He did, very accurately and concisely.
That is the whole essential answer right there. The links (which I snipped out here) are just support and elaboration on why, and how this works.
After considering it for a long time, I didn’t want to post anything. However, it’s because this discussion is so serious and goes to issues very central to the cultural conflicts of the times, such that it really belongs in Great Debates. However, to contribute something and lighten the mood:
I think we should we be happy that people such as Mrs. Swinton get roles in Hollywood. I know that the creators of Technological Intelligence Learning Digital Acting would be proud to know how far their creation has come. We should all congratulate T.I.L.D.A on her accomplishments and developing her Positronic neural net to portray emotions at least some of the time. Personally, I know many wanted Mrs. Swinton to star in Ghost in the Shell, but it’s likely that she didn’t want to be typecast as a Cyborg-American. I’m certain that once the Institute takes over the world with their unstoppable army of Synthetic Life Forms, TILDA will support and champion the cause of Organic Rights.
In all seriousness, I’m a huge fan of Tilda Swinton, and realistically, she’s actually a strong choice to play The Ancient One. She often brings a sense of being slightly alien or otherworldy, even in relatively mundane roles, that works very well. I was surprised at first, but overall she very likely brings a strong personality that hopefully will have ample screetime. Now, if Mako was still with us, he’d be my top pick. Also, we could then pretend that this was in-continuity with Conan the Barbarian, and he had been the mystic defender of Earth for the last three thousand years or so.
Re: Tilda Swinton, I actually think they were trying to avoid the ‘wise, mysterious, mystical Asian’ stereotype which would’ve potentially been problematic for them.
I think everyone basically knows that when it comes to such rare and elite prestigious jobs with such HUGE HUGE numbers of highly qualified candidates, like “starring role in blockbuster movie” or “US Supreme Court justice”, etc., there’s not really any such thing as “the single one best candidate” determined solely by meritocratic standards.
When there are so many elite candidates with about equal levels of talent and credentials eligible for one super-elite job, the choice among them is made not by trying to estimate relatively tiny amounts of difference in ability, but rather by considering other characteristics, such as who’s a bigger star or will draw in more of a particular audience demographic.
Multiple other people have gotten the idea. The fact that you have not has nothing to do with his skillset, and has everything to do with your unwillingness to listen. It’s not remotely complicated.
It’s just something for you to jump on so you can dismiss him, since you lack any actual counterargument. You’re criticizing the form as a way to discount the content.
I remember hearing from a friend that there was a long tradition in anime to use different hair color on characters just to distinguish between the characters, but I don’t know how true that is.
As someone who has no interest in anime, I’ll check out this movie with Scarlett Johansson because I like Scarlett Johansson specifically. If it were some unknown Japanese actress, I wouldn’t.
Of course, I won’t actually pay money for it either way. With Johansson as the lead I’ll watch it on HBO or Netflix or whatever.
Someone asked why isn’t a Japanese studio making this picture. This seems like a fair question to me. Why isn’t a Japanese studio making it? Why is it up to an American studio to make the movie with a Japanese lead?
Lucy was a smashing success. The only time I’ve ever seen anyone say it was a flop is you, just now. This isn’t even your central point, so best to just let it go.
For a comparison, I did see Kite at some point on cable, and I found it just barely tolerable.
This seems to be an example of making an anime with an unknown actress as the lead, and it bombed miserably. Not half-a-billion “flop” like Lucy; a real, legitimate hardcore bomb of only generating half a million total, worldwide. And that’s when the unknown lead is a pretty white girl from southern California.
If I were investing millions of dollars of my own money in this project, I would absolutely prefer Scarlett Johansson as the lead to someone like, say, Kimiko Glenn.
I’ve heard that it’s because the original character is Tibetian, and they want to sell the movie in China (she’s also Nepalese instead). As you can imagine, this majorly upsets one blogger I saw who’s a Tibetian immigrant whose dad loved Dr. Strange BECAUSE of the Tibetian connection.
Oh, and there’s a report (which the studio is denying, but few seem to believe them) that there were experiments in CGI to make Johanssen look more Asian.
I teach for a living. Even from my seventh graders, I do not accept “because <link>” as an answer. All “because <link>” shows is that somebody, somewhere on the web said something related to the topic. It shows no actual depth of knowledge or understanding from the guy who posts “because <link>.” A statement like
sounds like the person making that statement is claiming an a true understanding of how Japanese animation represents people. “Because <link>” doesn’t rate as understanding at all. It rates as “I ran a google search and this is a hit that had some key words I was skimming for.”
Yeah. It’s a side issue so I’ll concede that I was probably wrong. My perception of the film’s reputation among Hollywood types was that it was disappointing, but perception isn’t always reality. Like you said it’s not really the point and not something I want to go the the mat about.
One of my two biggest complaints about Starship Troopers is the casting of Van Dien, I’ve been told repeatedly it’s not important that Rico is Filipino. To me it’s a defining characteristic of the character (apologies for the repetition) but apparently to many people it doesn’t matter.
See, in the case of that particular version of that movie I would say it’s important that someone who looks Aryan is cast in that role. But that movie isn’t really an adaptation of the book so much as it is using the book as source material to tell a totally different allegorical story about the creep of fascism in modern society. You can’t have Latino Nazis without undermining your allegory.
If there is a good reason for it I’m not opposed to changing race. That movie was a hot mess but there was a reason. 99% of the time there isnt a reason other than money.
Financial success. Critical flop. Two different metrics. And I suspect the star was the main reason a critical flop was a financial success.
I’d much rather they cast an Asian actress than Ms Scarlet but it’s not my money on the line (and I’m unlikely to see it either way).
Not to mention that a big point of Rico being Filipino in the book was that it wasn’t obvious to the reader that he was unless they were actually paying attention. He’s a brave paratrooper type who skyrockets through the ranks to become a company commander and a hero of humanity. Obviously he’s a ruggedly handsom Anglo-Ameri- hold the phone a second, did you say he speaks Tagalog?
The SST film did subtle surprisingly well (hiding the feather behind the sledgehammer and all), but this style of subtlety just wouldn’t fit the medium nor the message the director was trying to work with (which, as you noted, was not the same message Heinlein was working with).
And as a teacher, would you accept a student asking you for a precise repeat of something you’ve already written on the board for everyone to see, like post #70?
As for the tone of my first post? I wasn’t claiming “true understanding” - just enough understanding to know that anime conventions are not the same as Western racial markers. I could do that by listing the myriad non-black-haired, green-or-blue-eyed, pale-skinned characters who are clearly Japanese (or, in the case of e.g. Sailor Moon, happily live in a Japanese family with a Japanese name without anyone remarking on it even though they’re actually aliens/demons/robots) - the magic girl genre alone would keep me typing all day. Or, I could just link to the Kotaku discussions on this very topic - because talking anime is one large part of what they do
And anyway, why on earth would I waste my time doing that work for someone as outright hostile as you were in your first post to me? I mean, “nerdsplain”:rolleyes:? You expect me to care what you think after that?
Note that you haven’t said squat to actually refute those links, or replied to the rebuttal to your ridiculous “But what about aliens and elves!” argument. Nope, just tone policing. Why don’t you open a pit thread, if my tone offends you so much?
Now excuse me, got preening to do…
Shrug, I don’t start with the assumption that the Hero, in order to be the Hero, must be a WASP, but then, several of my favorite authors didn’t write in English.
I think it has a lot to do with the audience’s own background and what they know of the author’s. If I (a fairly white-bread Hispanic Roman Catholic American) read a book written by a gentleman with a name like “Robert Heinlein”, I will likely presume a character is going to be a white American unless given reason to believe otherwise, because to me, that’s sort of the default setting, for better or for worse.
If I read a similar book by a guy named Emilio Aguinaldo, I might not make the same assumptions. If I were more familiar with Filipinos, the Tagalog line would have been a neon sign in a moonless sky telling me that Rico is very likely either Filipino or Filipino-American. A lot of what an audience takes away from a work includes what they brought into it.
And my point stating my own pet peeve with Rico’s whitewashing is, if it’s ok for the ST movie to have very little relationship to the Heinlein story, why can’t the same be ok for Ghost? Maybe they’re not trying to tell the same story, just a story with some names in common (or, as in the case of a protagonist who can’t even pronounce his own name, some similar names). Would that be wrong?
I can think of very few times when white people are absolutely required to tell a story. Starship Troopers the movie happened to be one of them BECAUSE they were trying to draw parallels to Nazis. Maybe this will be too. We clearly are all using our jump to conclusions mat pretty heavily. But it’s a fairly safe to say we aren’t jumping to the wrong conclusions.