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Bugblatter posted:As someone who's lived in East Asia for several years, spent a lot of time in HK and a fair bit of time in different parts of Japan, it's really hard for me not to think of the city as Hong Kong and harder to think of it as Japan. Aside from a lot of notable landmarks being represented, and the distinctive skyline and harbor views being prominently displayed, there's a lot of little cultural things that are just culturally distinctive to Hong Kong, or distinctively not Japanese. The two most prominent being the graveyard and street signage. The iconic HK style graveyard could be a limitation of shooting in Hong Kong, but the signage leaning heavily toward chinese characters, Korean, and English with almost no Japanese, like in HK, as opposed to being primarily Japanese and Chinese forms as in Japan is an odd choice. Weirdly enough, Chinese street signs are often included in scifi movies to show how far society has changed and incorporated other cultures and to give a sense of otherness to the settings. Los Angeles in Blade Runner had a ton of chinese signs all over the place, for example. Gibson's Neuromancer was set in Japan but the first US hardcover edition had Chinese street signs in the cover art:  I also remember an interview with some Japanese movie set designer on a scifi movie set some time in the future and he talked about deliberately changing most of the signs to Chinese so there was a subtle sense that the language had evolved and changed but I can't remember which film that was. Also Hong Kong was the perfect setting for a futuristic dystopia: a filthy crowded city where everything was piled on top of everything else and everyone was crammed together with a suffocating claustrophobic sense caused by every available surface being covered in signs and ducts and railings and tons of hastily assembled and poorly maintained modern tech slapped on top of a crumbling ancient infrastructure. There's a whole bunch of essays about how Hong Kong's aesthetic influence ran right through the entire cyberpunk genre.
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Apr 8, 2017 17:25
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FuturePastNow posted:Also Firefly/Serenity, background signs a mix of English and Chinese and the occasional Chinese swear word tossed in. There's a bunch of sites that say that this graffiti in Blade Runner says "Americans are bad people" and "The future belongs to the Chinese"  ... but apparently that's not correct and the words are just meaningless gibberish. Dang. Schwarzwald posted:I have never seen that book cover before, and I feel that I have been deprived. Here's the full wraparound art: 
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Apr 8, 2017 18:13
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K. Waste posted:Kind of like that Chinese tattoo urban legend, except now instead of actually making fun of complacent white people, it's fans who desperately want to believe the filmmakers weren't complacent white people. I think the implication was that the filmmakers were complacent white people who hired some Chinese guys to paint hanzi all over their set and weren't aware of what they actually wrote, but it turns out they were just complacent white people who got an intern to look up a bunch of Chinese symbols and paint them everywhere in random order. And they sure went to town: 
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Apr 8, 2017 18:33
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Donnerberg posted:I might have parts of it confused with Re:Zero since they're kind of the same premise, but I think it went into how psychologically damaged Cage would get from the constant respawning as opposed to how Tom Cruise rolls with it and becomes a better man in the movie. Apart from that, I think Edge of Tomorrow was a far more fun version of that story. He gets pretty depressed and downbeat about halfway through. Not as much as Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day but still, it clearly sucked a lot for quite some time before he found his mojo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lT0tbFXD9w Snowglobe of Doom fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Apr 11, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 12:51
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It must be a godammned nightmare doing an adaptation and finding a balance between making the text novel and fresh and constructing a space within it where you can express yourself artistically but not going so far as to lose those aspects that made the original so memorable. Especially if the project is being pushed by producers and you only get called in to work on one aspect or one stage of the production. It must especially suck for those writers who get called in to make another pass at a script knowing that several guys have already tried and failed and no matter how much blood sweat and tears they put into their version of the script it's also likely to get dumped. .... and then there's projects like I, Robot which started out as a totally unrelated scifi murder mystery but then the studio got the licence to Asimov's books and went "Oh, just change the title and make a few nods to the books if you can and we'll just say that it was 'inspired' by Asimov's work." And then they hired Will Smith to star in it so they brought in a new scriptwriter to rewrite it to suit him and the guy who originally came up with the script and developed it for years and years with several studios ended up with just a "screen story by" credit, and the original idea he came up with a decade before the movie came out never got made.
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Apr 12, 2017 15:38
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WMain00 posted:Its worldwide total is $152.1 million. Its made its money back from production. A sequel might be on the cards. It was co-produced by Shanghai Film Group and Huahua Media so the international box office counts somewhat more than it used to but it doesn't seem to be doing that well in China so I don't know if they'd really be that happy with how it's tracking. It's been out in Japan for nearly 2 weeks but it's made less than $4 million there so they clearly haven't flocked to see it.
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Apr 18, 2017 17:09
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FuturePastNow posted:at least Boss Baby isn't a sequel or a remake It's a (loose) adaptation of a children's book
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Apr 20, 2017 21:41
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At one point the American live action remake of Akira was going to change Tetsuo's name to Travis. Starring Chris Evan and Joseph Gordon-Levitt! Panfilo posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jafd97yJFOI Snowglobe of Doom fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 19:00
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Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.
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Macarius Wrench posted:Would having an Asian actress have made this film better Hmmm let's find out /watches 1995 film Yeah it's better  Mithaldu posted:Iron Fist is an irredeemably dumbass show, but how is it whitewashing? The Netflix show and the original comics both tie in to the 'White saviour' theme where all these foreign dudes need a white dude to come along and show them how to really master their cultural practices. There's a long history of that kind of thing in literature and there's a poo poo ton of American films where a white martial arts guy uses his superior skills to beat the evil Asian martial arts guys. They even used to brag about the cultural appropriation on the movie posters. 
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Apr 23, 2017 15:56
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Echo Chamber posted:I'd argue that whitewashing is also symptomatic of people not caring to make their product good. Yes, there are "whitewashed" things that are technically decent or occasionally good. But don't be surprised if something's bad if the people making it are just cashing their checks. We should really, really disengage discussion about whitewashing from discussions about quality. Whitewashing would still be problematic even if the show/movie was amazingly good and popular.
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Apr 23, 2017 17:57
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Taintrunner posted:A Fistful of Dollars is a remake of the Samurai film Yojimbo, retold in an American Wild West setting .... and as I mentioned in the other thread, Kurosawa has gone on record saying that he lifted a whole bunch of Yojimbo from Dashiell Hammett novels which means that A Fistful of Dollars is pretty much re-Westernizing the material.
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Apr 23, 2017 21:51
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Echo Chamber posted:Getting back to GITS, getting a white person to play the lead role is an intentional decision made in a climate where Hollywood knew its casting choice will be scrutinized. The film itself exercises gymnastics to justify this decision. People were pointing out the whitewashing from the minute Scarlett Johansson was announced for the role so Paramount had been trying to figure out a fix for that right from the get go. There were also really persistent rumours that they commissioned some visual effects tests to make Johansson look more Asian but I guess we'll never know if they actully did unless someone hacks their emails. Another issue here is that someone higher up in the chain might have greenlit the project on the proviso that they attach a big star like Johansson as lead so it could have been the case that the filmmakers were stuck with the whitewashing and had to make do.
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Apr 25, 2017 05:05
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Back when this film opened opposite Boss Baby and stumbled right out of the gate (Boss Baby brought in more than double the box office that opening weekend) the trade papers were predicting that thanks to the huge advertising campaign it would lose between $60m to $100m based on a global B.O. projection of $200m ($50m domestic, $150m international). Well it did way worse than that, bringing in a global BO of $166m ($40m domestic, $126m international). It bombed haaaard. I guess we shouldn't be holding our breath for a sequel.
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May 4, 2017 13:21
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Sir Kodiak posted:Eh, the tragedy of this movie is that it's so obviously made with care. They made some bad decisions, but nothing in the movie is lazy. I think the way they decided to end the film was creatively lazy. Some guy was talking about how he went to an early test screening and it had an ending which was pretty much the same as the 95 film but apparently test audiences weren't fond of it so the it looks like the producers went "Welp, chuck out all that touchy feely crap, just shoot all the bad guys and have the Major decide she doesn't care that she was kidnapped and brainwashed and her boyfriend was turned into a crazed frankenstein monster and she actually likes being a kickass robot assassin CUT TO BLACK, ROLL CREDITS" Sir Kodiak posted:The production design alone speaks to the attention to detail. There's a whole bunch of stories of technical/design staff pouring hundreds of manhours of work into films only to have it all thrown away on a whim by the higher ups, like the infamous story of the team of illustrators creating aliens for the doomed Superman Lives! production only to have the producer wander through with his family and let his kids pick the designs they liked and the rest were rejected.
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May 5, 2017 15:42
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Thundercracker posted:I can absolutely believe that a white washing controversy can bomb a movie. Especially a new franchise in this over saturated market. Think of how Get Out was such a hit because of word of mouth and think pieces that said it was was a must see. And now think of how a whitewashing controversy is the exact opposite of hype. Its almost like having to accept a political angle to go see the movie even if one doesn't exist. Even if people didn't care about or even understand whatever was causing the blowback it would still colour their perception of the film if they hadn't already decided to go see it. If all you knew about it was that it's some futuristic scifi movie with robots and it apparently has a lovely attitude towards minorities that'd be enough for a lot of people to give it a miss, and most of the people who didn't care whether anyone was offended probably aren't the kind of people who'd be interested in an adaptation of a foreign cartoon that wasn't completely in English. Also people wouldn't be able to post cinema selfies saying "Catching GitS with my crew!  " without risking criticism and starting arguments and we really, really shouldn't underestimate how much that would influence a lot of people's decisions.
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May 24, 2017 00:25
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Tias posted:I never quite supported the whitewashing controversy anyway, she's not clearly asian in the anime and the canon states that her name is fake( since it's very unlikely a Japanese family would be named 'Kusanagi') That's not actually all that relevant to the people who were actively campaigning against the film. The Netflix series Iron Fist had a similar whitewashing controversy and Danny Rand was always 100% not Asian in the comics. Young Freud posted:I think that the marketing team didn't know how to both approach the material and the controversy. You can see it how they tried to turn the movie into some sort of "woke" feminist answer to action films and science fiction with the "I Am Major" campaign, which ultimately backfired because the people they're trying to appeal to were already well-versed with the whitewashing fiasco and hijacked the campaign. The DJ Aoki thing didn't help either. I've been trying to think of how they might have headed off the controversy and at least quieted down the people being so vocal about it, if not bring them back on board. At the very least they needed Johansson and a Japanese co-star from the film to really aggressively take on the charge and say "No, we were aware of the issue right from the start, we've got this" but they were pretty timid in addressing it. She addresses it 50 seconds into this interview: https://twitter.com/GMA/status/846705727750135809 Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. She talks about how their portrayal of the character is supposed to be identity-less and that she wouldn't try to portray a character of a different race which doesn't actually answer the question that the interviewer put to her. Finishing up with "Hopefully any questions that come up will be answered when audiences see the film" was also a giant cop out. Edit: I also meant to say that I can also totally understand why trying to ride it out after making minimal lip service to the issue was preferable to starting a twitter war with the tumblrverse. If I was in Johansson's shoes I sure wouldn't want to become the Hollywood spokesperson in the whitewashing debate Snowglobe of Doom fucked around with this message at 13:56 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 13:52
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Tias posted:others thought her brain was actually Japanese and placing her in a white chassis is whitewashing. Yeah that's actually what happened in the movie. The cybernetics company that created her kidnapped her, cracked her skull open and scooped out her brain, plonked it into a robot body, wiped her memories and gave her a completely new identity where she had a different name ('Mira Killian' because she's their 'miracle', get it?) and even a different race. Her character arc is that she slowly discovers that the bad guys whitewashed her both figuratively and literally (part of the cybernetic process is coating the cybernetic body in a white liquid which is then blown away to reveal her new pink artificial skin underneath) and erased her racial identity. Of course this is presented as a terrible crime in the movie and all the people responsible for it are killed as a result which the filmmakers probably thought was a great way to address the issue and solve any remaining difficulties over racial appropriation, which I guess is why Scarlett Johansson was on the one hand telling people that the movie would answer all their questions but on the other hand couldn't elaborate because they didn't want to give away the ending of the movie. The problem is that the film's handling of the issue was lovely and awkward and actually erases the Major's original identity a second time by choosing not to show her face in flashbacks ( at least, not clearly) or even show an old photo of her when the Major visits her mother. Her original identity is reduced to a macguffin which is discarded again when it's no longer needed to push the plot forwards and she goes back to using the name Major pretty much immediately. The evil characters in the film didn't give a poo poo about her original racial identity but the film itself also didn't really give a poo poo.
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May 24, 2017 17:42
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Tenzarin posted:Boss Baby getting a sequel, will Paramount make a Ghost in the Shell sequel to show them up? Boss Baby made nearly half a billion dollars worldwide, almost three times as much as Ghost In The Shell. It was hugely popular.
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May 30, 2017 17:38
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Alan_Shore posted:I don't know why they made it so that she had a human brain in a robot body, not a human mind in a robot brain. Completely misses the point of the original. Too complex for audiences or something? I'm pretty sure that the cyberbrains in the original are human brains encased in a synthetic machine/computer interface, part of their brain might be replaced with neurocircuitry but not all of it. In the '95 animated film the Major's brain was shown to be completely encased when it was put inside her synthetic body but in the live action movie they changed the cyberbrain design so that the living human brain inside it was still visible, no doubt because they thought the audiences needed it spelled out clearer.
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Jul 14, 2017 18:53
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starkebn posted:Tried to watch this yesterday and couldn't get all the way through. The only scene I thought was any good was when the Major found Kuze the first time. Every other scene aped something from previous media but had no idea what made those scenes any good. Why do so many scripts feel the need to explain everything through origin stories and explanations of everything? The original film starts basically "in media res" and apart from the non-dialogue body construction sequence during the titles there is no other exposition about the characters or the setting until we learn a little about the non cybered member of the team. We see the characters, immediately identify them through tropes and cliches and understand what's happening intrinsically. Case in point Batou's eyes. This makes me think of Patton Oswalt's diatribe about the Star Wars prequels. A lot of people don't give a poo poo about Darth Vader as a kid, they care about Darth Vader as shown in the original films. It's not always interesting to show how characters we like came to be how they are, we just like them how they are. The 95 film asked plenty of interesting questions without trying to shoehorn some pity-story about evil villain CEOs loving over the little people. Yeah this film felt more like a prequel to the '95 film since the characters are way less experienced and sure of themselves at the start of the film but by the end of the film they're pretty close to the '95 characters, but then they also incorporated and re-imagined a whole bunch of scenes from the original film. The futuristic aspects of the setting were also ratcheted back a few steps in comparison to the original where full body cybernetics were commonplace but here the Major is the first person known to go through the process. It leans really hard on the scifi imagery and concepts of the original but they were clearly leery about chucking the audience in the deep end and assuming they'll catch up (even though the original dived right into those scifi concepts more than 2 decades ago before this version and most of them are pretty commonplace in speculative fiction these days) so they decided to show the Major's 'birth' and walk the audience through everything. The film as disappointingly timid.
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Jul 30, 2017 13:09
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And More posted:Who says an adaptation has to be faithful? Maybe this remake likes to bang loads of other movies that you don't even know about. Actually it's the other way around, it was the '95 film that got banged by loads of other movies
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Aug 5, 2017 12:31
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Snak posted:I really didn't like how in the 2017 film, they showed the villain taking direct control of the spider tank. In the original, it's one piece of military hardware against another. Since a central question for The Major is whether she's really a person or just a weapon, the battle in the original movie is framed as conflict between a completely soulless weapon, and one who's wondering if she is. When the spider tank's guns wipe out the mural of the tree of life, it represents erasure of origin, and the idea that the origin of The Major doesn't matter, because she can choose what she wants to be. It doesn't matter where she or the puppet master came from, because they choose a new destiny. Also in the '95 film the Puppetmaster's stooge in the garbage truck does his bidding because his memories have been ghosthacked and he thinks his actions are going to help him be reunited with a daughter who never actually existed. His brain has been swiss-cheesed but he's still acting independently, happy to go along with the plan. When the truth of the matter is revealed and we discover that the Puppetmaster mindraped a random innocent citizen just so he'd perform a menial task it's horrific. Corgi (the guy the Major fights in the canal) had also been ghosthacked but he turns out to have been a minor thug who was prone to violence already. In the '17 film Kuze just takes control of the bodies of the garbage collectors and operates them remotely like they're characters in a video game, turning them into murderous automatons against their will. Corgi and the garbage truck driver are rolled into the same character. It's a heck of a lot blunter than the '95 version and there's no longer any real reason for Kuze to have given the garbage collector all those false memories, especially since they removed the scene where they explain to the driver that his original memory may never be restored and he'll probably experience residual simulations for some time and instead added that to the Major's character arc. Also Section 9 beat the poo poo out of and then aggressively interrogate an innocent man and then barely react when Kuze forces him to commit suicide as opposed to the '95 film where they gently question him with pity and empathy and then he's presumably left to pick up the pieces of his ruined life.
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Aug 12, 2017 11:24
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