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Ghost in the Shell live action movie
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Tassie Dave wrote: "The Bugs Bunny cartoon is forgiveable as it was made during WW2.It doesn't stand up to today's standards and shouldn't be shown in a children's time slot.
It is cringe inducing to watch it now."
Pardon me for quibbling with the vocabulary here, but it's kind of what I do.... "Forgiveness" for me is all tied up with repentance/remittance and forgetting, so I'd say that it is "understandable" instead. It's one of those things that's shocking, but not surprising. Like a lot of social dynamics, you can't helped but be shocked... but you're not really surprised. When you watch TV and there's a story about some born-to-lose idiots holding a "rally" to support the Confederate flag, and they start flashing KKK hand symbols, you can't really be surprised, but it's still shocking. We know why that Bugs Bunny cartoon happened. Hell, even Tarzan was fighting the nazis in the 40s.
And in the context of a global conflict for the existence of culture, ideas and the lives of millions of people... it's not a big a deal relatively speaking. Though we shouldn't be dismissive on the basis of context, we do have to factor it into its time. When I saw it forty years on outside that context, it was much more shocking-not-surprising. I can't say if it's any more/less shocking-not-surprising these days when we are, if anything, in the midst of a global community and prosperity never before seen in the history of the world—despite the best efforts of certain members of our polity....
Stephen wrote: "I did not see the Hollywood reporter listed in the 47 Ronin, just a lot of "never heard of that" type of websites. I still think it is because a woman is in the lead. I will wait for the next reinvented Magna film with a male lead to see if the outrage is the same."
It's possible that her gender is a factor, though I don't know how one might go about showing evidence for such a thing. However, excluding the hits on message boards/public discussion sites, the first page of hits when I google "47 Ronin whitewashing" contains:
"47 Ronin" and the Hollywood Outcast - Racebending.com
www.racebending.com/v4/featured/47-ro...
10 Horrible Acts of Whitewashing/Racebending in Hollywood Movies ...
filmonic.com/10-horrible-acts-whitewa...
Keanu Reeves and the White-washing of Hollywood :: WINM :: Keanu ...
www.whoaisnotme.net/articles/2016_012...
More whitewashing. 47 Ronin starring Keanu Reeves as the White in ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/.../more_whi...
Whitewashed TV isn't Just Racist, It's Boring – thenerdsofcolor
https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2013/12/1...
The true Hollywood story: Whitewashing, appropriation and tokenism ...
www.villainesse.com/.../true-hollywoo......
I only looked at a few of those. Some of them are pro and others con. The point is, there was a discussion at the time. Whether that situation is the same as this one is, of course, debatable. The issue is getting increasing attention over the years, and it's arguably more egregious to cast a (sometimes) red-headed actor named "Johanssen" in an Asian role than it is to take a mixed race actor named "Keanu."
One film or two now that GitS has come out being box office failures doesn't constitute a trend, but probably the most pertinent thing about 47 Ronin to the issue here is not just the white-washing, but the viability of the film. From Wikipedia: "Adjusted for inflation, it lost an estimated $152 million. Variety magazine listed 47 Ronin as one of 'Hollywood's biggest box office bombs of 2013'".
I wouldn't say that's down to the white-washing issue entirely, but I'm starting to suspect that the white-washing issue is indicative of a generalized "bad film-maker" thinking. That is, when making an adaptation (rather than filming an original screenplay) film-makers who cast in a way that conflicts with the source material are going to play similarly fast and loose with the plot, the dialogue, the character motivations, even the denouement of the source material. That's generally a bad idea, and I'd argue they did all of those things in the live action GitS adaptation. There are films that are loose adaptations rather than strict ones and still wind up being successful, but if you take into consideration the popularity of the original then such an adaptation is rolling the dice rather than go with proven success. That seems like a big gamble what with the cost of making a movie these days.
Gary I think that last paragraph is dead on. And while it does seem to be more a symptom of something bigger then a unique disease, I do think it is one that we should apply more pressure on then just having studios stop making bad movies. Thanks for sharing.How did your viewing party go?
John (Nevets) wrote: "Gary I think that last paragraph is dead on. And while it does seem to be more a symptom of something bigger then a unique disease, I do think it is one that we should apply more pressure on then just having studios stop making bad movies. Thanks for sharing."You're welcome, and it does seem to be the kind of thing that film makers (or the studios, rather) will pay attention to. I mean, certain things they just aren't going to get. The complaints about casting Cruise as Lestat and Pitt as Louis for Interview with a Vampire rather than the other way around seems like something that they are not going to wrap their heads around because physicality and source material aren't real high on their list of priorities. However, race is something that even a highly paid studio executive can comprehend....
How did your viewing party go?
Good. It wound up being more wine and cheese than pizza and beer, surprisingly.
I actually caught a few things in the anime that I hadn't picked out before. It's not a subtle piece of work by any stretch of the imagination, of course, but there are some fascinating nuances. There's a shot, for instance, with the Major on a boat going down one of the famous Tokyo canals. She looks up and sees her physical double sitting at a table having a drink. Then she floats on by....
Was that meant to be her physical prototype? Another version of her body? Is that the *real* major and her ghost is a copy? Were they saying that *everybody* has a physical double even people with artificial bodies?
The anime really presents the Major with more doll's eyes than I had remembered too. She seems vacant in a way that even Batou, with his cybernetic lense-eyes, doesn't. Again, I'm confident that was a purposeful choice by the film-makers, not least because they kept it at the end when (view spoiler).
Matthew wrote: "Trike wrote: "The single biggest issue with this movie is the whitewashing, which goes hand-in-hand with white guys adapting a Japanese property that they either didn't understand or decided it was...Wasn't saying you can't/shouldn't talk about it just that it's rude to be so dismissive of someone trying to change the subject when this thread was started as general discussion."
So let me get this straight: it's NOT rude to be dismissive of an ongoing conversation and insist that it cease but it IS rude to resist being told to stop said conversation?
Ok, got it. Thanks for telling me how conversations are supposed to work.
I saw the movie. It was just OK. And I own the original '95 movie and Stand Alone Complex series, though I've not watched the Kuze arc that that some of the new movie plot is based.Visually it is stunning, but many great looking movies are bad, like Great Wall.
Whitewashing - yes it is a problem in Hollywood. we can all agree on that. Is the Major supposed to be Japanese? Born that way, yes. Is her body Asian. Maybe, maybe not. I just realized in the original movie her eyes are a light gray and in Stand Alone Complex they are reddish purple. So that's no indication of anything to me. Plus as a long time anime fan, anime characters rarely have realistic looking eyes. I've seen characters in slice of life comedy drams with hourglass pupils - go figure. I've always assumed the Major's body was a Japanese body, freakishly augmented. But I'll accept that since it's artificial, it could be racially neutral.
But here's some irony about whitewashing (view spoiler)
As far as the movie itself, it was certainly a lot of eye candy. But beyond that was the basic plot of evil corporation doing bad things. Gone is the more philosophical aspects of what iit means to not only be human, but to have a soul.
In that basic story, I think the original Robocop did it better. Once you get past the homages and callbacks to the anime, it's a very rudimentary script. The bar is high considering the quality of the source material too. As a early summer action flick it serves it's purpose.
But the story and scripting itself oversimplified the GitS world of ghost hacking, cyberbrains, augments and questions of humanity.
Also getting the short end of the stick were some of my favorites, like Togusa, the family man who refused to have augments. Saito, the sniper seemed to be relegated to cameo status.
Beat Takeshi as Section Chief Aramaki seemed bored most of the time, even though he does get some badass moments. Maybe because he was the only character speaking in Japanese and everybody else was speaking to him in English? Come on, at least a yes sir, no sir would do. I always spoke to my parents mixing English and Chinese. Thei grankids only speak English, but they weren't raised to speak the language either. It just struck me as odd. I would have thought the language of this world would have evolved some. Firefly seemed to only do it with swear words.
REVIEW OF MOVIE ITSELF:So I actually thought everything about it was great...except the writing. Visuals great, action great, casting Scarlet Jo was actually quite good and Batou and the Director were nailed. When I first finished it, I was originally mad a the multitude of seemingly dumb writing decisions they made then as I thought about it they didn't really have much of a choice due to time constraints which leads to the real problem. Which is they tried to do WAYYYY too much in one film. Bottom line they shouldn't of tried to tie in the Kuze arc in this film if they really wanted to do that they would need a trilogy. They should of just done a cool post-cyberpunk story about catching some criminal leader and had it focus on the team and their relationship vs ohh look how creepy it is that your brain can get hacked.
note about Major Kusanagi's body: It's supposed to be a forgettable yet still attractive body so she can blend in with the average population of future mainland japan.
107 Ghost in the Shell facts if you have 27 minutes to kill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5cVT...I want to see the cut scenes from the first video game.
I had no idea there was an "Arise" series where she had bangs, lol.
So I finally got around to seeing the original this weekend. Never saw it before. I found it kind of...meh. Not great and not bad, just there. It seemed like a mashup of Bladerunner and Gibson Cyberpunk books. I could barely follow the plot until over halfway through the movie, when it finally started to make sense.I watched it with my kid, a 14 year old Anime fan. She also wondered what the heck was going on. While we're glad to have watched it since it's a classic Anime film, neither of us saw what the big deal was.
The big deal was at the time, not 20 years later, after countless copycat and inspired by works and anime now being common and accepted in the U.S.
That's plausible for my daughter's reaction - she watches / reads a lot of Anime. But as for my reaction, I noted that it followed Bladerunner and Gibson's Cyberpunk books, and seemed derivative of them.
John (Taloni) wrote: "But as for my reaction, I noted that it followed Bladerunner and Gibson's Cyberpunk books, and seemed derivative of them."All cyberpunk is derivative of those. They defined the genre.
Yeah, I think it was a time/place cult following mostly, but also a lot of the "confusing" bits are likely parts that riff off of cultural references that don't translate well. I found a lot of it weird when we watched it first, and then someone explained a lot of the significance for specifically Japanese people at the time and it made more sense and became a lot more meaningful. It'd be like reading Narnia without knowing anything about the Christian Bible.
John (Taloni) wrote: "So I finally got around to seeing the original this weekend. Never saw it before. I found it kind of...meh. Not great and not bad, just there. It seemed like a mashup of Bladerunner and Gibson Cybe..."I don't actually ever remember seeing the first 2 movies, just the tv series which is where all the hype was and by tv series I really mean 2nd gig aka season 2.
Or you can watch Psycho Pass which I actually like better.
^My daughter mentioned the TV series. She thought maybe the movie would have been better after watching the first season. I dunno, I thought the movie was first.
John (Taloni) wrote: "^My daughter mentioned the TV series. She thought maybe the movie would have been better after watching the first season. I dunno, I thought the movie was first."The movie was first by almost decade according to wikipedia.
Gary wrote: "This adaptation is a particularly strange version of that process. They clearly studied the anime. So many shots are taken almost frame for frame from the 1995 film that they had to have gone over it in agonizing detail. They don't appear to have understood the majority of it, though. Either that or they assume their audience isn't going to understand it (despite it having been around for a generation...) so the options are: they're dumb and/or they think their audience is. "I just watched the film and I'm honestly baffled by it for these exact reasons. How is it that this movie is longer than the original yet has less content? That takes a special amount of stupid to accomplish.
One of the things I really liked about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which I just revisited after seeing War for PotA, is that they actually take their time to set up the story. Including showing us the backstory of the supporting characters, especially the various apes. (And done like a silent movie, to boot.)
Regardless of whether one likes the original anime of Ghost in the Shell, they do this exact same thing: we get to know the secondary and tertiary characters because they take the time to flesh them out. (Sometimes literally, for the ones who are manufactured.)
None of that is in this movie. But as Gary says, it looks like they copied some of the scenes frame by frame without understanding the reason for it. In that sense it reminds me of Zack Snyder's Watchmen, copying the look without getting the point of why it looks that way.
But the other weird thing is that the movie is ugly. It has that bland, dark, washed-out look so many films have these days, except when they do over-the-top CGI, then it pops with color. It's weirdly inconsistent.
I had completely forgotten the sniper guy was part of the team until he showed up and sniped somebody at the very end. Had he even been introduced prior to that?Edited to add: But seriously: If you hated the movie, or even if you loved it, watch the Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex TV series, which is vastly superior in every possible way.
Well, I finally watched it on a plane ride. I agree with much that has been said before. The one thing that I don't believe has been mentioned yet, is how poor the use of audio was in this adaptation. The score and audio mix in the original is excellent (and even better in the second animated movie), and really help set the pace of the film. It along with the quite, more everyday juxtaposed visuals were a big part of what made the original so great. Gary and Trike are right the pacing is just way off. They didn't give the movie any time to breath. Even the chase scene that they stole so many shots from, is longer and better paced in the original. How do you screw that up, you had the blueprint. While the writing was bad, I think the plot changes are the least of the sins of the film. I think they would have been better off going for a much looser adaptation from the beginning, then this mashup of remake, yet change everything important. I think I was most disappointed in the ending for the major. I mean her finding herself, and making the choice she does to escape life in the government is such a big part of the original. And yet hear they just gloss over it, so they can set up more movies, that will now never happen.
Oh well, I guess they got my view, but at least they didn't get my cash on this one.
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Books mentioned in this topic
Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won (other topics)Ghost World (other topics)
Wasn't saying you can't/shouldn't talk about it just that it's rude to be so dismissive of someone trying to change the subject when this thread was started as general discussion.
But if this is what we're going to talk about then I must admit I think you're conflating a lot of issues. The issue of treatment of the source material is different than the issue of casting white people in asian roles. The issue of casting white people in asian roles is different than the issue of yellowface and insulting/demeaning stereotypes in media.
Themes and concepts are going to change when Hollywood adapts foreign material. Get over it. It's not a race thing, it's a "dumbing down and making it palatable to american audiences" thing. I'm not trying to insult american audiences here, the studios are. British people had similar reactions to the Americanization of V for Vendetta.
I think the whole white actors cast in asian roles is getting overblown. Yeah it sucks for asian-american actors (and aboriginal/black/etc. actors too!) but I think we wouldn't be having this argument if there were more nuanced and varied roles for them in the first place. They shouldn't have to bank on the next anime-turned-movie to get roles. This movie is a very small symptom of a much larger problem. The race of the character/actor should only be important if it is a movie aiming for historical realism or one where race issues are central to the story.
Finally, why are we even talking about Breakfast at Tiffany's? I see no one trying to defend stuff like that. It's a strawman argument that has no relation to the decision to put Scarlett Johansson in this movie unless they jammed buck teeth into her mouth and made her squint throughout the movie.