions are some of the most thick-headed fuckers in the industry.
You know what's crazy? Nick is actually pretty darn progressive when it comes to their cartoons. Avatar: TLA and especially Korra, were properties I don't think would see the light of day under most studios. Disney is similar, they made a Kim Possible series in 2002. The reason I'm using female lead cartoons as a barometer is that cartoon studios are squeamish AF about cartoons having female leads. That's why there hasn't been a Wonder Woman cartoon by WB, frankly it's a miracle they green lit her live action movie.
edit: Avatar: TLA was important since it revolved around Asian cultures - and then Nick dropped the ball when they made the movie with whitewashing. That's a big reason whitewashing became such a huge cause for Asian Americans in the media. If we didn't have that GiTS might have been the movie adaption that got that rolling.
I don't know that I'd specifically blame Nickelodeon for that debacle. That's standard issue Hollywood bullshit. I mean, it's the most common complaint about the movie this thread is about.
Whitewashing in Avatar: the Last Airbender? How much of the cast of the original cartoon was Asian American?
Edit: huh, less than the movie.
Paladin on
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.
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
Watched this last night.
Not as bad as people want it to be, but not as good as it ought to be.
Honestly, I rather have a section 9 'The Raid' movie then what we got. Cause, holy shit, Section 9 is fucking awesome.
Whitewashing in Avatar: the Last Airbender? How much of the cast of the original cartoon was Asian American?
Edit: huh, less than the movie.
The big thing about the series versus the movie was the inverse correlation between skin tone and asshole.
In the series the lightest skin people were by far the Fire Nation who were just this side of Nazis on the Evil-o-meter. Contrast with the tribe that was always helpful and supportive of the good guys being the darkest skinned.
That the movie just happened to flip this relationship exactly was pretty worthy of side eye. That they defended it with "perfect actors for the roles" who were anything but just added fuel to the fire.
Edit: The series pretty explicitly rejected the idea of skin tone being a predictor of virtue but appearances do matter.
Whitewashing in Avatar: the Last Airbender? How much of the cast of the original cartoon was Asian American?
Edit: huh, less than the movie.
The big thing about the series versus the movie was the inverse correlation between skin tone and asshole.
In the series the lightest skin people were by far the Fire Nation who were just this side of Nazis on the Evil-o-meter. Contrast with the tribe that was always helpful and supportive of the good guys being the darkest skinned.
That the movie just happened to flip this relationship exactly was pretty worthy of side eye. That they defended it with "perfect actors for the roles" who were anything but just added fuel to the fire.
Edit: The series pretty explicitly rejected the idea of skin tone being a predictor of virtue but appearances do matter.
That's kind of not fair. Two of the three cast asian/asian american voice actors were fire nation bad guys (drawn as white looking guys), and the good guy one was a side character. The director of the movie was Asian American and he hired a lot of asian Americans for substantial parts (as the bad guys).
I'm having a hard time deciding which hiring practices were worse.
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.
Of course, all this is stuff you can probably figure out on your own Feral--but I think it's worth spelling out. Each time an Iron Man or Captain America film comes out--and they do somewhat regularly--it's easy on these forums to consider them in the light of an existing canon of material and a complete image of their cultural significance, for better or worse--let's not even begin with Star Wars. And now we have Ghost in the Shell, which can actually be afforded the same courtesy (when a lot of other franchises can't)--though not necessarily in an American audience.
A few notes about me personally:
I haven't read the manga, but I'm (I hope) not the only person who finds your (and Kana's and scheck's) posts helpful.
I got an inkling of what you and Kana are talking about from my viewings, but getting interpretation from people more familiar with the source material and with Japanese culture makes it more likely that my interpretations aren't based on merely an American's orientalist stereotypes.
Even if you're retreading stuff I already know, or might be obvious to some other readers, there's still a ton of material between your/Kana/scheck's posts that I either hadn't noticed, or hadn't thought about in remotely as much depth. I suspect that's going to be the same for others.
For example, I'm very familiar with Zhuang Zi's butterfly dream, but I'd never put it together with this story before. I've always considered that to be an Eastern counterpart to Decartes's evil demon - perhaps we are always dreaming, and we can never intimately know whether there is any objective truth to reality. However, I'd never before considered that Decartes answers that conundrum in a very individualistic way: "I think, therefore I am." He knows something about himself, and through that knowing learns something about reality. Zhuang Zi is not merely questioning the authority of his senses, but also his identity. I've always left out the last line in my mental concept: "This is the transformation of material things." That changes the meaning in a way I had not considered.
Besides, talking about the deeper cultural nuances of the story is a bit more interesting of a discussion than ethnic representation in media, no? Ethnic representation is important and I don't mean to minimize it, but I think we've all seen every side of that argument a million times and there isn't a whole lot of new ground to tread.
If you ever do read the manga, it'll be interesting to hear your thoughts on it--not just because it is old, and not even so much that it's a arc-based comic about a take-charge female lead (I can't say the same for American comics, but Kusanagi came about in a time in the industry when there was a long run of female action heroines who answered to no man, nor God, and took no heed--Appleseed (by the same author), Bubblegum Crisis, Dirty Pair, Patlabor, Gunnm, Gunbuster, etc.--though whether or not we'd consider them "strong female leads" today is certainly up to debate in some cases); but because it's old and the portrayal of a well-known character is probably radically different than what most would expect: she's a not-so-subtle braggart, kind of a loud mouth, immensely proud of herself, and occasionally childish (against a background of similarly childish personalities). The one obvious thing that's missing (that briefly appeared in SAC) is seductive--if she does seduce someone in the original book, it's so unmemorable next to everything else (though by contrast, she does joke and jibe about femininity as a consequence of working alongside almost exclusively men). That may be where Oshii took the idea of asexual behavior into his film adaptation and ran with it to the extreme.
As dear to my heart as the TV series (and the original book) are to me, people aren't wrong when they say it fails to "show, not tell"--be prepared for that. Personally, I'm willing to accept the depth of a poignant political thriller even if it means big info dumps from time to time, and I like that world too. It's extremely hard to "show, not tell" a government conspiracy to suppress a unproven but effective vaccine to a new disease that is the cancer or HIV of the transhuman age, and the political and corporate fallout resulting from that--after all, how many theatrical portrayals of that sort of thing do you see? But I don't expect everyone to be so tolerant.
They're ok, some are better then others. Final fight spoilers
I felt the tank fight was a let down, the '95 movie makes it look silly in comparison. What you don't see in the trailers is that the tank gets controlled by the big bad, because reasons.
edit: A big difference I picked up on with the Major was that she didn't have massive weight that she does in other adaptions, none of the cyborgs do. She fights like Black Widow.
So this actually addresses something I'd suspected for a long time, even if it was barely more than a ridiculous "conspiracy theory" observation: GITS is mostly, or at least in large part, just another vehicle for Scarlet Johansson in the wake of the inability to make a Black Widow film for whatever stupid reason Marvel has settled upon--we're going to get Ant Man III: Revenge of Anteater Man or some other stupid bullshit, but not a vehicle for literally the female lead in both Avengers and Iron Man because reasons.
That may be me being unduly unfair to Marvel and Disney, but to a layperson that's certainly how it looks. You hire Johansson, who let's assume is generally very capable in most of her roles (I haven't seen enough to be certain myself), to play a strange adaptation of a Japanese military veteran turned-special operations police officer. You have a few different variations of that existing character to work with. And the end result seems to be, "If Black Widow had to solve crimes and fight cyborgs in a transhuman world." "If Black Widow had to fight a multiped think tank." "If Black Widow was the commander of hostage rescue unit."
And that's not her fault in the least--she's been playing Black Widow for coming on a decade now, right? How long do we think Scarlet Johansson had heard of Motoko Kusanagi? Probably no longer than anyone else who's roped into a Hollywood adaptation of anime and isn't James Cameron and his apparent fixation on GUNM/Battle Angel Alita, so, less than an hour. Were 2017 Ghost in the Shell some sort of remarkable breakthrough, the first of its kind that didn't kind of (or really) suck, it'd be praised as a miracle. Except that increasingly looks to not be the case.
It's very hard to sit in the outside, with only a passing familiarity of the Marvel properties that consistently and repeatedly dominate the box offices in the US and abroad, and not go, "Why the hell didn't you just give her a Black Widow movie? Why did you have to drag this thing I like into another failed attempt?" Sure, one can argue that unless Hollywood keeps trying, they're never going to get better--but that argument comes with little, or no, justification to the affected franchise's fans, who now get to console themselves with the fact that, well, at least if Hollywood's other failures in this same area are any indication, at least these things don't drag down the original franchise with them.
In the meantime, I am the angry man shaking his fist as the at a cloud--an expensive cloud that possibly no one asked for, and cost millions of dollars to generate.
Not as bad as people want it to be, but not as good as it ought to be.
Honestly, I rather have a section 9 'The Raid' movie then what we got. Cause, holy shit, Section 9 is fucking awesome.
Nobody wanted a shitty GiTS movie, we were just able to see the signs that this was going to be bad. Not terrible, mind you, this wasn't exactly hard to figure out if you knew what to look for. I'd have been glad to eat my words had the movie been high quality. It'd still be a bad thing with them whitewashing Motoko but I'd have something to enjoy as a fan of the franchise.
edit: I'd love to see a Section 9 Raid style movie, but as long as the people making this movie have the rights we're never going to get that.
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
Not as bad as people want it to be, but not as good as it ought to be.
Honestly, I rather have a section 9 'The Raid' movie then what we got. Cause, holy shit, Section 9 is fucking awesome.
Nobody wanted a shitty GiTS movie, we were just able to see the signs that this was going to be bad. Not terrible, mind you, this wasn't exactly hard to figure out if you knew what to look for. I'd have been glad to eat my words had the movie been high quality. It'd still be a bad thing with them whitewashing Motoko but I'd have something to enjoy as a fan of the franchise.
Whitewashing in Avatar: the Last Airbender? How much of the cast of the original cartoon was Asian American?
Edit: huh, less than the movie.
The big thing about the series versus the movie was the inverse correlation between skin tone and asshole.
In the series the lightest skin people were by far the Fire Nation who were just this side of Nazis on the Evil-o-meter. Contrast with the tribe that was always helpful and supportive of the good guys being the darkest skinned.
That the movie just happened to flip this relationship exactly was pretty worthy of side eye. That they defended it with "perfect actors for the roles" who were anything but just added fuel to the fire.
Edit: The series pretty explicitly rejected the idea of skin tone being a predictor of virtue but appearances do matter.
That's kind of not fair. Two of the three cast asian/asian american voice actors were fire nation bad guys (drawn as white looking guys), and the good guy one was a side character. The director of the movie was Asian American and he hired a lot of asian Americans for substantial parts (as the bad guys).
I'm having a hard time deciding which hiring practices were worse.
Exactly, this'd be less of a problem had both sides been Asian/non-white (like in the show) - instead once again white people get to be the heroes/stars. M. Night being a minority himself is not a shield for him participating in these practices, it's heart breaking how he either went along with it or thought there was nothing wrong there.
GiTS and TLA hiring a diverse cast is great, except this only goes so far when the big roles remain out of reach - like lead roles. Both films are instances of a Hollywood production whitewashing their leads.
Fire Nation were meant to be Japanese equivalent, not white. Water Tribe were Inuit.
The biggest obstacle that GiTS has, regardless of everything, is that the basic premise has been picked clean like a plate of delicious hot wings in the subsequent 22 years since the original came out.
So, either do something drastically different or anything you do will be a bit boring...
Stand-Alone Complex and its follow-up 2nd Gig were made over a decade ago, but they still hold up. hell, they still feel super-relevant to today, considering some of the major themes in it beyond the post-cyberpunk transhumanism. (Conspiracies between corporations and the government, civil unrest caused by massive influx of refugees, etc)
Whitewashing in Avatar: the Last Airbender? How much of the cast of the original cartoon was Asian American?
Edit: huh, less than the movie.
The big thing about the series versus the movie was the inverse correlation between skin tone and asshole.
In the series the lightest skin people were by far the Fire Nation who were just this side of Nazis on the Evil-o-meter. Contrast with the tribe that was always helpful and supportive of the good guys being the darkest skinned.
That the movie just happened to flip this relationship exactly was pretty worthy of side eye. That they defended it with "perfect actors for the roles" who were anything but just added fuel to the fire.
Edit: The series pretty explicitly rejected the idea of skin tone being a predictor of virtue but appearances do matter.
That's kind of not fair. Two of the three cast asian/asian american voice actors were fire nation bad guys (drawn as white looking guys), and the good guy one was a side character. The director of the movie was Asian American and he hired a lot of asian Americans for substantial parts (as the bad guys).
I'm having a hard time deciding which hiring practices were worse.
Exactly, this'd be less of a problem had both sides been Asian/non-white (like in the show) - instead once again white people get to be the heroes/stars. M. Night being a minority himself is not a shield for him participating in these practices, it's heart breaking how he either went along with it or thought there was nothing wrong there.
GiTS and TLA hiring a diverse cast is great, except this only goes so far when the big roles remain out of reach - like lead roles. Both films are instances of a Hollywood production whitewashing their leads.
Fire Nation were meant to be Japanese equivalent, not white. Water Tribe were Inuit.
I just don't get why the movie gets flak for whitewashing and the cartoon doesn't. If what you say is true, animation is immune from whitewashing because it doesn't matter what race the voice actors are.
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.
Whitewashing in Avatar: the Last Airbender? How much of the cast of the original cartoon was Asian American?
Edit: huh, less than the movie.
The big thing about the series versus the movie was the inverse correlation between skin tone and asshole.
In the series the lightest skin people were by far the Fire Nation who were just this side of Nazis on the Evil-o-meter. Contrast with the tribe that was always helpful and supportive of the good guys being the darkest skinned.
That the movie just happened to flip this relationship exactly was pretty worthy of side eye. That they defended it with "perfect actors for the roles" who were anything but just added fuel to the fire.
Edit: The series pretty explicitly rejected the idea of skin tone being a predictor of virtue but appearances do matter.
That's kind of not fair. Two of the three cast asian/asian american voice actors were fire nation bad guys (drawn as white looking guys), and the good guy one was a side character. The director of the movie was Asian American and he hired a lot of asian Americans for substantial parts (as the bad guys).
I'm having a hard time deciding which hiring practices were worse.
Exactly, this'd be less of a problem had both sides been Asian/non-white (like in the show) - instead once again white people get to be the heroes/stars. M. Night being a minority himself is not a shield for him participating in these practices, it's heart breaking how he either went along with it or thought there was nothing wrong there.
GiTS and TLA hiring a diverse cast is great, except this only goes so far when the big roles remain out of reach - like lead roles. Both films are instances of a Hollywood production whitewashing their leads.
Fire Nation were meant to be Japanese equivalent, not white. Water Tribe were Inuit.
I just don't get why the movie gets flak for whitewashing and the cartoon doesn't. If what you say is true, animation is immune from whitewashing because it doesn't matter what race the voice actors are.
Animation is less noticeable to the public as a genre, and people generally don't know who the VA's look like. It's not that animation is immune it's that they are below everyone's radar. Plus, they had the advantage of actually giving the audience high quality product, and gave respect to the culture they were inspired by rather than ignoring the implications for a pay check.
Whitewashing in Avatar: the Last Airbender? How much of the cast of the original cartoon was Asian American?
Edit: huh, less than the movie.
The big thing about the series versus the movie was the inverse correlation between skin tone and asshole.
In the series the lightest skin people were by far the Fire Nation who were just this side of Nazis on the Evil-o-meter. Contrast with the tribe that was always helpful and supportive of the good guys being the darkest skinned.
That the movie just happened to flip this relationship exactly was pretty worthy of side eye. That they defended it with "perfect actors for the roles" who were anything but just added fuel to the fire.
Edit: The series pretty explicitly rejected the idea of skin tone being a predictor of virtue but appearances do matter.
That's kind of not fair. Two of the three cast asian/asian american voice actors were fire nation bad guys (drawn as white looking guys), and the good guy one was a side character. The director of the movie was Asian American and he hired a lot of asian Americans for substantial parts (as the bad guys).
I'm having a hard time deciding which hiring practices were worse.
Exactly, this'd be less of a problem had both sides been Asian/non-white (like in the show) - instead once again white people get to be the heroes/stars. M. Night being a minority himself is not a shield for him participating in these practices, it's heart breaking how he either went along with it or thought there was nothing wrong there.
GiTS and TLA hiring a diverse cast is great, except this only goes so far when the big roles remain out of reach - like lead roles. Both films are instances of a Hollywood production whitewashing their leads.
Fire Nation were meant to be Japanese equivalent, not white. Water Tribe were Inuit.
I just don't get why the movie gets flak for whitewashing and the cartoon doesn't. If what you say is true, animation is immune from whitewashing because it doesn't matter what race the voice actors are.
Animation is less noticeable to the public as a genre, and people generally don't know who the VA's look like. It's not that animation is immune it's that they are below everyone's radar. Plus, they had the advantage of actually giving the audience high quality product, and gave respect to the culture they were inspired by rather than ignoring the implications for a pay check.
This is a bit different from the people who are just angry that a person of non-asian descent was cast as Asian. I agree that if you want to have Asian culture in your story, you might as well go full hog. But I can't abide by the hypocrisy of criticizing casting choices by the race of the actor regardless of the quality of the material. Respecting culture by always doing research makes sense. Sometimes hiring asians and sometimes not depending on the media doesn't make sense to me. Be consistent is my motto.
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 biggest obstacle that GiTS has, regardless of everything, is that the basic premise has been picked clean like a plate of delicious hot wings in the subsequent 22 years since the original came out.
So, either do something drastically different or anything you do will be a bit boring...
Stand-Alone Complex and its follow-up 2nd Gig were made over a decade ago, but they still hold up. hell, they still feel super-relevant to today, considering some of the major themes in it beyond the post-cyberpunk transhumanism. (Conspiracies between corporations and the government, civil unrest caused by massive influx of refugees, etc)
Stand Alone Complex did a few important things: first, it came out more than ten years ago, when Kodansha's Mobile Armored Riot Police was less than 15 years old. That's "only" twice the age of the first movie for Iron Man, much less the franchise. By those standards, it was pre-adolescent. Second, it came out at a very opportune time for technology: the gradual end of the Internet anonymity on the wide scale, the adoption of modern surveillance techniques over those from the Cold War, the maturation of Japanese online communities that set the model for today's network, filling in the gaps where the original creator had been deliberately vague (who in the 1980s was predicting Facebook--not that many?) with things that are at least relevant today (even though the foundation of the story--that by 2030, cyberization in the richest countries in the world will be almost ubiquitous--is almost hilariously zeerust; by 2017, full cyborg bodies were already started to be produced for injured children, and for adults it was much more normal). The technological aspects of GITS that aren't 2001 optimistically zany are fairly poignant.
Third, and most fancifully, by the second season the United States had launched a impressively persuasive publicity campaign to secure a 80% (at least) polling approval for the second invasion of Iraq, completely at its leisure, when Iraq posed about as much threat to the United States as Lake Michigan (except Lake Michigan can affect the American climate, unlike Iraq). It had demonstrated that NATO, the multinational alliance that had prevailed in the Cold War and was now charged to secure peace and prosperity worldwide, even when three charter members objected to the war, would only oppose American aggression for about as long as it was convenient for them personally (measurable in weeks), and that the rest of NATO would either utter not a word, or even come along for the ride because war kicks ass oorah! And that the sole remaining opposition of significance, Russia (thanks to Iran's strange ambivalence) could scream about the sky falling for as long as it cared to, but not do a single thing to stop it. No sanctions, barely any condemnation, and absolutely no declarations of war, as a response to an unprovoked conflict with no foreseeable end. The relationship between a strong nation, and a weak nation, was ripe territory for the second season--and it took that hilarious tragedy and combined it with Japan's own colonial history and sordid nationalist past, alongside the existing postwar setting of crumbling and resurgent superpowers, Japan, China, Russia, and the three United States successors. It's why Stand Alone Complex is so heavily influenced not by September 11, but the War on Terror and the Balkans War before that: you couldn't ask for a better example about how to manipulate public opinion and strong-arm inconvenient actors. 2ND GIG took that concept and rode it, and hard, and gave us the postwar tale of the Individual Eleven.
It's why Stand Alone Complex was considered a wide success, especially in terms of storytelling: the individual short arcs of the manga--there are only so many of them, and frankly, they're not all great either--are window dressing for original plotlines: the Laughing Man, and the Individual Eleven. There is very little of either of those stories in the original 1989 serialized manga--hell, in 1989, not that many Japanese thought that Russia was going to be the lone objection to war made at another country's leisure. Or that international alliances intended to keep the peace could be subverted with such comical ease in the right circumstances, including the very ones Japan worked closely in concert with. Combine that with Japan's own wartime history--militarization, invasion, atrocities--and you get a scary damn story. And it's why the aggression of ideological powerhouses like Iran or the Soviet Union (a trope of Appleseed too) was replaced with the aggression of actual economic and military powerhouses, like Japan or the three American successor states (which are all nuclear powers).
tl;dr--the Bush (and to a lesser extent Clinton) governments helped justify some of the crazy complicated political conspiracies that are the meat of Stand Alone Complex's immediate background and final arc. You can't make that shit up.
To add, Ghost in the Shell doesn't have quite the same problem that, say, Batman or Spiderman have, wherein the origin and premise has been fucking done to death over and over again (as much as I enjoy the Nolan films)--but studios are aware of that issue, hence Arise's attempt to exploit an underexamined period (Major Kusanagi's military career immediately prior to Section 9's formation) as well as a different origin (stupid fetus cyberization). Put simply, in anime and manga, you very seldom get to do the same story over and over and over again, though there are exceptions (which says something about GITS' cultural cache in Japan and East Asia today).
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
It's also in large part because of the "star power" way movies are made and marketed. There just aren't that many 'slots' to be a big budget movie star.
Japanese Americans only make up about 0.4% of the US. So even ignoring any sort of casting prejudices, the odds of any random JA actress being in the top 50 or so Hollywood stars(in the pretty narrow age/appearance window the role 'needs) who'd be able to justify having a big budget film like this built around them is only about 10%.
I don't know who the 25th highest grossing actress in the 25-35 age-braket is, but if you gave me a list I doubt I'd know who they are.
Except movies aren't produced across all of America, they're produced in the Coastal states. Which tend to have a disproportionately much larger Asian population compared to the non-Coastal states.
California, for instance, is 15% Asian people.
Vancouver is 30% Asian people.
And movie stardom doesn't appear from thin air. Actors have to work their way up the ranks first. The problem isn't simply that Asians aren't being considered in lead roles for blockbusters. The problem is that they're not being considered for any role in general, even for roles where the "we need an a-list star to attract ticket sales" do not apply.
I'm not blaming Asian-American Actresses, I'm blaming us, the movie goers, for not making them as famous as we did with Leonardo Dicaprio with "He deserves an Oscar!"
I'm blaming people who are cry out "We need minorities in movies" but don't go to the movies and see the ones being made with minorities in the lead.
I'm blaming us.
What movies are you referring to?
Also, it's not just movies. It's also TV. Leonardo DiCaprio's big break was on the show "Growing Pains."
Has there ever been a single Asian character ever on that show? What about any of the other popular sitcoms of the 1980s?
I'm not blaming Asian-American Actresses, I'm blaming us, the movie goers, for not making them as famous as we did with Leonardo Dicaprio with "He deserves an Oscar!"
I'm blaming people who are cry out "We need minorities in movies" but don't go to the movies and see the ones being made with minorities in the lead.
I'm blaming us.
What movies are you referring to?
Also, it's not just movies. It's also TV. Leonardo DiCaprio's big break was on the show "Growing Pains."
Has there ever been a single Asian character ever on that show? What about any of the other popular sitcoms of the 1980s?
I know that Hollywood--and for that matter television producers--have some sort of not-clearly-explained disinclination to cast an Asian male in a romantic lead (with either an Asian actress or someone of a different race). Asian actresses will occasionally pop up in romantic roles, but an Asian male? Literally the only examples I can think of are Jet Li from one to two decades ago, and Jackie Chan more recently (and that's kind of pushing it when it comes to "romantic lead"--honestly, you could probably say Owen Wilson or Chris Tucker were the romantic leads of those movies). After that, we have to go to Indian actors, mostly in British films.
Granted, that affects me more directly as a (biracial) Asian male (not that I'm actor), so I assume I'm more inclined to think something's amiss.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
I'm not blaming Asian-American Actresses, I'm blaming us, the movie goers, for not making them as famous as we did with Leonardo Dicaprio with "He deserves an Oscar!"
I'm blaming people who are cry out "We need minorities in movies" but don't go to the movies and see the ones being made with minorities in the lead.
I'm blaming us.
What movies are you referring to?
Also, it's not just movies. It's also TV. Leonardo DiCaprio's big break was on the show "Growing Pains."
Has there ever been a single Asian character ever on that show? What about any of the other popular sitcoms of the 1980s?
I know that Hollywood--and for that matter television producers--have some sort of not-clearly-explained disinclination to cast an Asian male in a romantic lead (with either an Asian actress or someone of a different race). Asian actresses will occasionally pop up in romantic roles, but an Asian male? Literally the only examples I can think of are Jet Li from one to two decades ago, and Jackie Chan more recently (and that's kind of pushing it when it comes to "romantic lead"--honestly, you could probably say Owen Wilson or Chris Tucker were the romantic leads of those movies). After that, we have to go to Indian actors, mostly in British films.
Granted, that affects me more directly as a (biracial) Asian male (not that I'm actor), so I assume I'm more inclined to think something's amiss.
this is a Known Thing in hollywood from what ive gleaned from talking to bros in the area
its also a thing with test audiences. its why jet li didnt get sexy times in romeo must die for example, original ending had him kissing aaliyah but test audiences got "uncomfortable" so they changed it to a hug
short version is its like a very expensive music video made by somebody who really liked scenes from the oshii film
Just came back home from seeing it, and on the way home I said it felt like cargo culting going "oh man this scene from the original is so cool, want that in the movie!" without understanding why it was in the original movie.
I also groaned out loud at
Corporate Scumbag going "Is the spider tank ready?"
He might as well have said "Is the final boss fight ready?"
I'm not blaming Asian-American Actresses, I'm blaming us, the movie goers, for not making them as famous as we did with Leonardo Dicaprio with "He deserves an Oscar!"
I'm blaming people who are cry out "We need minorities in movies" but don't go to the movies and see the ones being made with minorities in the lead.
I'm blaming us.
What movies are you referring to?
Also, it's not just movies. It's also TV. Leonardo DiCaprio's big break was on the show "Growing Pains."
Has there ever been a single Asian character ever on that show? What about any of the other popular sitcoms of the 1980s?
I know that Hollywood--and for that matter television producers--have some sort of not-clearly-explained disinclination to cast an Asian male in a romantic lead (with either an Asian actress or someone of a different race). Asian actresses will occasionally pop up in romantic roles, but an Asian male? Literally the only examples I can think of are Jet Li from one to two decades ago, and Jackie Chan more recently (and that's kind of pushing it when it comes to "romantic lead"--honestly, you could probably say Owen Wilson or Chris Tucker were the romantic leads of those movies). After that, we have to go to Indian actors, mostly in British films.
Granted, that affects me more directly as a (biracial) Asian male (not that I'm actor), so I assume I'm more inclined to think something's amiss.
According to dating site metadata, asian men and black men compete for the lowest response rate from women. Asian men usually perform the worst at getting responses from same-race women.
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.
I just came back from the theaters a few hours ago, and look, I know that today is April Fool's and all, but ... Wow, what a fucking joke this movie was.
I have never seen a film that misses the point of the source material as profoundly as this one does.
Ghost is the Shell is about life, and how we define it. The Puppet-master was an AI that argued neither science nor philosophy could define what life was. It demanded rights as a sentient being, including the fundamental right of all life - to reproduce and to die. It sought to contact and merge with the Major in pursuit of this motivation. And this is supported throughout the film: in the soundtrack, which features a Shinto blessing often used for weddings; in the architecture of the setting, which featured a city that was a beautiful merger of old and new societies; in the dialogue, in which the Major talks to Togusa about the importance of strength through diversity, etc. Their ultimate union is accompanied by the presence of an angelic vision, driving home the idea that procreation is a sacred and beautiful thing.
That's what Ghost in the Shell is about.
But this 2017 remake is a bog-standard Hollywood special-effects-laden affair that demonizes technology and the corporations that advance it. Western cinema has a long standing tradition of acting in this regard (see Terminator, Avatar, etc), and it is a shame to see Gits follow in those footsteps.
I cannot say enough bad things about this film.
I have seen movies that miss the point of their source material before, but the 2017 Ghost in the Shell misses the mark spectacularly, almost offensively.
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Casting can only save a film made with some kind of vision and experience the writers and directors wish to share with an audience, something new and real they want to teach us. Not some superficial reaction they have when handed an IP to toy around with. It's a problem with modern improv comedies and it's a problem with franchise sci fi. Ambling from pastiche to pastiche with the sole goal of turning fandom into a remaster subscription begs for stagnation and failure.
I think well researched original ideas still exist, but any remainder of vision from the cerebral age of Japanese animation will never survive the trip across the ocean.
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, either do something drastically different or anything you do will be a bit boring...
A direct adaptation of the 1988 OVA would fit right in with other US action movies. You have a "bad cop" who has rejected society after the suicide of his wife helping terrorists against characters who are essentially Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon (if Riggs and Murtaugh were a romantic couple). The only thing I can think off the top of my head that would clash with Hollywood is that the main characters are an interracial couple (Briareos is a full cyborg body, but he's from North Africa).
The casting isn't about saving the film, though it wouldn't hurt it. Plus this is more than casting it's respecting and acknowledging how the politics within GiTS works and how inherently Japanese it is - which they don't necessarily need to go totally in-depth with it to have a good movie or a movie franchise. It'd be great, if they tried their best rather than ignore the implications because they're only doing this for a paycheck. If this was a generic sci-fi franchise they'd be able to get away with the former, except this is GiTS so expectations will be higher with the story and characters.
Movies don't tend to have substance, but there's no reason they can't try. Sure they won't all be Christopher Nolan (makes me wonder what he'd do with this) films yet they don't have to be this hollow, either. There more than two options here.
And it's not like Spielberg himself can't make great film with substance when he is motivated, RE: Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report, Jurassic Park, Munich, Schindler's List - if Hollywood was as dire as you suggest none of these would have gotten made. I'm not saying GITS has to be anywhere near these in depth, merely not brain dead. Unfortunately Spielberg doesn't give a fuck about GiTS to do this.
The first move behind the scenes to make a movie like GiTS have substance and high quality is not with casting, it's with hiding the director, writer and relevant consultants. Once they hired the guys who ended up with this movie was doomed to be a mediocre film that completely misunderstood, or care about the IP they're making. What we're asking is not impossible, we've had a few films already this year who were able to do both without falling on their face: Logan, Life, Kong: Skull Island. They did that because they genuinely tried and cared about what they make.
I don't think it is impossible as you suggest that GiTS depth was always beyond Hollywood, they wouldn't give it the depth of say the '95 movie of course but it needn't be completely lost. Unfortunately this was a lost cause with Ambling Entertainment - give the rights to someone who actually wants to explore the franchise with respect, talent and the movie adaption will improve tremendously. And it wouldn't kill Hollywood to give it to an Asian director, rather than expendable white director #5 who's in this just for the paycheck.
Nah, they can still do interesting stories with the premise. That material is right there for inspiration if they bothered to check it out and they're not doing anything new with this plot. Recycling the plot from Robocop into GiTS isn't innovative, it's an example that they're not trying. The movie also was inspired by plots from SAC, except like with the original movie all they did was make them a checklist to tick off, rather than do anything intriguing or creative with them. They can also do something drastically different without misunderstanding the entire premise or insulting the fanbase.
I think that the way this has been set up is too fraudulent to allow a good movie to happen for quite some time, and I finally understand why.
They want to repeat the success of the comic book industry taking over tentpole blockbusters with manga and anime. There are a wealth of unique Japanese comic stories that have value to execs because they are comics, And they are trying to rekindle the fire. There are a ton of Japanese stories out there that are great and untapped by Hollywood production values.
But they're going about it wrong. The introduction has to capture the public spirit with the joy of comics, a la Iron Man. Without that, you are doomed to isolated reboots forever.
I believe it is too late. A lot of money will be spent purely on business motive by companies rushing to buy all the Japanese IP and resell it to the public for incremental profit. Why let people who understand the work and can bring something new to it own it when you can leech off a trend? Why make a truly great movie when there is no extended universe to exploit? Why bother getting the original creators involved in sharing their vision when they don't care and you don't care?
That last point is the knife edge. The creators don't care. They won't help write the story because this isn't their country or their audience. Who among us understands the vision of these storytellers?
I don't know. It's not Steven Spielberg. It's not Asian American directors. I think the best we can hope for is stripping the story of all but the bare concept and starting fresh - like Edge of Tomorrow. I don't think the Japanese influence cam survive this process without the nurturing of its creator, and we didn't really miss it. Excise it completely if you don't understand it and the story will be better for it.
Where do Asian American directors and actors fit into this manga and anime exploitation? They probably don't. Asian American culture isn't Asian culture. I can't think of a single manga that focuses on Asian American culture at all - that I've read. A Google search turns up Eagle, which I guess was good? I've never heard of it.
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've never read the original, but I think Edge of Tomorrow did it exactly right - localize, but maintain the interesting ideas that the original played with. I've seen Edge of Tomorrow described as the first movie that really gets video game logic, that iterative process of dying and restarting at a save point and trying again. Which makes sense, since it was a light novel, published smack dab in the middle of Japanese nerd culture. The characters are changed a lot, and the ending is different, but the movie still treats the original core idea with respect.
And really another example of that is of course The Matrix, which takes a lot of ideas from Japanese anime, not only philosophical, but using animation's flexibility of time, the way animation can pause or slo-mo time while still moving the camera. The original pitch for The Matrix was the Wachowskis pointing at Ghost in the Shell and saying they wanted to do that. The Matrix borrows not only a lot of visual elements, but it also kind of repackages a lot of those GitS themes about identity in a more pop action setting. And of course then there was The Animatrix, which was basically the Wachowskis giving work to a bunch of the auteurs who had first inspired their movie.
By contrast, at least according to Emily Yoshida, 2k17 GitS is more of a cyberpunk themed female Jason Bourne story... Which like, normally I would think sounds fucking awesome, fuck yeah I'll watch scarjo as a cyberpunk Jason Bourne! But those aren't the ideas of GitS, it's using GitS as set dressing for its Jason Bourne story.
If you missed Almost Human when it was on it wasn't tremendously far off.
It was too good for this world though.
The Lone Ranger shit up all kinds of things and was grossly offensive, but for some reason it's always anime that's the most sacred of art forms when it can be argued it's one of the most diverse and open to interpretation. Much like American comics, entire universes and plots vanish and reappear, characters die and then don't.
The issues with GiTS making obvious casting problems actually main stream news is fantastic. I don't begrudge ScarJo for taking the part. I hope moving forward the next time they Hollywoodize a comic or manga it's done by people who love the source material.
And lots of adaptions do excellent work with the material, so maybe they should try harder? It's not like doing that can't be financially profitable.
No one is saying this is uniquely offensive or more insulting when its done with Japanese culture, I don't know where you're getting that from. Its bad with any culture.
Anime is a third rail due its origins being aboard and the culture being noticeable when it's Americanized. Not that this is true for everything, Live Die Repeat got excellent reception despite being very different from the source material and having a white cast. It's difficult to tell which foreign IP will galvanize the populace and which won't until it's already occurred with absolute certainty.
American comics has its own problems with inherent racism built into its bones from inception. The adaptions usually fare better win they update it and focus on more inclusiveness rather than acting like the casting should stay 100% as if it was made like the IP's were in the 60's or 70's. They're also heavily Americanized already, so they don't need to do deeper research or care about being seen as racially tone deaf.
The casting problems are not the whole picture with the complaints. They're only the most obvious rally point, the rest of the thread has gone over the relevant side issues relating to Japanese culture with GiTS.
I am disappointed that Scarlett did accept, though she likely was the best choice for the role among the white actresses. Cashing this check comes with ethical consequences she won't get with roles like Black Widow, as well as being obligated contractually (whether she believes it or not) to promote whitewashing as a "good thing" for Hollywood productions.
They're ok, some are better then others. Final fight spoilers
edit: A big difference I picked up on with the Major was that she didn't have massive weight that she does in other adaptions, none of the cyborgs do. She fights like Black Widow.
So I mean, I am unsure if the eye colour in any of the pre-hollywood film franchise is terribly relevant unless you're discussing comparisons with one specific version.
It is just so weird to me that the people who make the big decisions about merchandise could not wrap their head around figures for Toph, when Toph was easily the most amazing character on the show.
In addition to being hilarious, she stole, like, every action scene she was in.
The executives making these decisions are some of the most thick-headed fuckers in the industry.
You know what's crazy? Nick is actually pretty darn progressive when it comes to their cartoons. Avatar: TLA and especially Korra, were properties I don't think would see the light of day under most studios. Disney is similar, they made a Kim Possible series in 2002. The reason I'm using female lead cartoons as a barometer is that cartoon studios are squeamish AF about cartoons having female leads. That's why there hasn't been a Wonder Woman cartoon by WB, frankly it's a miracle they green lit her live action movie.
edit: Avatar: TLA was important since it revolved around Asian cultures - and then Nick dropped the ball when they made the movie with whitewashing. That's a big reason whitewashing became such a huge cause for Asian Americans in the media. If we didn't have that GiTS might have been the movie adaption that got that rolling.
Edit: huh, less than the movie.
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.
Not as bad as people want it to be, but not as good as it ought to be.
Honestly, I rather have a section 9 'The Raid' movie then what we got. Cause, holy shit, Section 9 is fucking awesome.
The big thing about the series versus the movie was the inverse correlation between skin tone and asshole.
In the series the lightest skin people were by far the Fire Nation who were just this side of Nazis on the Evil-o-meter. Contrast with the tribe that was always helpful and supportive of the good guys being the darkest skinned.
That the movie just happened to flip this relationship exactly was pretty worthy of side eye. That they defended it with "perfect actors for the roles" who were anything but just added fuel to the fire.
Edit: The series pretty explicitly rejected the idea of skin tone being a predictor of virtue but appearances do matter.
That's kind of not fair. Two of the three cast asian/asian american voice actors were fire nation bad guys (drawn as white looking guys), and the good guy one was a side character. The director of the movie was Asian American and he hired a lot of asian Americans for substantial parts (as the bad guys).
I'm having a hard time deciding which hiring practices were worse.
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.
If you ever do read the manga, it'll be interesting to hear your thoughts on it--not just because it is old, and not even so much that it's a arc-based comic about a take-charge female lead (I can't say the same for American comics, but Kusanagi came about in a time in the industry when there was a long run of female action heroines who answered to no man, nor God, and took no heed--Appleseed (by the same author), Bubblegum Crisis, Dirty Pair, Patlabor, Gunnm, Gunbuster, etc.--though whether or not we'd consider them "strong female leads" today is certainly up to debate in some cases); but because it's old and the portrayal of a well-known character is probably radically different than what most would expect: she's a not-so-subtle braggart, kind of a loud mouth, immensely proud of herself, and occasionally childish (against a background of similarly childish personalities). The one obvious thing that's missing (that briefly appeared in SAC) is seductive--if she does seduce someone in the original book, it's so unmemorable next to everything else (though by contrast, she does joke and jibe about femininity as a consequence of working alongside almost exclusively men). That may be where Oshii took the idea of asexual behavior into his film adaptation and ran with it to the extreme.
As dear to my heart as the TV series (and the original book) are to me, people aren't wrong when they say it fails to "show, not tell"--be prepared for that. Personally, I'm willing to accept the depth of a poignant political thriller even if it means big info dumps from time to time, and I like that world too. It's extremely hard to "show, not tell" a government conspiracy to suppress a unproven but effective vaccine to a new disease that is the cancer or HIV of the transhuman age, and the political and corporate fallout resulting from that--after all, how many theatrical portrayals of that sort of thing do you see? But I don't expect everyone to be so tolerant.
So this actually addresses something I'd suspected for a long time, even if it was barely more than a ridiculous "conspiracy theory" observation: GITS is mostly, or at least in large part, just another vehicle for Scarlet Johansson in the wake of the inability to make a Black Widow film for whatever stupid reason Marvel has settled upon--we're going to get Ant Man III: Revenge of Anteater Man or some other stupid bullshit, but not a vehicle for literally the female lead in both Avengers and Iron Man because reasons.
That may be me being unduly unfair to Marvel and Disney, but to a layperson that's certainly how it looks. You hire Johansson, who let's assume is generally very capable in most of her roles (I haven't seen enough to be certain myself), to play a strange adaptation of a Japanese military veteran turned-special operations police officer. You have a few different variations of that existing character to work with. And the end result seems to be, "If Black Widow had to solve crimes and fight cyborgs in a transhuman world." "If Black Widow had to fight a multiped think tank." "If Black Widow was the commander of hostage rescue unit."
And that's not her fault in the least--she's been playing Black Widow for coming on a decade now, right? How long do we think Scarlet Johansson had heard of Motoko Kusanagi? Probably no longer than anyone else who's roped into a Hollywood adaptation of anime and isn't James Cameron and his apparent fixation on GUNM/Battle Angel Alita, so, less than an hour. Were 2017 Ghost in the Shell some sort of remarkable breakthrough, the first of its kind that didn't kind of (or really) suck, it'd be praised as a miracle. Except that increasingly looks to not be the case.
It's very hard to sit in the outside, with only a passing familiarity of the Marvel properties that consistently and repeatedly dominate the box offices in the US and abroad, and not go, "Why the hell didn't you just give her a Black Widow movie? Why did you have to drag this thing I like into another failed attempt?" Sure, one can argue that unless Hollywood keeps trying, they're never going to get better--but that argument comes with little, or no, justification to the affected franchise's fans, who now get to console themselves with the fact that, well, at least if Hollywood's other failures in this same area are any indication, at least these things don't drag down the original franchise with them.
In the meantime, I am the angry man shaking his fist as the at a cloud--an expensive cloud that possibly no one asked for, and cost millions of dollars to generate.
Nobody wanted a shitty GiTS movie, we were just able to see the signs that this was going to be bad. Not terrible, mind you, this wasn't exactly hard to figure out if you knew what to look for. I'd have been glad to eat my words had the movie been high quality. It'd still be a bad thing with them whitewashing Motoko but I'd have something to enjoy as a fan of the franchise.
edit: I'd love to see a Section 9 Raid style movie, but as long as the people making this movie have the rights we're never going to get that.
That sucks.
Exactly, this'd be less of a problem had both sides been Asian/non-white (like in the show) - instead once again white people get to be the heroes/stars. M. Night being a minority himself is not a shield for him participating in these practices, it's heart breaking how he either went along with it or thought there was nothing wrong there.
GiTS and TLA hiring a diverse cast is great, except this only goes so far when the big roles remain out of reach - like lead roles. Both films are instances of a Hollywood production whitewashing their leads.
Fire Nation were meant to be Japanese equivalent, not white. Water Tribe were Inuit.
The characters were, though, and the movie has less of an excuse. Another thing the cartoons did was heavily research and respect Asian culture.
edit: That the cartoons failed on that account isn't an excuse that what the film did wasn't whitewashing.
Stand-Alone Complex and its follow-up 2nd Gig were made over a decade ago, but they still hold up. hell, they still feel super-relevant to today, considering some of the major themes in it beyond the post-cyberpunk transhumanism. (Conspiracies between corporations and the government, civil unrest caused by massive influx of refugees, etc)
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I just don't get why the movie gets flak for whitewashing and the cartoon doesn't. If what you say is true, animation is immune from whitewashing because it doesn't matter what race the voice actors are.
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.
Animation is less noticeable to the public as a genre, and people generally don't know who the VA's look like. It's not that animation is immune it's that they are below everyone's radar. Plus, they had the advantage of actually giving the audience high quality product, and gave respect to the culture they were inspired by rather than ignoring the implications for a pay check.
This is a bit different from the people who are just angry that a person of non-asian descent was cast as Asian. I agree that if you want to have Asian culture in your story, you might as well go full hog. But I can't abide by the hypocrisy of criticizing casting choices by the race of the actor regardless of the quality of the material. Respecting culture by always doing research makes sense. Sometimes hiring asians and sometimes not depending on the media doesn't make sense to me. Be consistent is my motto.
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.
Stand Alone Complex did a few important things: first, it came out more than ten years ago, when Kodansha's Mobile Armored Riot Police was less than 15 years old. That's "only" twice the age of the first movie for Iron Man, much less the franchise. By those standards, it was pre-adolescent. Second, it came out at a very opportune time for technology: the gradual end of the Internet anonymity on the wide scale, the adoption of modern surveillance techniques over those from the Cold War, the maturation of Japanese online communities that set the model for today's network, filling in the gaps where the original creator had been deliberately vague (who in the 1980s was predicting Facebook--not that many?) with things that are at least relevant today (even though the foundation of the story--that by 2030, cyberization in the richest countries in the world will be almost ubiquitous--is almost hilariously zeerust; by 2017, full cyborg bodies were already started to be produced for injured children, and for adults it was much more normal). The technological aspects of GITS that aren't 2001 optimistically zany are fairly poignant.
Third, and most fancifully, by the second season the United States had launched a impressively persuasive publicity campaign to secure a 80% (at least) polling approval for the second invasion of Iraq, completely at its leisure, when Iraq posed about as much threat to the United States as Lake Michigan (except Lake Michigan can affect the American climate, unlike Iraq). It had demonstrated that NATO, the multinational alliance that had prevailed in the Cold War and was now charged to secure peace and prosperity worldwide, even when three charter members objected to the war, would only oppose American aggression for about as long as it was convenient for them personally (measurable in weeks), and that the rest of NATO would either utter not a word, or even come along for the ride because war kicks ass oorah! And that the sole remaining opposition of significance, Russia (thanks to Iran's strange ambivalence) could scream about the sky falling for as long as it cared to, but not do a single thing to stop it. No sanctions, barely any condemnation, and absolutely no declarations of war, as a response to an unprovoked conflict with no foreseeable end. The relationship between a strong nation, and a weak nation, was ripe territory for the second season--and it took that hilarious tragedy and combined it with Japan's own colonial history and sordid nationalist past, alongside the existing postwar setting of crumbling and resurgent superpowers, Japan, China, Russia, and the three United States successors. It's why Stand Alone Complex is so heavily influenced not by September 11, but the War on Terror and the Balkans War before that: you couldn't ask for a better example about how to manipulate public opinion and strong-arm inconvenient actors. 2ND GIG took that concept and rode it, and hard, and gave us the postwar tale of the Individual Eleven.
It's why Stand Alone Complex was considered a wide success, especially in terms of storytelling: the individual short arcs of the manga--there are only so many of them, and frankly, they're not all great either--are window dressing for original plotlines: the Laughing Man, and the Individual Eleven. There is very little of either of those stories in the original 1989 serialized manga--hell, in 1989, not that many Japanese thought that Russia was going to be the lone objection to war made at another country's leisure. Or that international alliances intended to keep the peace could be subverted with such comical ease in the right circumstances, including the very ones Japan worked closely in concert with. Combine that with Japan's own wartime history--militarization, invasion, atrocities--and you get a scary damn story. And it's why the aggression of ideological powerhouses like Iran or the Soviet Union (a trope of Appleseed too) was replaced with the aggression of actual economic and military powerhouses, like Japan or the three American successor states (which are all nuclear powers).
tl;dr--the Bush (and to a lesser extent Clinton) governments helped justify some of the crazy complicated political conspiracies that are the meat of Stand Alone Complex's immediate background and final arc. You can't make that shit up.
To add, Ghost in the Shell doesn't have quite the same problem that, say, Batman or Spiderman have, wherein the origin and premise has been fucking done to death over and over again (as much as I enjoy the Nolan films)--but studios are aware of that issue, hence Arise's attempt to exploit an underexamined period (Major Kusanagi's military career immediately prior to Section 9's formation) as well as a different origin (stupid fetus cyberization). Put simply, in anime and manga, you very seldom get to do the same story over and over and over again, though there are exceptions (which says something about GITS' cultural cache in Japan and East Asia today).
As soon as ScarJo was announced, I feel most people did.
And to me, that was even more depressing.
At least with Margot Robbie, as bad as that would've been, you couldn't say "Black Widow does transhumanism."
short version is its like a very expensive music video made by somebody who really liked scenes from the oshii film
Except movies aren't produced across all of America, they're produced in the Coastal states. Which tend to have a disproportionately much larger Asian population compared to the non-Coastal states.
California, for instance, is 15% Asian people.
Vancouver is 30% Asian people.
And movie stardom doesn't appear from thin air. Actors have to work their way up the ranks first. The problem isn't simply that Asians aren't being considered in lead roles for blockbusters. The problem is that they're not being considered for any role in general, even for roles where the "we need an a-list star to attract ticket sales" do not apply.
What movies are you referring to?
Also, it's not just movies. It's also TV. Leonardo DiCaprio's big break was on the show "Growing Pains."
Has there ever been a single Asian character ever on that show? What about any of the other popular sitcoms of the 1980s?
Yeah. It wasn't terrible, just... kind of bland.
I know that Hollywood--and for that matter television producers--have some sort of not-clearly-explained disinclination to cast an Asian male in a romantic lead (with either an Asian actress or someone of a different race). Asian actresses will occasionally pop up in romantic roles, but an Asian male? Literally the only examples I can think of are Jet Li from one to two decades ago, and Jackie Chan more recently (and that's kind of pushing it when it comes to "romantic lead"--honestly, you could probably say Owen Wilson or Chris Tucker were the romantic leads of those movies). After that, we have to go to Indian actors, mostly in British films.
Granted, that affects me more directly as a (biracial) Asian male (not that I'm actor), so I assume I'm more inclined to think something's amiss.
this is a Known Thing in hollywood from what ive gleaned from talking to bros in the area
its also a thing with test audiences. its why jet li didnt get sexy times in romeo must die for example, original ending had him kissing aaliyah but test audiences got "uncomfortable" so they changed it to a hug
it sux
desi dudes get the same shit in the states
Just came back home from seeing it, and on the way home I said it felt like cargo culting going "oh man this scene from the original is so cool, want that in the movie!" without understanding why it was in the original movie.
I also groaned out loud at
He might as well have said "Is the final boss fight ready?"
According to dating site metadata, asian men and black men compete for the lowest response rate from women. Asian men usually perform the worst at getting responses from same-race women.
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 have never seen a film that misses the point of the source material as profoundly as this one does.
Ghost is the Shell is about life, and how we define it. The Puppet-master was an AI that argued neither science nor philosophy could define what life was. It demanded rights as a sentient being, including the fundamental right of all life - to reproduce and to die. It sought to contact and merge with the Major in pursuit of this motivation. And this is supported throughout the film: in the soundtrack, which features a Shinto blessing often used for weddings; in the architecture of the setting, which featured a city that was a beautiful merger of old and new societies; in the dialogue, in which the Major talks to Togusa about the importance of strength through diversity, etc. Their ultimate union is accompanied by the presence of an angelic vision, driving home the idea that procreation is a sacred and beautiful thing.
That's what Ghost in the Shell is about.
But this 2017 remake is a bog-standard Hollywood special-effects-laden affair that demonizes technology and the corporations that advance it. Western cinema has a long standing tradition of acting in this regard (see Terminator, Avatar, etc), and it is a shame to see Gits follow in those footsteps.
I cannot say enough bad things about this film.
I have seen movies that miss the point of their source material before, but the 2017 Ghost in the Shell misses the mark spectacularly, almost offensively.