Why Everyone Needs To Chill Out About Scarlett Johansson

If you’ve been on the internet recently, you’ll have no doubt heard the news that Scarlett Johansson has been cast to play the lead role in a live action version of a popular Japanese manga/anime called Ghost in the Shell.

I’ve seen the original. I didn’t like it. I found it very slow and not compelling at all. A few cool scenes, but otherwise, pretty boring (like most anime). It was one of the films that inspired The Matrix though, so that’s worth noting.

So, anyway, people are mad that a white woman has been cast to play a “Japanese” character. I put that in quotes because it’s arguable whether the character in the film counts as Japanese since she’s an android. Really, she could be any race and it would make just as much sense for the character.

But, whatever, the fans have an idea of what she should be, and this goes against that. I get it. And this adaptation will probably suck. I’m sorry. I know how frustrating it is, but it is what is.

But beyond that, as is the case whenever this happens, the automatic reaction is:

And while Hollywood is certainly not known for being incredibly sensitive to social justice issues, I feel like this reveals a bit of an oversimplified view of the world. By that I mean, most people just don’t get how the industry works. Sadly, this casting could have still happened even if there was no such thing as racism. Let me explain.

Casting Scarlett Johansson is simply the only way a movie like Ghost in the Shell could ever exist. Why? Simple. Movies like this one (high concept, lots of effects, unknown in the USA to all but a small group) are risky, and the most of that is because they’re expensive. The budget of this film probably is around 200 million dollars. That’s a fuckton of money. More money than you or I will ever make in my life probably. And just for one movie. To put that in perspective, Batman v Superman is being called a bomb even though it’s made three quarters of a billion so far, and everybody and their grandma knows who those characters are. If that movie can fail, this movie has a million times greater chance of failing.

Well, as you can imagine, the people who are putting up this money want some kind of guarantee on their investment. Of course, such a thing is completely imaginary. Nobody can ever predict what will sell and what won’t (see above). The people who say they can are lying, mostly to themselves.

But, imaginary security is better than none. One of the ways they do that is through a thing called star power. This means a certain actor can draw a crowd and make a movie a success simply by being in iy. Even that doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does. People look at a poster with Tom Cruise on it, and they think about all the other Tom Cruise movies they liked, so they pick that one, instead of the other one that they don’t know from Adam. It’s not rational, but human behavior seldom is. Even Cruise can’t always make a movie successful (Edge of Tomorrow).

So, unless you’re a high-powered director like Steven Spielberg, you’re going to need a name actor to get the money. And there just aren’t any Asian actresses that can match what the Scarlett brings in terms of name recognition in our American film industry. I know it’s sad and fucked up, but it’s true.

And I know you’re probably thinking, “Right. Because everyone’s racist.”

Not necessarily.

You see, since the studios are so unwilling to give these kinds of roles to people who aren’t already stars, only the people who are already stars get the roles. You see how circular that pattern is? And this affects everyone trying to be an actor, not just minorities. Because they can’t afford to take any risks, they never step outside what’s worked in the past. So it just ends up this constant loop of sameness. They don’t make star-making films with a low enough risk factor to make it worth casting an unknown, unless it’s Star Wars. Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t huge when he did Iron Man, but he had a name.

And you might say, “What about Lucy Liu, she’s a big star, right?”

Not really anymore. Hollywood is a very, “What have you done for me lately?” kind of place. Lucy Liu really hasn’t done much in the past 10 years of note. It’s all about what’s popular right now.

You can be mad at them if you want to, but they’re just chasing whatever trends are popular. It’s messed up and stupid, yes, but for whole other reasons than racism.

Now, if you want to ask why the American public won’t go see a movie with an unknown actor in it, that’s a whole different question. I suppose we could always fall back on William Goldman’s motto “Nobody knows,” and probably not be wrong. But there’s a lot of things to theorize. Like, the fact that there’s so much competition nowadays. Marvel has a movie out every six months now. That is insane when you think about how long it used to take. There’s also the fact that DVD and streaming are so common now. So people only go see the movies they REALLY want to see, and wait for Redbox to catch the others.

Of course, none of this is to say there’s no racism in America. That would a very ignorant thing to say. All I’m trying to do is inject some sort of nuance to this debate, because that’s what I’m not seeing a lot of. That meme I posted is about as nuanced as most of the things I’ve seen about this issue. We all know Hollywood is evil, but it’s evil in completely different ways than you might think. While a certain amount of anger is justified, it needs to come with a little more understanding. By all means, be mad that something you like is being bastardized. Be mad that Americans aren’t more willing to step outside their comfort zones when it comes to entertainment. But being mad at Hollywood is like being mad at the weather: won’t do you much good in the long run.

5 Movie Innovations That Are Older Than You Think

Hello again, friends. It’s been a minute since I’ve written anything since it’s been super busy for me, but I’ve been thinking about something lately. I’ve realized a lot of people seem to not realize just how old a lot of our modern movie technology really is, even though it may have only become popular more recently, a lot of the ideas have been around forever. So let’s do this!

#5: Blue/Green Screen

In a world where CGI is in literally everything, even indie dramas, green screen has become equally ubiquitous. Even a 10 year old kid in his room can experiment with it on his computer with Photoshop. I did. In the digital age, it’s fairly simple; the computer simply finds every pixel that’s green or blue within a certain range and changes it to transparent. This allows one to composite several elements together in a single scene. You see it so often you probably don’t even realize it.

Before computers, we had analog video, which worked more or less the same way but didn’t look nearly as good. For anyone shooting on film, it had to be done chemically, then run through a machine called an “optical printer”  where they sandwiched the film strips together and photographed them all onto a final piece of film. It could take up to 8 or 9 pieces of film depending on how many elements there were, including passes for atmospheric effects. The glow on the lights of a Star Destroyer? That’s most likely its own piece of film, plus the ships, plus the lasers, plus the background — all separate elements.

It sounds really complicated, and it is. But it’s also a pretty old technique. Films like Mary Poppins and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds made use of the technique. But we can go even farther, all the way back to the 30s with King Kong and The Wizard of Oz. The results are still pretty impressive when done well, but when not they can really jump out at you. That’s why a lot of effects have a heavy black or blue line around them in older movies. Go back and watch some and see if you can spot it.

#4: 3D

While Avatar is probably the one most responsible for 3D’s popularity (besides greed), 3D has been around forever. There was the 1983 cinematic classic Jaws 3D, with some of the best visual effects ever, and before that a ton of sci-fi B movies. Even Alfred Hitchcock made Dial M For Murder in 3D in the 50s, although the film was not released that way. But 3D actually goes back all the way to 1915, before sound and even plots were really all that common in movies. It’s really a very simple trick, and one that refuses to dies despite it rarely ever making a movie better. Most of us know how it works: You see one image in one eye and a slightly different one in the other. This can be done with colors, or other techniques, but one thing’s certain: you will have to wear some dumbass looking glasses for it to work.

#3: Surround Sound

The technique is simple: Instead of one or two speakers, you place a ton of speakers strategically around the room to make you feel like you’re inside the action. Pretty rad, right? Certainly no theater or man cave is complete without it these days.

This one probably sounds (no pun intended) pretty new, but its origin actually goes back to 1940. The inventor?

Walt Disney.

No joke. The film was Fantasia. Walt had the idea of placing speakers all around the theater to mimic the feeling of being in a grand concert hall. In those days, theaters were often smaller than they are now, and he wanted his classical music driven film to be as impressive as possible. He christened it Fantasound. Unfortunately, the idea never caught on due to cost. But, like the movie itself, it’s now a pretty highly regarded achievement.

2: Shooting entirely in First Person

So yeah, this one is prompted entirely by Hardcore Henry, which is being touted as the first first-person film (quadruple points). While it may be the first action film, it’s hardly the first film. That honor goes to, I believe, 1947’s Lady in the Lake (not to be confused with the steaming pile of Shyamalan shit, Lady in the Water). Films like Enter the Void and Dark Passage used it as well (the latter for only the first half though). And if we count found footage movies then we can add a lot more, such as Cloverfield and Blair Witch Project. It’s nothing new.

#1: Cinematic Universes

My childhood was a simpler time. A time where multiple properties existing within the same continuity and are canon with each other was much rarer than it is now. But with Marvel leading the way, almost every franchise is becoming a cinematic universe: DC, X-Men, Star Wars, and even Transformers. They proved you can make a boatload on it and everyone wants a piece of that action now. It’s the wave of the future, or so it seems.

But it’s really not new at all. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith have come out and said their movies are all in the same universe. In the 60s, Godzilla would go head to head with any number of foes from Mothra to Gamera to King Kong, who also starred in their own films.

But probably the first example of the shared universe I can think of goes back to the 1930s Universal Monster movies: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, etc. Almost all of these characters had crossover films that respected the continuity of the films they came from (mostly). The Wolf Man was always Lawrence Talbot (usually played by Lon Chaney Jr.); Frankenstein’s monster was always made by Dr. Frankenstein. Occasionally they did recast the characters, like Glenn Strange playing Frankenstein rather than Boris Karloff, but they recast Hulk, so I don’t see a difference. While the individual details might have varied from film to film (especially the fact that a lot of them died at the end of their stand-alone films) they always respected the lore of the characters’ origins.

But it gets weirder. Abbott and Costello made a number of comedies with the Universal monsters. But what’s interesting is the lore was often referenced. In Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, the inventor of the formula is mentioned with a picture of Claude Rains on the wall, and Vincent Price appears in a cameo as The Invisible Man (after portraying him in The Invisible Man Returns) at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein; which is the kind of thing you see in Marvel movies all the time now.

The only place where it gets tricky is in each of these films Abbott and Costello have different names and occupations, so it’s hard to make the case that they are the same characters in each movie. Though all that means is that different characters are being played by the same actors, but they’re all still canon with each other. The characters they play in Meet Frankenstein are not the same people as those in Meet the Mummy, etc. Think about it this way, in Spiderman, Bruce Campbell is in all 3 of the Raimi films. Is he the same character in all 3 movies? I don’t think so. But all of those characters exist within that version of Spiderman. So all the characters Abbott and Costello play exist within the Universal Monster Cinematic Universe.

I hear they’re rebooting that, but it won’t be as good. Well that’s all folks. Thanks for stopping by!

 

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