Jux said:
UberGott said:
- Children, young and old, who want to watch robots transform into stuff.
I asked the successful head of marketing at a major studio if he needed a star to market a movie and he responded, ?People pay money for concepts. Having a star doesn?t matter. ... [http://www.vulture.com/2012/07/why-stars-dont-matter-gavin-polone.html]
Go on, tell me more. Calling Optimus Prime 'the star' that drives people to see transformers is like saying Major Kusanagi is the star that drives people to see GITS. It says nothing about the person voicing, or acting, the character.
Sarcasm isn't always obvious in prose, so let me make this clear; you're taking what I've said too literally.
My point isn't literally that most people actually give a shit about Optimus Prime, it's that they care about big honkin' robots beating the crap out of each other in a 145 minute orgy of ugly robot punching porn. The concept of "Robots turn into trucks and then punch other robots" sells itself - heck, it's literally just an extension of a cartoon designed to sell toys!
Let's not kid ourselves, Transformers sells well simply because it's lowest-common denominator trash, and for all the ribbing Michael Bay rightly deserves, he happens to be the best at making lowest-common denominator trash that moves at a brisk pace and drops jaws when it has to. People love to hate them, and not without reason, but in the same way that McDonalds will always sell more hamburgers than a Michelin Star rated restaurant, more people will show up for middling superhero films and cartoon spin-offs than they will for a host of substantially better, more worth-while things.
The concept of "a lonely cop in a largely cybernetic future uncovers a massive political conspiracy while questioning the meaning of her own existance"... doesn't exactly sell itself to anyone who isn't going out of their way to look for it. Hell, most people who stumbled on the 1995 film did because of the novelty of
While not quite the same thing, I know, Science Fiction movies about artificial intelligence and their interaction with humanity - Automata, Ex Machina, Chappie, and so on - tend not to, and those are
less philosophically complex and narratively convoluted than GITS tends to be.
The exceptions to this are movies like The Matrix and I, Robot - films that sell themselves on being bombastic, braindead action films first, and
maybe a serious reflections of the human condition second. They also, coincidentally, starred Keanu Reeves and Will Smith. But that Star Power doesn't mean anything, right?
Jux said:
The conversation would go more like this:
-"Honey, lets see this movie, Ghost in the Shell..."
-"I loved those movies/series, ok."
I'm glad the love of your life is a weeaboo.
Now here's how that conversation goes for, like, 95% of the world.
-"Honey, let's go see this movie, Ghost in the Shell..."
-"I don't like scary movies."
-"Oh! No, see, it's about cyborgs."
-"Ugh, you mean like Chappie? That movie sucked!"
-"That's an Android. Anyway, it's based on an anime--"
-"One of those weird pedo cartoons I found on your laptop?"
-"I...y'know what, let's go see Thor 4."
-"I'll get my coat!"
-"Oh, wait! Black Widow's in Ghost in the Shell. She's the star, actually."
-"Johansson? Oh, neat. I guess we can see Thor next week."
-"Sweet!"
-"Who else is in Ghosting the Shell?"
-"Takeshi Kitano."
-"...wha?"
-"...you'd rather see Thor, wouldn't you."
-"Yeah. Thor's good."
-"...it's probably better than Ghost in the Shell, anyway."
-"Then why do you want to see it?"
-[Kenji Kawai music plays in the distance]
Though tbh, I'll probably be skipping this one, if only based on the sad whitewashing. ScarJo might do just fine, but I can skip out on a movie to stick to my principles.
Honest question: Did you refuse to see Memoirs of a Geisha because Ziyi Zhang wasn't Japanese?
What about Valkyrie, since Tom Cruise wasn't born in Germany?
How about the Japanese comedy Thermae Romae, which takes place in Ancient Rome but has an almost exclusively Japanese cast?
Have you taken a similar stance against the Fullmetal Alchemist films for taking what are intentionally European and Middle Eastern characters and casting them as Japanese - a story in which the clash between obvious ethnicities are actually central to the plot?
JUMBO PALACE said:
I'd like to hear what an actual Japanese person has to say about it.
[a href="https://archive.is/JroNc"]Ask and ye shall receive.[/a]