Yeah, same thing at Hollyhock House. One of the docents there told me he called tall people “trees” and absolutely refused to accommodate their dimensions in his work.
And yeah, beautiful and artistically groundbreaking as much of his work is, if the houses were built better they wouldn’t constantly need so much expensive restoration and preservation. They’re not that old.
On the other hand, I once toured a model of a Usonian House and was delighted that I, at 5’ 4", could reach all the shelves. He did have some good ideas–but catering only to short people is just rude, I agree.
While watching Big Little Lies with my wife the other night, we were struck by the downright ridiculous height of the kitchen cabinets. I mean, Adam Scott isn’t anyone’s idea of a particularly tall man, but neither is he a total shrimp, and I doubt he could reach the upper two shelves of the cabinet behind his head, to say nothing of the small windowed cabinet above it.
Hear, hear.
“No” to a live-action Akira. “No” to this insatiable need for the public to see new versions of things they already like, in general.
We finally got around to watching “Allied”. The story was engaging, but what really stood out for me were the wardrobe choices. Historical clothing is big thing for us, and not only did everyone look fabulous, but the civilian clothing looked good and period correct, instead of being modern interpretations of period styles. The Nazi villains were an exception. But I got the feeling that they were going for how Nazis were portrayed in 40s and 50s cinema, instead of how they actually dressed at the place and time depicted. I guess that is a style choice. I was really disappointed to not see “Rick’s Cafe” or Peter Lorre in the Casablanca background.
ETA: The bbs was inaccessible to me for ages so I’m re-editing this comment to include the other stuff I had to quickly strip out earlier.
I put spoiler tags in here earlier and they didn’t work initially for some reason, probably bad formatting. SORRY IF ANYONE SAW THAT!
Ghost in the Shell deals with the whitewashing as a central theme of the story.
The film suffers from some scale back for your typical, unimaginative westerner for whom the producers obviously decided immersion into the world of the manga or anime would have been so overwhelmingly intimidating as to drive away business.
So, it’s dumbed down a little and the scale of everything is just slightly less impressive. The city is smaller and shallower, the buildings stunted. A lot of the design seems sparse and clashes, like different departments were not communicating effectively, there didn’t seem to be a strong guiding hand knitting the design together.
However.
With the budget they had, and the difficulties of dropping what amounts to hard scifi in the laps of the general western audience, I believe the film makers managed to make a fairly gripping film, even haunting in some places.
Scarjo is great, as ever, she brings an insane physicality to the role. Everything from her stance, her posture, right down through to her micro-expressions screams about this immense, alien power that she possess. Batou is realised effectively as is Aramaki. Almost all the other Section 9 characters are sidelined apart from brief appearances from Togusa. The hacker, that’s all I’ll call him for now, is well done too and is also central to the whitewashing theme.
I’d say its a little better than the recent OVAs (and film), maybe approaches some of the weaker SAC episodes.
I want a directors or extended cut for all the stuff they (sometimes rather obviously) cut out.
We should probably keep the spoilered stuff secret for a wee while but I feel like I also want to talk about it, the theme being so strongly criticised in the media. Who’d have thought consideration of that topic would be a reason to see the film? It’s weird, the writers obviously wanted to address it, but the shit storm in the media makes their having addressed it in the movie just… weird.
I have been cautiously optimistic. My concern about Johanssen was less that she wasn’t Asian, and more a mismatch of personality. For me Atsuko Tanaka IS Kusanagi, having brought her to life with a quick wit and authoritative no-bullshit attitude which defines the character for me.
A deeper concern has been what sort of plot and worldbuilding they are going for here, as those are really what draws me into GITS.
Also I keep asking people why they assume that this movie is a remake of Oshii’s 1995 animated movie, but nobody ever says. But it gets referred to as “the original version”.
There be spoilers, but I just read a review on ArsTechnica, and its rather harshly critical:
I’m keeping my criticisms of the problems in the film close to my chest right now because they are all spoilers.
Suffice to say, it’s made for a general audience, the fan service is relegated to secondary consideration over making the film accessible, which compromises both endeavours.
Hardcore GITS peeps will be dissapoint. The product they wanted is impossible to make without a respected visionary and financially successful powerhouse like Cameron or Scott demanding total control.
And I disagree with some of the criticisms in that article. The author complains that the film diverges from the ‘original’ but then totally fails to acknowledge that the material it diverges to is also cannon (in the animated series). Pretty much all of the tropes, stories, characters, events, places and ideas are lifted from the source material, just moved around, dumbed down and knitted back together in a weird context and order.
I predict a lot more precious bitching on the subject from irate fans. And I can’t really blame them.
Also. There is ZERO humour in the film.
Shame about that but not entirely unexpected once the casting was known and those teaser trailers were released. At that point it seemed like the most pointless remake in the history of remakes. I’d much rather see free fire right now, ben wheatley appears to be on a roll with superb films.
Here’s another article about GITS. That I feel like I want to slap the guy who made it is probably not a good sign. They should probably have just made a Japanese-produced movie. Mamoru Oshii is a good live-action as well as animation director. I will probably see the US version, but to enjoy it I will probably need to seriously compartmentalize and evaluate it as an original movie.
I kinda agree. I guess that it’s still a possibility that a Japanese live action version is made. But think of the budget that it would need! If you wanted to realise something like the complexity of Innocence in live action with photo realistic FX, it would cost hundreds of millions to make. Like Waterworld money, we’re talking here.
That would be a whole other topic, but whereas I like movies, I detest the movie industry. I think that they are in most ways barking up the wrong trees. The US Hollywood model is basically an incestuous trade-guild/distribution-cartel which drastically pads out the costs of moviemaking in order to create jobs, control content, and “raise the bar of entry” - and that is where about 90% of the money goes. And towards actors, who are mostly paid to be stars rather than act.
That’s another boondoggle, IMO. Photo-realistic effects are a boring pursuit. Mostly because a norm has been perpetuated of using them to suspend the disbelief of unimaginative people, rather than use them as a truly creative stylistic medium in themselves.
Which would not necessarily be a waste if we got lots of big slick productions which were interesting. But the strengths of sci-fi and fantasy are that they are ideally genres of ideas, and it is precisely those ideas which are being lost. That ironically once you have the tech to realize any visuals whatsoever, you get all conservative and retreat into the unimaginative.
Not unlike in the interview I linked above, Rupert Sanders had no faith in his source material being interesting! So he decided his best option was decortication - to try replicating some of the feel and iconic imagery of GITS without getting bogged down by the characters or ideas. I think it’s funny/sad that GITS would be a hard sell, because it covers so much ground - it’s got tech, politics, humor, crime, conspiracy, action, war, transhumanism, science, philosophy. And very little of the GITS universe has been adapted for them to retread the same ground. If they have no faith in either their material or their audience, then they are potboilers making busy work for themselves.
Hollywood is where creativity goes go to throw itself into the wood-chipper of capital, and spray something onto the screen as it dies. People need to break their grip upon art and culture.
You missed my caveat, “complexity”. If there is a way to design GITS for the manga, and a way to design GITS for the anime, then there is a way to deign GITS for the silver screen.
…and, I would add, for the stage, the novel, short-form interpretive breakdancing etc.
I agree, but I think that’s it’s yet another area where Hollywood gets it wrong, in how to establish a medium-specific “language”. Most television and movies seem to far more closely resemble recorded plays than a truly open visual medium, such as still photography. I can appreciate the synthetic approach of melding stage with score, edits, sets, props, models, etc - but it seems to always reduce to being spoon-fed a narrative.
What prevents productions and effects houses from being more daring with regards to complexity is generally the worry about immersion/belief/suspension-of-disbelief. Which is a norm that these people themselves created, in hopes of creating a market in which to practice their craft. And most of the complexity of science fiction which is lost is conceptual, which costs little more to realize in writing than the most trite formula. It amounts to a bizarre spectacle of how an industry has boxed itself in creatively with expectations of what a movie should be.
“90% of everything” and all that.
A lot of people would argue the Hollywood production model is a triumph of Organized Labor, where craftspeople make a good living. Of course it’s a totally controlled nepotistic structure where getting in without connections is impossible.
The draining of creativity by corporatocracy is a tragedy. Forget digital fx, real creativity vanished from commercial animation many decades ago. At the hands of Disney et al a medium of unlimited visual expression became our same reality, but with talking animals. Watch the original Betty Boops to have your mind blown by trippy visuals and anthropomorphic everythings.
My favorite story of the vapidity of Hollywood:
in 1982 freelance writer Chuck Ross asked himself this question: Would contemporary Hollywood movie agents actually be able to recognize Casablanca if it was submitted to them as a script? Or failing that, would they at least be able to recognize it as great writing?
To find out, Ross devised an experiment. He retyped the script of Casablanca, changed its title to “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” (the title of the original play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison), changed the name of Rick’s sidekick from Sam to Dooley (after Dooley Wilson, the actor who played that character), and submitted it to 217 agencies as a script supposedly by an unknown writer, “Erik Demos.”
Of the 217 agencies Ross sent the script of Casablanca to, ninety returned it unread. They did so for various reasons — it was their policy not to read unsolicited manuscripts, they weren’t taking on new clients, or they were no longer in the agency business. Seven never responded. Eighteen scripts apparently got lost in the mail.
Thirty-three agencies actually recognized the script. For instance, Alan Green of the Gage Group wrote back to Ross, “Unfortunately I’ve seen this picture before: 147 times to be exact.”
Eight noticed a similarity to Casablanca, but didn’t realize it was Casablanca.
However, thirty-eight agencies claimed to have read it, but rejected it. In other words, of those agencies that actually read the manuscript (or claimed to have), the majority did not recognize it as Casablanca, nor did they think the script was good enough to be worth representing.
But making a living is a personal concern, whereas creating culture is a social one. If pay is compensation which naturally follows from doing something with societal value, then seeking pay as a goal in itself irrespective of the product seems backwards and ineffective.
It’s only as tragic as you let it be. Most animation, movies, music, books, etc are made by normal people who aren’t fronting for the interests of amassed capital. Suggesting otherwise only normalizes the exploitation of those who do it commercially. Paying pimps for the privilege of living in their blinkered cultural sweatshop sounds about as appealing for entertainment as it does for society at large. If one’s work really has creative or cultural value, then it still does even if you aren’t doing it for Disney/Hachette/Nabisco/etc.
And we’re back at the last discussion! We’re not going to resolve it, you don’t believe art and economics mix, or should mix. I think there’s room for art and pop culture both. When I say creativity drained from animation, that’s only referring to the entertainment industry. Of course there’s always been artists doing non-commercial work in every field. But not every creative person has other means of support or is willing to live in a squat like you, and the direction of popular art forms makes a big difference to their creative lives.
That’s not it. I think that’s a false dichotomy. The individual, or the group working together - are creating the economy inseparably from their creation of art or anything else. The trap is that of an elite minority striving to hijack that process. IF markets were truly emergent rather than imposed, this would not be much of an issue. An imposed system striving to make people marginal is not some aesthetic or lifestyle choice that I make, it is a war that I am confronted with, and which you are apparently paid to ignore. “Prostitution or Marginality” is a system imposed by neither side which are intended to inhabit it, but rather imposed from outside.
I admire your earnestness, but we sure do live in different worlds. Nothing wrong with that as long as you don’t go all “property is theft”. That tends to alienate people.
I have a 28 yo BIL who was all syndicalist-anarchist in college, he is now weed buyer for a dispensary in CA thinking about law school when he’s not playing in a thrash band.
