I’m just a movie watcher. Why should I care so much whether asian actresses are given a chance? Sure it’s annoying for some asian actresses, but other asians starve to death every day. I don’t see why I (or anyone) should focus so much energy on this relatively mild injustice.
What I care about, on the other hand, is the quality and authenticity of the movie. And to me, Scarlett seems like a good choice. She has played similar roles, she is a good actress, and she sort of looks like the character(!), especially the body shape. I don’t recall the movie that well, but I don’t think it was vital to the story that it takes place in Japan. If it did, a non-Japanese actor would feel inauthentic, but I don’t think that will be a problem.
Heinlein pulled a similar trick in Tunnel in the Sky: There are subtle hints that the main character is black, but he didn’t make a big deal of it. Though I actually picked up on those subtle hints, and interpreted them differently, as meaning that race just wasn’t relevant to the character at all.
Same here, no one cares about my money either, but I’m not paying for that shit. And I like ScarJo. I just think it’s damn unfair that she got this role.
Not at all. The best actress out of all of humanity is likely going to be better than the best actress out of a limited subset of humanity. And even if the best happens to be white, the same probably won’t be true of, say, the top ten.
They should cast Don Cheadle as Bond so he can do a British accent again.
I could see Idris Elba as Bond, but I hope it never happens. The Bond franchise was played out in Roger Moore’s day. He would have to turn down a lot of good work to make it happen.
As for Ghost in the Shell, what about the rest of the cast? I see other white actors…are their roles also presumably Japanese?
Some of them are. Not a lot of the actors are credited with specific roles, there.
Everyone in Section 9 is certainly Japanese in descent (Batou looks less so, but he’s got a Japanese name, Paz has a non-Japanese name, but looks very Asian, everybody else is a hit on both counts), but only the Major, Batou and Aramaki have specific actors attached, and Aramaki is at least played by a Japanese actor.
Hideo Kuze is also certainly Japanese, and a white actor is credited.
It’s been a decade or so since I read the book, do they actually specify that he’s from the PI? Because it’s at least possible he’s a Filipino-American. And how much karate do they do in the Philippines anyways?
It’s not explicitly contradicted for most characters (the Major certainly isn’t unless her background is completely a lie), but the only hint of it for anyone is a couple characters have names that don’t exist in the real world (but that’s a different situation).
In the movie Johnny Rico is Argentinian (I’m from Buenos Aires and i say kill them all!) and his tan made him darker than most of my Argentinian friends.
As I talk about in the rest of my post, this is what I think we should care about. (But I think that Scarlett is a good choice for this particular movie.)
Bit of a tangent, but I once attended a panel featuring Neil Gaiman where he talked about his then-new novel Anansi Boys, in which the protagonist and many of the major characters are black. He said he’d heard from a number of readers who obviously hadn’t picked up on this at all. Gaiman said it had seemed awkward and unrealistic when writing from the perspective of a black character to have him thinking “Yup, I’m still black” or something, but that since it’s a major part of the plot (and even revealed in the title) that this character is the son of a West African god then he hadn’t thought there was any ambiguity as to his race. But he said apparently many people assume that white author = white protagonist.
And he’s also told of movie (or TV?) producers wanting to adapt the book for the screen, but oh, just with this one minor change, we’re going to make the main character white, no problem right?
How many movies have to be made like this before Hollywood realize this schtick has a bad ROI?
How well did Gods of Egypt do? The Last Airbender? Exodus? We were told that white actors were better money-making prospects for these films, but they all did pretty crappily at the box office. So much so you have to wonder if the producers are kicking themselves for hiring expensive ass Christian Bale when a cheaper actor of browner hue would’ve worked just as well.
For a movie like Ghost, if they were going to cast a white woman as the lead, it would have been better to just set the damn thing in the States. Turn it into an American adaption of a Japanese story and you’ll attract both anime fans and those who haven’t a clue about anime. But by keeping it a Japanese story but one that oddly stars a white person, you will alienate strangers to anime who are biased against any movie set in a foreign place and you will alienate Asians and others (a potentially huge viewer block if you consider the international audience) who will see this as just one more instance of white folks reservingthe spotlight for themselves. Which leaves as the primary audience anime afficianados who are either indifferent to race or assume anime characters are all white anyway. How many people fall in this category? Probably not anywhere close to the number of Asian viewers alone (foreign and abroad) who will boycott this movie on principle.
It wasn’t like I was planning to see this movie anyway, but I don’t see any reason for me to incentivize cynical casting decisions by paying to see movies like this one. Eventually, unless movie producers are insane, they will wise up and realize that we’re not in the 50’s anymore. The world is getting more diverse, not less, and it’s time for our movies to stop catering so much to insular white folks.
