Clips: Rogue One Easter Eggs
Posted on April 10, 2017 at 3:59 pm
Some Easter eggs (hidden puzzles and inside references) from the new Rogue One DVD:
Posted on April 10, 2017 at 3:59 pm
Some Easter eggs (hidden puzzles and inside references) from the new Rogue One DVD:
Posted on April 10, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Hag sameach!
Posted on April 9, 2017 at 12:39 pm
The casting of Scarlett Johansson in “Ghost in the Shell” is just the most recent “whitewashing” that has created controversy and played at least a contributing factor to the poor results at the box office. Audiences have understandably objected to having white actors play Asian characters. It might be different if it ever worked the other way, if actors of color were cast in roles written for white actors. But with so few explicitly Asian characters in movies and so few Asian actors being cast in lead roles, it is especially troubling. To make matters much worse (SPOILER ALERT) the cybernetic characters played by Johansson and white actor Michael Carmen Pitt are both supposed to be Japanese humans who now have white-featured robot “shells” or bodies.
This is just one of many examples in current and past productions. Asian characters have been played by white actors for decades, including Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Warner Oland, Peter Lorre, and Mickey Rooney. More recently, Cameron Crowe was sharply criticized for casting Emma Stone in “Aloha” as a woman with some native Hawaiian heritage.
In the LA Times, Jen Yamato and Justin Chang wrote about this issue:
Chang: We seem to have fallen into a dispiritingly familiar pattern where Hollywood-goes-East blockbusters are concerned, and it usually starts with the announcement of some fresh casting outrage: Tilda Swinton enlisting as a Celtic version of a Tibetan mystic in Marvel’s “Doctor Strange,” or Matt Damon being called in for white-hero duty on “The Great Wall” (a China-U.S. co-production, incidentally).
From there, the woker-than-thou factions of the press and public react with unsurprising anger. The marketing campaign becomes a passive-aggressive exercise in damage control. The movie is released, and the casting is duly dubbed either the worst thing ever or a complete non-issue. And neither reaction, I think, really gets at the more complicated truth of the matter….I liked Johansson in “Ghost in the Shell,” just as I liked Swinton in “Doctor Strange.” And I was perfectly fine with Damon in “The Great Wall,” in which he’s not really a white savior at all, and is in fact amusingly upstaged by director Zhang Yimou’s make-China-great-again production design.
As she demonstrated in “Lucy” and the masterful “Under the Skin,” Johansson can be a mesmerizing screen presence, with the kind of otherworldly aura that naturally lends itself to science fiction. All of which is to say: It’s possible to admire a performance while still acknowledging the ways in which it’s — to use a word I loathe, but sometimes there’s no alternative — problematic.
Yamato: It’s one thing for a film or television show (see Marvel’s “Iron Fist” and Netflix’s upcoming Americanized “Death Note”) to be problematic. It’s more insulting for filmmakers — and the stars whose white faces are plastered on posters and billboards in front of exotic Asian scenery — to ignore the damage their failures have wrought. That is both irresponsible and cowardly….But whether you call it yellowface, white saviorhood, race-bending, erasure — it’s all whitewashing if a story rooted in Asian origins or an Asian setting defaults to a white normative reality. The filmmakers behind these properties, nearly all white men, are forcing white preference and white privilege into the spotlight and blaming it on a system that necessitates bankable white stars. The more these movies bomb while others like “Get Out” flourish, the more these excuses get exponentially more tedious.
And in the Hollywood Reporter, four Japanese actresses gave their thoughts. They spoke about some cultural dissonance or outright mistakes they think would have been handled correctly if the filmmakers were Japanese. Some of their comments:
Keiko Agena: It was harder to watch than I thought it was gonna be. To get emotionally invested, you have to really care that she needs to find out who she is. But when she finally meets her mom, my gut felt so weird in that moment.
Atsuko Okatsuka: ScarJo was probably lost. “OK, hold on. So I’m a Japanese woman. I used to be? Wait, I am. I talk to my boss in English even though he speaks to me in Japanese?”…It’s not even about seeing me on the screen as a performer. It’s a bigger concern. It’s 2017 and I don’t know why these representation issues are still happening. It’s overwhelming. This means so much to our community but is so on the side, still, for a lot of people.
Even if Hollywood does better on this (and on casting trans and disabled actors in roles reflecting their experience and understanding), we still have the problem of the past. An Asian friend recently wrote to a movie theater about their showing of the beloved Audrey Hepburn classic, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Hepburn’s impeccable elegance cannot make up for the outrageously offensive portrayal of her Japanese neighbor, played by Mickey Rooney.
The theater manager’s thoughtful response:
I can say that this is a constant issue of programming a repertory theater. Showing anything from classic Hollywood is generally at the very least problematic, and in many cases, such as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” an example of a horrible history of filmmaking. While this is not a plea to justify our decision to book this film, I hope you can understand that we do not condone every element of all of the films that we show and when booking classic film this issue is unavoidable. This film is playing as a part of a ‘music in film’ series; they will be performing a song from this film later in the month. I do hope the rest of our programming, specifically the new indie and modern repertory titles, reflect our commitment to diversity, progressivism, and positive depictions.
After a further exchange, the manager said they would provide some context.
On the evening of the screening, I will be present to introduce the film and to discuss Rooney’s performance in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in order to shed light on these issues in classic Hollywood cinema and to let the audience know that both institutions are opposed to such portrayals. We will also be distributing a handout that discusses Rooney’s character and the history of racial stereotypes in Hollywood films.
That is the best we can do for movies of the past — to raise the issue and insist that it be addressed. We can do a lot better with movies of the future, to make sure that the history of racial stereotypes in Hollywood films is coming to an end.
Posted on April 9, 2017 at 8:00 am
John O’Hurley may be best known for playing a fictionalized version of the founder of the J. Peterman catalogue on “Seinfeld.” In his new film “Swing Away,” he also plays something of a fictionalized version of a real-life character. In an interview, he told me that when they were filming in 2014, he had no idea that the real estate mogul he based his brash, bombastic golf resort developer character on would be elected President before the film was released. We also talked about the fun of filming in Greece and why golf reveals character.
The film is about a Greek-American professional golfer (Shannen Elizabeth) who flees to her grandparents in Rhodes after a televised meltdown in an important golf tournament. It is a sweet, funny, story with a little romance and some spectacular scenery. One of the highlights is a golf match in Rhodes with an obnoxious American developer, played by O’Hurley.
The audience at the screening we attended was almost entirely Greek-American and they were thrilled to see the beautiful location footage.
It does speak to something that I found out about this film. The Greek people are the proudest people I have ever met and they support Greek culture in any way that they possibly can. They are proud to be Greek when they get up at six in the morning and they are proud to be Greek when they go to bed at 4 am.
It is clear you are real-life golfer.
Yes, I am a golfer. I have been a golfer my whole life. It’s always been the game that I played and I played it competitively in high school and then acting was my love so it has always been kind of an avocation for me.
They say that golf is more revealing of a person’s integrity and character than any other game. Do you think that is right?
Absolutely. You spend four hours with somebody on a golf course and you will learn pretty much everything you need to know about them. It’s a game with personal responsibility. The ball isn’t moving when you go to hit it, so therefore everything you do from the first tee shot to the ball is all up to you. It’s all within your wheelhouse; you can’t blame anyone or anything else for it.
Is it true that, at least a year before he declared his candidacy for the Presidency, you based your performance on Donald Trump?
That’s exactly what I was going for. It really had to be that kind of overwhelmly myopic American businessman capitalist coming in to take over what his vision of the development would be, culture be damned. We’ve seen examples of that all over the world and Donald certainly has made several forays overseas in the British Isles and met with quite a bit if resistance over there, so he has been through it, absolutely.
Is it fun to play a guy who is really over-the-top?
Oh, absolutely and I had a chance really to sculpt his character from the ground up. I make no apologies for the jackass that he is. And I think he has to be unredeemable in order to make this film work; I don’t think he can be somebody who is redemptive. The rest of the film is redemptive but he has to be irretrievable.
Very little of my character was scripted. A lot of it was just improvisational because I understand the mentality of this character very well. So in many cases I had the borderlines of what we wanted to say, and they let me flower things up. Most of what you see on screen is just me rambling.
It is so beautiful there. Did you get to enjoy yourself in Greece? Try any special Greek delicacies?
As it turned out I only had about two weeks free from other commitments that I could spend there so they basically had to stack all of my scenes including the big golf match kind of back to back to back. So I didn’t really have a day off, I kind of just continually shot. But in the evenings we went out to eat and I enjoyed them all and I think I had them all. I think I gained 15 pounds and I look at the film and I also thought it was kind of appropriate that the character looked a little self-indulgent. So, I definitely put on pounds while I was there. Because we were shooting so much outdoors we were limited by the last light and from there we would go right to dinner and we would eat and dance every night. They celebrate outdoors and eat outdoors and dance outdoors and it was fabulous every night.
What do you think people should talk about after they see the movie? What is the lesson of the movie?
I think it’s a movie about redemption, that all things are remediable. I like the idea her going back to her homeland to rediscover the whole passion of why she became involved with golf. It was a sense of rebirth for her and seeing through the eyes of this little 10-year-old girl and mentoring her and just gave her that sense of renewal that she needed to go back and take the game at a different level.
And what’s the best advice you ever got about acting?
Acting is reacting. Before I go on stage and before I do a film I always say, a prayer: “God, let me be surprised.” And that’s all it is so that way I’m calm and I’m out there looking for the next moment to happen. I know what I’m going to say but I shouldn’t know how I’m going to say it yet. I’m just waiting and ready for the moment to inspire me.