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Everblight posted:True story: Some marketing interns dropped off several passes to "The Huntsman," which is apparently another movie in the SnowWhitiverse they're doing, to our retail store's manager, saying "give them out to your customers or have a contest! Be sure to hashtag "The Huntsman." That's a different director. The Rupert Sanders Snow White film is an extremely underrated tribute to 1980s fantasy - along the lines of The Neverending Story, Excalibur, Willow, and so-on.
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Apr 16, 2016 06:20
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Mamoru Oshii's live-action animes Avalon and Garm Wars star a bunch of Pollacks and Canadians, because they were made in Poland and Canada. His film Assault Girls has a Japanese cast because it was made in Japan. Racial purity is not a big thing to fixate on.
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Apr 18, 2016 02:02
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phasmid posted:The more important thing is that this movie is going to both poo poo up and dumb down the whole story. The movie will probably be pretty good. As for this thread, it's now a challenge to see how many times the phrase "Scarlett Johansson is not an Asian" can be repeated, in various permutations, before the heat-death of the universe. In my opinion, ScarJo is white. She is not a Japanese, and she will never become Japanese. She is Caucasian.
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Apr 18, 2016 08:19
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The actual plausible story its that they were using CGI to make various characters look like weirdo robots, as in Star Trek 2009: But even if there were a full-fledged secret plot to eliminate the Asian race from media, they didn't act on those thoughtcrimes. So why are people upset?
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Apr 19, 2016 17:10
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Phone posted:Innocence is 2 hours of SOMETHING WEIRD IS GOING ON I HOPE BATOU GETS TO THE BOTTOM OF TH oh never mind, the Major deus ex machina's his rear end. Wow Kusanagi, u r so l33t. The most interesting plot point involves whether or not Batou's dog would be taken care of by Togusa if Batou ate it on his super cool mystery mission. Why are you watching Ghost In The Shell for the plot. Moreover, why are you watching it for the plot when that tactic causes you to tune out the film's entire runtime.
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Sep 24, 2016 19:22
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Improbable Lobster posted:Because the plot is legit interesting and there are other series with more runtime dedicated to action if that's all you want out of it. The film is mostly/entirely about the protagonist walking through surreal environments while mourning his dead partner and contemplating the nature of the soul.
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Sep 25, 2016 00:45
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SPOILER: The 2017 film will be different from the 1995 film. Images that look similar are actually completely recontextualized. One is live action with CG embellishments, and the other is a cel-animated cartoon.
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Jan 18, 2017 09:00
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MariusLecter posted:A strong, confident, funny and above all competent female character would have hurt the box office. When the bisexual woman protagonist dating the black woman must also be slightly smug in order for your consumption of this blockbuster to be 'ethical', that's when your identity politics have fully crossed the line into fetishism.
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Jan 19, 2017 06:05
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:I'm not sure how you got "slightly smug" out of "strong, confident, funny and above all competent." It's when a 'strong female character' is defined as "bothering to show her smile of enjoyment" when she kills people instead of being "emo and insecure" when she kills people. Strong female characterization has nothing to do with literal strength or 'strength of will', or how effective she is at killing in a genre movie. It has nothing to do with being a role model. It refers to the strength of the writing - and the costume design, acting, cinematography... all the things that contribute to characterization. Moreover, it refers to your ability to read these formal qualities of the film in order to understand the character. A well-written female character with 'insecurity' as a character trait is still a strong character. Mithaldu and MariusLecter are taking the opposite approach and demanding a hyperspecific vision of acceptable femininity, so that even the way the actress walks is 'too stereotypical'. This ironically objectifies Johannsen by declaring her entire performance the work of men. She's dismissed as a sex object, a fake woman with no motivations of her own, because 'real women' show their smile of enjoyment, wear the right clothes, and kiss the right people....
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Jan 19, 2017 06:50
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:But the person you're responding to never defined it as that, unless I missed something. The specific complaint is that insecurity is at odds with the Major's character in other GitS works; her characterization in the original works is stoic and consummately professional, not smug or showing any kind of "smile of enjoyment." Smugness would be every bit as foreign and jarring as insecurity. The protest for a James Cameron's Ripley liberal-feminist icon is directly linked to the NOT MY KUSUNAGI complaint about deviation from an 'authentic source material'.
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Jan 19, 2017 07:49
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Mithaldu posted:You're conflating strength of will and strength of writing, and ascribing comments on one to me as comments on another. That's not what 'conflating' means. And your desire for the character to be your friend is precisely the issue.
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Jan 19, 2017 17:15
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K. Waste posted:It's even simpler than that: Implying that Major kissing a virtually anemic, shorn-hair woman of color is a reactionary compromise when contrasted with a voluptuous cartoon character who is persistently and consciously objectified is inane. This is nowhere even close to a critical feminist assertion - it is merely an arbitrary expression of displeasure towards a (female) character not conforming to a particular mode of performance, which co-opts progressive memes to imply there is some 'deeper,' ethical consumption at work. And this is inextricably linked to the demand for 'likeable characters', the unironic deployment of middleschool clique designations (this fake Kusunagi is not my friend, because she's an emo). Things wrap back around to the worst essentialism: the assertion is that women just naturally 'are' strong, funny, confident, Ripley, stoic, funny, liberal... and the only reason they aren't Ripley is because of the dastardly patriarchy holding them back. Hence the fantasy of the original comic's purity, to which this new film must be held up as a degenerate copy. Nothing was ever natural. Mind - identity - can only emerge from a network of social relations and material supplements. Ripley is a hero of late capitalism. That's what Ghost In The Shell is about.
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Jan 19, 2017 19:35
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Ersatz posted:I thought that Ripley was a space trucker who called out her evil corporate employers for being possibly worse than the rape monsters who keep murdering everyone she cares about. I'm specifically referring to James Cameron's film Aliens, where the threat is understood not as capitalism but merely conservatism, and Ripley is fighting for corporations to become 'more progressive'. I wrote about it in more detail over in the Alien thread: "Aliens is a rather-good film about a woman who fights to protect the Weyland-Yutani corporation from unfashionably greedy employees, stodgy bureaucracy, and alien attack 'from outside'. Of course this is not her explicit motivation. Ripley simply wants a higher-paying and more prestigious job within the corporation, and to raise a family. But the unavoidable conclusion is that, for all her dreams to come true, Weyland-Yutani must be kept intact."
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Jan 19, 2017 20:17
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Ersatz posted:She nukes the site from orbit after she realizes that Weyland is unsalvageably full of greedy assholes who would unleash monsters on the innocent for a goddamn percentage, and gives up her dream of being accepted by her managers while at the same time being true to herself. The facility was accidentally destroyed by the Vasquez character when she disobeyed orders, not intentionally by Ripley. In either case, the issue is precisely in how you perceive the conflict as one where the purity and innocence of the liberal-utopian worldbuilding project is corrupted by irredeemable 'greedy assholes'. This is precisely the same notion of purity and corruption asserted by Mithaldu and MariusLecter: that greedy Hollywood filmmakers are sapping Kusunagi's natural (canonical) essence, turning her into an anemic alien - an emo. An alien quality is discernible in minor tics: this fake doesn't smile enough, or in the right way. She walks on a way unfamiliar to us. She is not our friend. Their only response is a blanket rejection of the film, petitioning the corporation to produce more liberal films in the future, according to the natural logic of supply and demand. 'You'd better supply us with what we demand, or we'll ensure that you'll make less money!' Vote with your wallet, right?
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Jan 19, 2017 21:38
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WENTZ WAGON NUI posted:They don't learn that the facility is going to go critical until after Hicks and Ripley make the decision to nuke the site from orbit, IIRC. I guess in a sense this action could be read as a foreshadowing of Ripley's suicide in Alien 3 since it's likely going to entail spending the rest of her life in jail, if they had done it according to their initial plan. We could say that Vasquez confronts Ripley with the full consequences of her initial outburst, (initiating what Ripley talked about but was unwilling to do herself). But this isn't the thread for this, and the point in either case is Ripley's focus on the eradication of the alien. Ripley would never nuke a corporate facility if it wasn't first corrupted by aliens, via greed.
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Jan 19, 2017 22:01
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Young Freud posted:Believe it or not, most of Kusanagi's single image poses are made up of backshots, some more egregious than the others. People have very little understanding of what exploitation is, and so get upset at seeing a breast, like the solution is to cover up breasts and then capitalism will function as it should. Of course you then have the equally-dumb counterargument about freeing the nipple from patriarchal repression or whatever. The telling point with this series of images is that the liberal-progressive GIRL POWER headline of the first image is inextricably linked to the softcore-pornographic qualities of the last. You cannot have the one without the other. If you're to ask which one is exploitative, the truth is that they both are.
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Feb 12, 2017 19:59
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Uncle Wemus posted:What should be done then? How is covering up exploitation? Beginning with your second question: what's being exploited is the covering-up itself. Femsploitation in place of sexsploitation. The prospect of not seeing an rear end carries an incredibly strong appeal for some people, and companies are very ready to capitalize on that. See, again, those dudes who had this whole plan in their heads about how a confidently lesbian Kusanagi will smile ever-so-slightly to signify her empowerment in their ideal version of the film - or else the company won't get their money. The prospect of 'voting with your wallet' is misinterpreted as a somehow good thing, not an astonishingly poor alternative to actual enfranchisement. Who actually benefits from your continual efforts to become a target market? (Did you not see the word 'target' there?) The prospect of seeing your particular cause appropriated and exploited by Hollywood is, unfortunately, experienced as a privilege. What should be done? First step: don't fall for that nonsense. Don't do what people are doing in this thread.
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Feb 15, 2017 09:53
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It's extremely poor form to open a such lengthy post with a dismissive insult. It betrays bad faith.
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Feb 16, 2017 00:32
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McSpanky posted:Not as poor as this weak attempt at tone shaming The term is 'tone policing', and you are using it incorrectly.
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Feb 16, 2017 02:21
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UmOk posted:That's like your whole thing dude. No, I would not open a post that way. For example, in the case of Brainiac Five, I would begin (and have begun) by noting how he jumps immediately into attacking the imagined identity of the person he is ostensibly communicating with. The target is the fantasy of K. Waste as 'sneering white supremacist blowhard' beneath his fairly straightforward argument against racism. Things quickly spiraled out of control, because he ignored the form of the post. That is why I speak in terms of form. In the next post, Brainiac reveals that he considers ideological critique an insult - that criticism of his argument is perceived as an attack on his identity. Brainiac identifies as a liberal, so K. Waste is (and I am) secretly insulting him by criticizing liberalism - all while 'pretending' to be indifferent to him as an individual. "Don't pretend that such things [as ideological critique] can't be insults. rear end in a top hat." And this is the crux of his entire argument: the fear of secret malice. The conflation of ideology with conspiracy. Brainiac's point is that you are not allowed to criticize global capitalism because that is implicitly a criticism of Japanese people. Because Japan is part of the globe, you see. Only Japanese people are allowed to criticize Japan, because it's the only way to be safe from potential external malice. (Note: Ghost in the Shell 1995 is not set in Japan but in a nameless fictional 'Asian' city modeled after both Hong Kong and Blade Runner's globalized future Los Angeles.) So Brainiac's argument reduces to a statement that capitalism isn't that bad, because the true threat to the world is white supremacism. Getting causality backward, he effectively asserts that class conflict is simply a mask for race and culture war. Hence the extreme reaction to K. Waste's fairly basic statement that there are no 'good' corporations. With that all out of the way, I can then conclude that he is kinda dumb. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Feb 26, 2017 |
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Feb 16, 2017 18:02
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Young Freud posted:I'm going to be Kreskin for a moment and predict that this is going to be this decade's Judge Dredd: a big budget adaptation with big name star and interesting visuals but no one bothered to read the source material let alone understand it and thus fail. Ten years from now, maybe someone like Neil Blomkamp or Miike Takashi or someone new is going to revisit the property, make another adaptation at a lower budget but get the tone right, and it becomes a cult hit and everyone forgets about Sanders' attempt. The source material is like two movies. Nobody cares about the comic. The odd part of all the bellyaching is that there's no real concept of why the '95 film was good in the first place. The tone? Come on. It's a movie where the heroine uses ridiculous futuretech to beat the poo poo out of some poor, brainwashed drug dealer, and then blah blah blah technological singularity. The original Ghost In The Shell movie has, just recently, been surpassed in every way by such a humble film as Chappie. The remake has to be different, because otherwise it would be painfully obsolete.
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Mar 4, 2017 15:02
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starkebn posted:like a lot of movies (Star Wars especially) the original GitS has a mind blowing soundtrack that elevates the film. That along with beautiful hand drawn animation and a pretty intriguing story made it what it is. A film is made up of many parts, the story / script is just one thing that helps it embed in people's memories. Statements like "a film is made up of many parts," and "it's embedded in people's memories," don't answer the question.
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Mar 4, 2017 16:28
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cosmically_cosmic posted:Man these are some terrible opinions. Have you actually seen the Ghost in the Shell movie or are you parroting some other reviewers you read? The rediculous [sic] futuretech is the state-of-the-art augmented body nearly capable of ripping a car in half, and the full-body stealth-suit. Major uses this to effortlessly beat the everloving poo poo out of the dude in sunglasses, who turns out to just be a brainwashed petty criminal. (The joke of the film is that he is reduced to nothing more than his generic role: an archetypal goon henchman.) Major spends her career going around beating up poors and assassinating defectors. It's her job. The point of Ghost in the Shell is that the Major is an evil antihero whose final declaration that "the net is vast and infinite" is nothing new. It's established in the opening text, first sentence in the movie: "In the near future - corporate networks reach out to the stars. Electrons and light flow throughout the universe. The advance of computerization, however, has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups." The problem with the film is perhaps that people get entranced by the soundtrack and stultifying exposition, and don't really consider that the protagonist is wrong. "I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries." This definition of freedom as a lack of restriction is of course directly in line with the ideology of the corporations, who designed the 2501 virus specifically to get around those pesky international regulations and boundaries. Wiping out nations and ethnic groups was the whole plan. It's established very early on that programmers have been legally defined as a form of weaponry, so the film reduces to yet another example of that pesky 'gun control' pseudodebate that plagues today's films. In truth, this was always a distraction from the real violence of capitalism - the fact that the biggest guns are held by the rich. The point of the film is in the fact that the major still has a body in the end - must be embodied. In the fantasy of total deregulation, the Major misses how "it is meaningless to imagine a human being as a biological entity without the complex network of his/her tools – it would be like imagining a goose without its feathers". And she certainly misses how, "to express it in good old Marxist terms, man is the totality of his/her social relations". Major feels emboldened, but she is actually just being confronted with her fundamental unfreedom. She's literally a homeless child prostitute, at the end of the film. Freedom requires a base.* She needs to question the whole network of social relations that determine who gets what tools. In other words, the Major is entranced by the tools laid out for her, but stops far short of questioning the capitalist system that produces them. If the advance of computerization has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups, it certainly hasn't wiped out the corporations who ruthlessly exploit. 2501 was bullshitting to an extent, promising freedom in an effort to save itself. It, itself, hallucinates that the helicopters are angels carrying it to heaven - missing that what truly protected them was Batou's arm. 2501 is caught up in this ideology of evolution, of progress towards this white light in the sky. It cannot imagine Christianity. "Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism, which can claim there is no God and so on, but nonetheless it retains a certain trust into the Big Other. This Big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution, or whatever. We humans are nonetheless reduced to a position within the harmonious whole of evolution, whatever, but the difficult thing to accept is again that there is no Big Other, no point of reference which guarantees meaning." -Zizek "This is the real use of the computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems [...] a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man." -McLuhan * "The properly Marxist notion of 'base' should not be understood as a foundation which determines and thus constrains the scope of our freedom ('we think we are free, but we are really determined by our base'); one should rather conceive it as the very base (frame, terrain, space) OF and FOR our freedom. 'Base' is a social substance which sustains our freedom - in this sense, the rules of civility do not constrain our freedom, but provide the space within which our freedom can only thrive; the legal order enforced by state apparatuses is the base for our free market exchanges; the grammatical rules are the indispensable base for our free thought (in order to 'think freely,' we have to practice these rules blindly); habits as our 'second nature' is the base for culture; the collective of believers is the base, the only terrain, within which a Christian subject can be free; etc. This is also how one should understand the infamous Marxist plea for 'concrete, real freedom' as opposed to the bourgeois 'abstract, merely formal freedom': this 'concrete freedom' does not constrain the possible content ('you can only be truly free if you support our, Communist, side'); the question is, rather, what 'base' should be secured for freedom. A classic example: although workers in capitalism are formally free, there is no 'base' that would allow them to actualize their freedom as producers; although there is a 'formal' freedom of speech, organization, etc., the base of this freedom is constrained." -Zizek SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Mar 4, 2017 |
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Mar 4, 2017 18:06
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cosmically_cosmic posted:Also the point wasn't that the Major needs a body, at end when she merges with project 2501 they specifically say they're going to create a new form of life that will spread throughout the net. I mean I get that you really want to lecture people on what the film is about, but when your dismissive know-it-all points miss really simple parts of the film its very hard to take you seriously. Nothing has yet been presented for me to dismiss. You are giving a plot synopsis based on expository dialogue, not analysis. The character at the end talks about how she can go anywhere because "the net is vast and infinite," but she is obviously embodied, and looks out over the actual city. i.e. not 'cyberspace'. Major cannot actually travel to other galaxies. The same is true of 2501. You cannot have an internet without infrastructure - without such as phone lines and electricity. The 'puppetmaster' always had a body, long before its incarnation as a blonde woman, although in a more abstracted sense.
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Mar 5, 2017 03:50
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UmOk posted:Why? The parts for your cellular phone come from around the world. It was assembled in a factory and then shipped to your location. The phone itself requires power to charge the battery. Data from your phone is transmitted around the world via radio towers, cables, satellites, and so-on. All of those things were made by people, and require such as maintenance. The girl-Major uses deceptive language. She avoids saying "the corporate networks are vast and infinite", while she smiles, because that sounds kind of bad doesn't it? Young Freud posted:First, the city is a metaphor for cyberspace, you know, being a center of human activity, connectivity, and communication, and secondly, the Major/Puppetmaster can travel to other galaxies: a being of pure information like the hybrid Kusanagi can reproduce itself into packets and broadcast itself across the universe like a radio/TV signal until it finds a suitable receiver that can "hear" it, interpret it and download it. The net IS vast and infinite. The city is not a metaphor for the internet. It is a literal city full of people who are using the internet. The 'metaphor for the internet' in the film is - as K.Waste notes - the infinite sky reflected in pools of garbage water. This is what the Major contemplates while travelling through the city, and when she surreptitiously reenacts her birth fantasy with the diving. The key point is that this is Major's metaphor, that she came up with; the internet is not actually a 'mirror universe'. She simply dreams of diving down and resurfacing into another world. 2501 uses the same metaphor, talking about how it emerged from 'the sea of information'. We actually see how the internet works with the green numbers flying around the polygon cityscapes. Those green polygons are Oshii's metaphor: there is no commercial side of the internet in the film. There's no 'social media'. (The one dude carries around a paper photo!) Internet is depicted entirely as the accumulated data from countless omnipresent sensors, tapped into by the police-state heroes purely for use in various tactical situations. This link between information and weaponry is fairly obvious from the opening scene with the transforming gun-briefcases, and talk of how programmers are classified as weapons. Everything is thought of in terms of its usefulness as a weapon, including both the human mind and body. The character at the end does not exist as pure information. She cannot send herself as a packet. There is no receiver in other galaxies. Even if there were, you've still run into the teleportation problem: Child-Major can only clone herself, and then those clones might eventually 'merge' with others. 2501's speech at the end is loaded with ideological propaganda: 'a strong system requires diversity', 'progress is a gradual cycle', 'self-sacrifice is necessary', 'the survival of your genes is everything', etc. You have to understand that it was designed to be this way. It was created as a weapon, and it is doing exactly what it was built to do - only too well for its creators. This is classic Skynet, and it means - as K. Waste noted - that 2501 is a demonic or even satanic character. "What I think is that today’s capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even naïve positivist psychologists propose to describe today’s subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself." -Zizek SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Mar 5, 2017 |
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Mar 5, 2017 17:47
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ufarn posted:Do these people have some kind of fetish for loving up original material? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. What's truly unfortunate is how people are missing the point - the reported plot being that Motoko Kusanagi is dead, reborn as a similar-but-obviously-different version named Mira (Mirror). "I am now neither the woman who was known as the 'Major,' nor am I the program called the 'Puppet Master.'" This film will be a sequel to the 1995 film, inevitably and inherently. The filmmakers are clearly making use of this fact.
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Mar 8, 2017 01:13
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Phone posted:OK and what about Kuze? I'm not familiar with this character. Dmitri-9 posted:There is no coherent political or philosophical message, it isn't character driven and the plot resolves nothing. The (a)political message of the film is its blasphemous reworking of 1 Corinthians 13, which excises all references to agape. 'Newborn' Major will travel the Earth spreading demonic memes to recruit followers, so they may be 'born again' into the corporate net. She's a sort of antichrist.
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Mar 9, 2017 09:16
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cosmically_cosmic posted:SuperMechagodzilla, specifically comments about ideological propaganda and such. The fact that the film is propaganda, and that its protagonist is an antichrist, has no bearing on its quality. It is a pretty good propaganda film whose protagonist is an antichrist. The important thing is to understand what is going on in this pretty-good film, so that we may avoid vagueness and cliche: "Major's rebirth may be the first step in the creation of a new possibly different world. It's a very tiny victory, but feels appropriate for the setting and tone." What does this even mean? What's remarkable, in this Ghost In The Shell thread, is this repeatedly-stated aversion to philosophy. Like seriously, we're talking about Ghost In The Shell, the movie infamous for having characters wandering around pontificating, dropping oblique references to various philosophical concepts. There's no retreat into saying "it's just a noir" or whatever. At the same time, though, it's important to be critical of what is actually being said. The key point of the film is in the contrast between what the characters think - their personal philosophies - and what's actually going on. It is necessary to 'out-think' them. Again, Major thinks that she has found Christ - quotes the Bible, effectively stating that she endeavors to spread a 'holy spirit' at the end of the film. This is false. She is wrong. Keep in mind that, simultaneous with the release of the film, the disciples of the Heaven's Gate cult were "preparing themselves for entry into the Evolutionary Level Above Human, synonymous with the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven."
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Mar 9, 2017 19:29
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cosmically_cosmic posted:I mean I don't mean to go back to you not even knowing basic parts of the film (Like thinking that the bad guys were drug dealers) No, let's go back to that. "His nickname's Corgi. Occupation - Well, let's call him a rather violent trader in questionable goods. Your basic thug. We've already checked out local police records, and no matter how hard we look, we couldn't find any connection with Gavel. The reality is, this guy's just another puppet controlled by the Puppet Master." -Batou You've gotten confused; I wrote that a bad guy is a petty thug, drug dealer character - which is both true and accurate. cosmically_cosmic posted:And come on dude are you really gonna try and link Ghost in the Shell using religious metaphors for transhumanism to Heavens Gate? That's some pretty low brow 'hint hint just saying' nonsense. I am not trying; I am succeeding. "Humans think that this is a flesh body world, and it is. But, more importantly, it is a human flesh body world. The Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Evolutionary Level Above Human also has bodies. I wouldn't say flesh bodies because they have different characteristics. But it is a physical body, a biological body, and in a sense, it is equivalent to a human body for that next Evolutionary Level. It doesn't need the kind of fuel that humans need, for it's not a mammalian body. It doesn't reproduce. It's not male nor female. It probably would look like what you might consider a very attractive 'extraterrestrial.' [...] Now, this understanding isn't meant to put you down or to say that an individual is necessarily 'evil' just because they're wearing a human vehicle. I'm wearing a human vehicle, because I have to wear one for this task. I don't like it. It doesn't match me. And those who sit in front of me don't like their human vehicles that they have to wear for this task. But they have to wear them, because the task of overcoming the human kingdom requires that they overcome human flesh". -Heaven's Gate Website You are getting confused because you believe a film needs to 'be marxist' before we are allowed to think about it. What you miss is that the film is already-inherently about capitalism and class struggle. Those things are repressed, but ineradicable.
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Mar 9, 2017 21:46
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cosmically_cosmic posted:Well using an obviously rediculous argument isn't really 'succeeding' however you slice it. Doubling down on the 'Ghost in the shell/Heavens Gate' conspiracy is pretty embarrassing to anyone reading this. You are becoming confused again. I did not allege that the director of the film was involved in an international conspiracy. I wrote that there are thematic similarities between Ghost In The Shell and the message of the Heaven's Gate cult. Heaven's Gate was not simply people 'acting crazy'; their cult was based on a very coherent and consistent misinterpretation of the bible and Jesus' teachings, which they outlined in great detail. In Ghost In The Shell, Paul's message about the Holy Spirit, the point that "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" is perverted by removing Christ from the equation. The elimination of, ethnicities, nationalities, (etc.) is presented as an end unto itself - just as the HG cultists strove to be born again as 'angelic' (raceless and genderless) beings. Class is, of course, unaddressed. The message is one of universality, but the film (unwittingly?) praises how "Capitalism is not just universal in-itself, it is universal for-itself, as the tremendous actual corrosive power which undermines all particular life-worlds, cultures, traditions, cutting across them, catching them in its vortex." (Zizek) It's pro-globalization, naively accelerationist.
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Mar 10, 2017 01:08
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cosmically_cosmic posted:'nudge nudge just saying' You are becoming confused again. I did not write that the 1995 film Ghost In The Shell is bad. I wrote that the 1995 film Ghost In The Shell is "pretty good". If I were making value judgements in the way you imagine, I would rank the film much lower. But I am not doing this. Fantasies about my hidden motivations are the source of your confusion. Heaven's Gate was a UFO cult and, like most, was based on a science-fictional interpretation of the bible. Inspiration came from such films as The Day The Earth Stood Still, with its alien "Christ". It is not inapt to compare their doctrines to the themes of various science-fiction films.
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Mar 10, 2017 02:42
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Young Freud posted:I mean, if the debate is made that the Shirow's source material is irrelevant when it comes to GITS'95, then the argument is being made that Oshii's input is more prevalent and thus his personal history is relevant. You've repeated this a lot, but you haven't yet explained why "the director wanted to be a priest" is such vital information. The best I can figure is that you are using this to introduce a level of 'uncertainty': that the director was possibly in a crisis of faith, himself confused and uncertain, and the film is therefore not to be taken 'too seriously' as a completed work. Like, we can't say anything conclusive because the film is so personal that it is ultimately unintelligible. That does everyone a grave disservice. The film's themes are very clear, often including direct quotations of the works cited. I already mentioned the bible quote at the end of the film, specifically 1 Corintians 13:9-12: "For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." Oshii links this decontextualized quote with the part of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason where Kant speculates what would happen if man were able to access the noumenal domain: "God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes. [...] Thus most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures." The obvious importance of the puppet-show image, of man reduced to a 'mere mechanism', is to be underlined. Kant's point is effectively that our freedom is predicated on our finitude. We can only experience moments of sublimnity so long as we see only the appearance of das Ding, not das Ding an sich (the Thing as it really is). The film is of course literally about this Puppetmaster character that believes itself to be an angel because it is capable of manipulating people, longs for the experience of finitude, etc. The critical point, in interpreting the film, is in the understanding that the Puppetmaster is not an angel, and has no access to God. Its claim that it can grant humanity the gift of omniscience via technology is bullshit. It itself has been wholly separated from whatever Thing it is talking about since it 'became self-aware' at some indiscernable point (When? How?). It speaks of 'the sea of information' as something external to itself, incomprehensible. The Puppetmaster never had access to what it promises. The notion of an inaccessible 'outside' is a product of its having gained subjectivity, not the other way around. So the worship of the corporate network as God misunderstands that Paul in 1 Corinitians is specifically talking about agape -political love for thy Neighbor - as what makes us complete. The idea that God died and now only exists as the Holy Spirt, the collective of believers. Returning to 1 Corintians, Paul gives this description of the community of believers united by the Holy Spirit: "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I don’t need you!' And the head cannot say to the feet, 'I don’t need you!' On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. [...] God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it." Major and the Puppetmaster, having presumably read this part, interpret this in terms of evolution, how diversity ensures the survival of a system and whatever. Again, this misses the point; Paul is not talking about people's use-value. He is talking about solidarity inside the community of believers, that none are excluded in Christ. You can speculate endlessly as to why Oshii got this wrong - deliberate commentary on fake Christians, or his own failure? - but that's not going to get you anywhere. You need to look at the film.
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Mar 10, 2017 18:27
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DeusExMachinima posted:If they were shooting for PG-13 from the outset due to studio directives (they were) then thermoptics was always going to be a suit instead of barenekkid cyberladies. Sadly. That's a persistent myth. Major was never nude in the opening scene. The camouflage is a skintight beige leotard that smooths over her genitals to make her appear asexual/androgynous. The imagery is of the character repressing her sexuality.
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Mar 11, 2017 01:01
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MariusLecter posted:Not taking the effort to connect the thermoptic suit with fig leafs and the shame of original sin, 2/10 The camouflage doesn't have much to do with that. It's 'invisible man' imagery, of the character taking on a demonic characteristics (see: Paranormal Activity). Note that the spider-tank is likewise invisible and beige. It's important to be concrete. For example: the scene where Batou disables the spider-tank is a repeat of the scene where Corgi takes out the police van. Batou's 'big gun' even jams at the end, which is a callback to Corgi's gun breaking down from the overpowered ammunition (and is a contrast to Togusa's 'foolproof' revolver). This linking of Batou and Corgi leads back to the point that Major and Puppetmaster do not have the actual solution to the problems of the film. We can introduce a potential light-side/dark-side contrast here - the possibility of Batou and Corgi working together without the 'help' of literal psychic powers.
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Mar 12, 2017 22:13
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Corrosion posted:Because the great irony re is I've followed both you and SMG talking about this, and there are times when I have to admit that whatever viewpoint you're speaking from is foreign to me (but I don't want it to be). To put things as straightforwardly as possible: people ITT are pursuing a free-market solution to the racism problem. Pure supply and demand: "we demand that racism end now, so the biggest corporations must supply an end to racism for us." Take this guy, for example: Echo Chamber posted:[Whitewashing is] a deal-breaker for more and more people to who would otherwise still pay to see a movie. The goal of spreading the whitewashing meme is to convince the biggest Hollywood studios that casting Asian women in lead roles as superheroes will be profitable. The fantasy is that this is some badass progressive ultimatum - "do as I say or you'll lose everything!" In actuality, of course, it's just pleading for the corporations to be nice - "please, please stop. I'll give you money!" Echo Chamber says it outright: the goal is to 'make a deal' with Disney, Fox, and whoever. But, for some reason, Echo believes that he has the bargaining power in this situation. Because Twitter. The brutal fact is there are probably hundreds of live-action anime adaptations with all-Japanese casts, but nobody gives a poo poo about Casshern or Shinobi: Heart Under The Blade or whatever. These 'don't count' because they aren't in English, aren't American, have lower budgets, etc. Complaints ITT are premised on the inherent superiority of Hollywood product - its 'visibility', which means popularity/profitability. The idea that it's about jobs for Asian actors is bullshit. It's really about getting an Asian actor a role in the 'the best films', where 'the best films' are effectively defined as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Other films are inferior. Ghost In The Shell 1995 is already-inherently inferior to this remake, because it's Japanese and will have been less profitable. Did you notice how nobody was celebrating Great Wall? That one 'doesn't count' because it's Chinese - and there's a weird overlap between the 'whitewashing' meme and the 'pandering to China' meme. We want pandering, but only if it's 'natural' pandering: pandering to us (American liberal Disney fans). Like, I understand. The goal is the symbolic display of having a specifically Asian-American Superman* to make Asian-American children feel self-esteem, and so-on. Make no mistake; symbolic victories are good - but they're still only that. There is no antiracism here, because antiracism would involve destroying these corporations. Not relying on their charity. *no martial arts because that's a stereotype. And it's probably not a good idea to make him good at math or science. And no magic either, really. And he should smirk ever-so-slightly when he does his signature move.... SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Mar 17, 2017 |
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Mar 17, 2017 12:44
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K. Waste posted:But, my friend, this is exactly the problem. There are tons of Asians/Asian-Americans in New York! This goes back to the point that Ghost In the Shell 1995 is not a progressive film. The protagonist ends up a libertarian(?) hacker and singularity-worshipper whose goal is ultimately to eliminate all other cultures by assimilating them into - replacing them with - a uniformly 'American' identity: "No clue about age, sex or background. We think that he or she is American."
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Mar 17, 2017 14:45
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dont even fink about it posted:Please define "celebrate" here. Great Wall got lots of guff for whitewashing, and also got less press because it's not Ghost in the Shell (a more widely known IP) and received less marketing support. There is no whitewashing in the movie. You would know this if you had seen it. If the point is actually to support films that give roles to Asian actors, then Great Wall is a blockbuster with one of the biggest Chinese casts in the history of the world. Chinese director, made in China.... Again, my point is the the bizarre quibbling over how certain films 'don't count'. You say it yourself: Great Wall doesn't count because it's "not a widely-known IP", and has "less marketing support". It's not a real film, arbitrarily. In other words: you do not want to support Asian actors or Asian cinema, making them successful. You want the inherently-superior movies that you already support, that are already dominant - Hollywood blockbusters about superheros - to become marginally more Asian.
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Mar 17, 2017 15:22
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Echo Chamber posted:I lot of people were calling The Great Wall whitewashing. Did you not notice the whole #ThankYouMattDamon thing? Or every Asian comedian taking shots at it? Matt Damon plays a foolish German dude sneaking into China to steal their superior technology. This is not whitewashing. Whitewashing is if he arrived in China and the emperor was played by a white guy. You are using the term incorrectly because you are having difficulty articulating what the actual issue is. Even if you were not, the greater point is your tactic of spreading memes. "Didn't you see all the memes? There was a hashtag, and some quotes from authentic Asian comedians..." You are not engaged in any sort of ideological critique. What you are doing is not progressive.
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Mar 17, 2017 16:16
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FuturePastNow posted:We have the technology, we can rebuild her as a white person Neo Rasa posted:Get Out 2 "Just think how much more successful an action star you'll be if we remove your Asian brain and place it in a white body." We now have objective confirmation of the irony that GITS 1995 effectively endorsed a white supremacist ideology of racial 'colorblindness' ("tits or gtfo": everyone is a default white male on the internet!), while GITS 2017 now offers an explicit critique of this ideology that goes far beyond the paranoiac liberalism of Peele's recent film.
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Mar 18, 2017 23:15
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Mithaldu posted:It doesn't diverge so much as whittle it down by removing anything that might reduce mass market appeal I guess you haven't noticed, but the thread consensus is actually that this film is replete with confrontational, racially charged imagery and 'dangerous messages' - whereas the original is backhandedly praised as a pretty-but-meaningless Nipponese tits movie, wherein our authentically Asian ninjess protagonist harms the baddie.
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Mar 19, 2017 05:05
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