Avalon

[Drunk Monk]

Directed by Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii, with a Polish cast. It's about an immersive video/audio/sensory game where a lot of stuff blows up and you ponder existentialism. Strange use of filters make it oppressively dingy at first. There are some surreal bits, like what's up with that dog anyway? There's some good mechatech-destructo tanks. Gratuitous machine gunning, explosions, gristle eating and classical opera. No sword fights. Not sure if I liked it actually. I might have liked it better in its original language with subtitles instead of bad dubbing. But I started it before KFTC20 and finished it after, so there was a serious break in continuity.

[Drunk Monk]

You know, I never saw the original GitS. It was a gap in my anime viewing. Hulu+ has GitS2.0 and as Netflix just put our FitS:Arise, I checked it out.

It was visionary, mind-blowingly so. I'm not hooked into it tho, not watching the rest of the franchise....well, at least not right away. No sword fights. Lots of gunplay and explosions, plus ample robot boobs. I really enjoyed it as a robot story. Good stuff. Glad I finally saw it. It ranks up there with the top anime films I've seen (not that I've seen that many, but prolly more than that film student Greg ).

[Drunk Monk]

Never mind that the lead protagonist, Motoko Kusanagi, was Japanese... :roll:

Will Smith & Tom Hardy Eyeing ‘Suicide Squad’ At Warner Bros – Update
by Mike Fleming Jr
October 16, 2014 4:50pm

One For The Boys Charity Ball: Arrivals - London Collections: Men SS15UPDATE, 4:50 PM: The Wolf Of Wall Street‘s Margot Robbie is also looking likely for Suicide Squad. It looked like she was going to star in Ghost In The Shell for DreamWorks, but those talks fizzled. I’ve heard DreamWorks has instead made a $10M offer to Scarlett Johansson, whose action price has risen to that level after Lucy and her work as Black Widow. Robbie, who stars alongside Smith in the upcoming Focus, should slip nicely into the Warner Bros film. The studio would not comment.

Will Smith Tom HardyPREVIOUS, 4:04 PM: Warner Bros, which this week identified the DC Comics property Suicide Squad as one of its priority projects that will be released in 2016, is apparently moving aggressively on the film that will be directed by David Ayer as his follow to the Brad Pitt-starrer Fury. I’m hearing that both Will Smith and Tom Hardy are circling the film and are close to signing on. Charles Roven is producing.

The premise: A group of supervillains are brought together to tackle high-risk black ops missions for the government. This is one in the growing universe of DC properties and getting this duo would be the makings of a pretty good mission movie. Stay tuned.

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[Drunk Monk]

In the ALT-Japan, there will be no nipples or pubic hair and Japanese will be whitewashed.

[cranefly]

As soon as I can get a copy of this movie, I'll be spending the rest of my life making a new print, FXing nipples onto all the guys.

Oh, and maybe onto Scarlett too.

Just to be fair.

[Drunk Monk]

Ghost in the Shell (2017)
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Sure, the whitewashing sux even with ScarJo. It’s starts out too obvious with way too much talk about ghosts and shells. Yeah, we get it. Movies that have to spend that much time explaining their title is just lazy writing. The plot is choppy - there are some dumb leaps that are never satisfactorily explained. Beat Takano speaks all his lines in Japanese - no one else does this - and everyone understands perfectly as if he was speaking wookie. The effects are awesome, sort of blade runner on cgi steroids, but we all know good effects can only carry things so far. Much of the design seems to be trying to actualize the anime, which with cgi isn’t too hard. It’s very dark, like the anime, with nice moments of ultravi. A tad preachy on the tech vs humanity schtick, but it started to work for me towards the latter part of the movie. Binoche was classy as always and Beat comes alive at the end. ScarJo does what she does well, that husky-voiced stoic heroine, often stripped nude to her bot bod sans nipples and pubes because bots have no need for such trifles. As she realizes her humanity, she gets to act a little, not too much tho cuz she’s still mostly bot. As much as I luv ScarJo, this film didn’t do that well so the whitewashing flopped. A better choice might have been someone like Rina Takeda for the lead, but she’d have absolutely zero traction in the U.S.  Moderately entertaining nevertheless, or at least distracting, although I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you’re into the anime, and then just for closure’s sake.