"Ghost in the Shell" Targets Scarlett Johansson

[The Kid]

No surprise there. This is a pretty big habit of Hollywood

[simbob4000]

But even the big stars and headliners of the past and present had to start somewhere, but that doesn't quite happen to today's minority actors either. One solution is for minority media makers to create their own production companies, but even then they don't have the decades of entrenched and established support as the big studios.

I'm pretty sure I've seen minorities in movies, so they get what could be called starts in places. Now if you want to make the point that not as many go on to bigger...well, ok.

Ah, but the thing is, bringing in an outsider fundamentally changes the nature of the story itself, like a version of the telephone game that children play but on a larger scale. For example, when Spike Lee wanted to make Malcolm X, he campaigned hard with the studios that the movie focus on Malcolm X himself. The studio wanted a white journalist as the center. And doing so would have changed the lens through which the movie sought to study Malcolm X, since no matter what the white journalist's intentions were, it wouldn't be about a black leader's struggle with civil rights, but about white perception of civil rights during a particular and specific moment in history (and as well, white people weren't exactly suffering during the Civil Rights movement). The insidious thing about racial and cultural appropriation about history in Hollywood is that it seeks to make minority history about white experience, oftentimes rewriting or even outright erasing minority roles to boost white media portrayals. It's often not intentional (I doubt those studio heads meant for that to happen), but it's a consequence that's a component of the usual Hollywood revisionism.

The Bruce Lee movie doesn't sound like a biopic, one part of the movie is Lee's fight with Wong over teaching white people. The other part, which I'm going to guess is the main part, is a fictional story about them teaming up to fight gangs in Chinatown. That Bruce Lee movie isn't like making a movie based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X and putting a white POV characters in.

Actually, I do remember when it came out. Many, many, many complaints from film reviewers and message boards was that the movie was essentially Wolverine and the X-Men. But the script, the development, the marketing, the advanced screening for critics -- that all happened well before opening day, and Jackman was groomed from the start -- honestly, if they were cautious about Jackman as Wolverine, then Wolverine wouldn't have dominated the story as much as he did. Also consider, if Halle Berry was the draw of the movie, she'd have far, far more than 11 lines. It's not like the movie was modified to have more Hugh Jackman and less Halle Berry a mere two weeks after opening -- these are decisions that were made, put in place, and finalized well before the final product was delivered.

Wasn't saying he wasnt the star of the movie, just that she was the focus of the marketing. Halle Berry was the main selling point of the movie; you saw anything about that movie on tv, Halle Berry was the one that came up most. She was the one they sold to people, not Huge Jackman, because people didn't even know who Jackman was. And Wolverine (who's the biggest X-Men character) wasn't really the focus of that first movie. The movie wants you to think it's about Wolverine, but it's actually about Rogue...who is the character we meet Wolverine through.

[darthjoker]

I really don't like when Hollywood tries to make real life movies from Anime. They simply don't translate well. Example: Dragonball Z, Blood +, and probably now this (ghost in the shell). Even anime-like games like Street Fighter ended up being bad. But video game movies is another thing.