IP echoes
ok, i’ll keep this rant short. and i’ll start more positively than usual. if someone ever wanted to drop a truckload of money on my front door to bring Black and Blue to the silver screen, i can’t say i’d put up the most sincere fight. the concept of ‘selling out’ seems like one of those bullshit first world problems, like ‘fear of success’. but you hope that whoever wants to expose an idea to more people will be faithful to the concept. why wouldn’t they be? but that brings me back to my earlier point. can they?
i have a long list, and feel free to add your own in the comments below, of people who missed the point when redoing an old idea. maybe it’s trying to make things hip for a young audience, or just not understanding the source material, but the result is the same. a few bucks made, purists shaking their heads, and me, writing a rant about it, shouting into the void.
which brings me to a sort of resolution. i’m not boycotting, but i’m gonna just abstain from things i know will just get my blood boiling. seems like a good resolution for my old age. to wit, daryl wasn’t in my walking dead, my robotcop is peter weller, and my major kusanagi is japanese.
return visitors will recall i don’t have the biggest soft spot for anime, but a good movie is a good movie.
major kusanagi is the head of a department that deals with cyber terrorism. which, for 1995, was pretty ahead of it’s time. she’s a cyborg, and a beer drinking bad ass, and like alot of anime, the whole affair was confusing as all hell. but based off of a comic book that had been going on for years prior, so….. they fit in what they could. it happens alot in anime (akira cough). i wonder if people who were fans of that appreciated it being made into a movie the first time.
but here we go again. 21 years later, and it needs to be live actioned up. and oddly there were apparently no japanese actresses left, or certainly none who fit the bill as a japanese woman as much as the hipster teen from ghost world.
and i’m left to wonder, if it doesn’t matter to casting what race she is, why not let ms johansson her keep her blonde locks? i suppose black hair is ‘just asian enough’.
so fine, when Black and Blue does become a live action movie, and virgil is played by channing tatum in silver paint cause he plays better with the 18 to 24s than an angry toaster oven, i’ll eat my words. until then…….
No confidence that hollywood can make anything but a hot mess out of GitS… Then again, do we really care? The original GitS movie is a masterpiece. Stand Alone Complex and 2nd Gig were extremely good anime. I haven’t gotten around to Arise yet, but I hear it’s good as well.
I feel like back in the old days, it mattered a whole lot more if the movie adaptation of something was good, because the stories were so niche that we didn’t know if there’d ever be another version. As time goes on, though, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that for the really good stuff, they’ll keep swinging till they figure out how to connect.
I’d agree that this swing doesn’t look promising, though. The inability to find a japanese actress seems to be an indication that they don’t have much faith in the source material, and are mainly hoping to sell this as another cool action movie. pretty sad.
i think they have faith in the source material in as much as they know they can make money off it. but it’s backwards logic. ‘because people liked ghost in the shell the way it was, they’ll like it more when i make it different’
i think we’re being conditioned to eat gruel and pretend it’s ambrosia. if we don’t know better, we won’t expect better. and it’s easier to serve up slop than quality. i’ll eat my hat if i’m wrong, and ghost in the shell turns out to be a good movie. and i don’t want to. it’s a very nice hat.
We need money to live above any level other than being a subsistence hunter-gatherer, so if Hollywood comes and says, “Hey, here’s $100,000 for Black and Blue,” I personally would give a thumbs up.
The problem with Hollywood is that there’s only a few movies that came through unscathed. The Last Unicorn is absolutely faithful to the book, word for word. The book is far better than the movie, but that’s only because bringing the whole book to the screen would take hours and hours to watch it.
Citizen Kane was untouched because Orson Wells got an iron-clad contract.
But for some good manga, well, sometimes we just have to take what we can get. Personally, I just can’t imagine Hollywood making a good adaptation of Akira. Hollywood can’t even do remakes well. Compare The Day of the Jackal and the Bruce Willis remake. Yuck.
Hollywood has its own weird filter. Personally, I just wonder why the Japanese movie industry can’t make Ghost in the Shell.
i’m sure the japanese could make a live action akira, but this is about saturation, not faithful adaptation. then again, live action ‘attack on titan’ was not…. well…..
they’re trying to make things palletable to everyone. i get it, it’s a big business, hollywood can ill afford flops. but that doesn’t excuse it what ends up happening. and the way they go about the whole thing seems to be about focus testing, market research, trend following. not very artistic terms.
but thanks for the thumbs up on B&B. i’m pretty happy doin as i do. no big plans. maybe eventually a card game. i don’t know why, that just sounds fun.
Along the lines of selling out–have you ever seen what happens in the middle of the movie “The Player” (the 1992 one with Tim Burton)? If you have not seen it, you should watch this. The sub-plot with the writer who is resisting selling out his movie ending (and the fake movie with Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis) are a scream.
seen it, i hadn’t even heard of it. but it looks interesting, so i’ll check it out. thanks for the tip!
The Big Picture, Christopher Guest’s directing debut, had a similar albeit silly take on the issue.
thanks! i’ll check that out. lots of things to watch in my queue now!
Is that really happening?! NO!! How hard was it to find a Japanese woman to play her?! Just…ew.
The last time I got burned by an “imaginative retelling” of a series was when the Resident Evil movie first came out. As someone with a full back tattoo of Nemesis I took quite a bit of offense to Milla Jovovich getting all the best parts of my favorite characters to keep for herself just because she was screwing the director. However, I loved Silent Hill and was BEYOND pleasantly surprised at Aeon Flux (a movie I swore I would rather eat razors that attempt to watch). And judge all you will: I fully intend on twitching my way angrily through the live-action Jem movie in a couple of days just to see how badly my childhood has been raped.
I could see a skilled director making something spectacular out of your vision while staying almost completely true to the comic. You have well-developed characters, great story arcs, a feel for suspense, and (especially where Kris Station is concerned) a spectacular sense of comedic timing.
Just never sign over creative rights, do your own casting, and hey, remember your poor friend Molotov when you want a soundtrack put together!
first things first, nemesis is cool and all, no doubt. when it came out, i walked around for days moaning ‘stars!’, but dude, that is a commitment…..
and yes, it is happening. scarlett johansson has be slated to play the lead role in ghost in the shell. which, imdb will suggest first, over the original anime, when looking it up. even though it’s not due till 2017.
i actually didn’t mind the first resident evil, even though i was a hardcore fan of the franchise. until 5…. maybe because the games got so ridiculous themselves at times. it was when they tried to consolidate the movie characters, with game characters, and made jill such a weakling compared to milla. but i didn’t know she was boinking the director. that fits.
it was silent hill that i thought was a huge departure from the game. still watchable, but, kinda missing some of the sadness and the isolation of a man looking for his dead wife. that kid got on my very last nerve too. never saw aeon flux though. couldn’t put myself through that. loved the cartoon too much. i saw clips. i feel like i made the right move.
enjoy jem and the holograms. i hear it’s truly outrageous. and thanks. there’ll be more kris station. i had fun with that. as for the offer it may not be the right time, but i’m thinking of a broadway musical, cats style. you got your work cut out for you.