mdk

Oh by the way Rick and Morty is back

April Fool's. Don't even bother checking Adult Swim.

Ghost in the Shell was a good movie.

MDK'S VERDICT: NOT BAD

New GiTS is decidedly NOT a terrible movie. It's also a let-down, but not for the obvious reasons..... yes, it readily departs from all the established universe, yes it changes like a BUNCH of characters.... all that basically makes sense in the movie, even (especially) the whitewashing aspect. I really wanted to hate Batou, but couldn't. Anyway, it's none of the expected stuff that makes the movie suck, I guess, is the point of this intro -- suck is a strong word. It's got weaknesses. Let's dive in.

THE GOOD:

First, the movie sounded fucking brilliant. They're getting a lot of props for the visuals -- those were great, sure, most of the time, but the sound was outstanding. Major props to Clint Mansel, the soundtrack guru you should all know better than you think you do. He nailed this shit.

Second, the visuals. They were cool. The coolness was suitably pervasive too -- background floating fish, holobilboards, etc. It looked slick. They even handled most of the legacy shots well -- the spherical hacking, the robogeisha, all that shit. Visuals were nicely done.

Third (and arbitrarily last), they cast this shit right. Based on the script I just watched, Japanese is the only think Kusanagi couldn't be -- her cover was a refugee killed in a terrorist attack on a boat into the country, so that wouldn't, you know. How would a Japanese refugee be sailing to.... w/e. Yeah they could've written it differently and preserved stuff, but Scarlet nailed it, and so did (almost) everybody else. Had my doubts with Aramaki off the bat, but he turned out to be perfect too. Really, the only people who didn't seem like a perfect cast were evil-white-corporate-villain and the random-third-world-rep (who performed just fine, really, but just could not capture the gravity of his role or dialogue and it's purely an aesthetic thing -- his acting was fine, he just wasn't cast in the right part).

POINT OF THIS SECTION BEING, there's plenty to like. It was paced well (enough), the action was good, various other elements were good.

THE NOT-SO-GOOD:

First and foremost, this was a really simple film -- nothing wrong with that, I guess, if we don't hold it to source-material standards -- but it managed to still do a really terrible job introducing its elements. We never saw (cringe) Major Major's shell as anything particularly special -- the old shit always has a shot of her crashing into some concrete or talks about how she'd sink in water or whatever. This one she just broke on literally every single mission until magically she's ripping apart a tank with her bare hands? It was rough. This was surprising because they started out, like, super good at this -- that African negotiation, where he plays the french lullaby and says "in the time it took her to sing that song, she learned French." PERFECT! They coulda done that level of exposition the whole way through and it woulda been great. But sadly no -- ten minutes later we reverted to sixty fucking lines of trialogue to explain what 'diving' means, and that still didn't turn out to mean anything because at the end of it Major Major just magically knows where the signal was coming from and handwave it just you know hacking or something fuckit let's go shoot Yakuzas. See they tricked me into thinking they were gonna write it well, and then they didn't write it well at all.

Second, the characters were generally awful with some great exceptions. I mentioned Aramaki already -- thought he was gonna be in the awful camp, he wound up in the good camp. Also in that camp: Togusa, Oulet, British agent whose name I never fully registered. Awful camp: pretty much everyone else. Motivations (if they surfaced at all) never made much sense for anyone else, which you can forgive in the random drones I guess, but not in the main characters, so let's focus on them. Major Major swallowing magic plot-suppression juice until she no longer swallows magic plot-suppression juice because random guy she's so bent on killing has a funky tattoo and then I mean shit man do I really have to go on, and all this supposedly after going from zero to ultraterminator in a year? Meh. It was a sad fucking excuse for an arc, summarized nicely by the clumsy Schwarenegger punchline they spent half her scenes building towards. How about White Corporate Villain though? Honestly can't remember if he literally said it out loud, but that was the full depth of his character -- well, that, plus a tedious coward-reveal at the end just to help the audience feel better about Major Major's punchline (it didn't work). Batou, I'm struggling to put into either camp.... On the one hand I thought they generally handled him fine, but then on the other, I can't decide whether he makes any sense at all as less than a full cyborg. I keep going back to the Yakuza Disco, and wondering how he can be both Cyber-Noob and also unit strongman who recklessly throws his measly organics into actual human carjacks and come out on top. He made sense when he was full-cyborg. He didn't make sense here. They didn't have a choice, based on the way they took the script -- but maybe that's a reason they shouldn't have gone that way.

Third, the whole big thing was overly personalized at the expense of nuance. There was one heroine and one villain and everything else was a smokescreen. By doing that, the movie precluded the asking of any significant questions -- "Are cyborgs still human?" "Well you're the main character, so I guess yup, checkmark, done." "How does the team differentiate itself into their different roles -- and how can a guy like Togusa contribute? What even is diversity when every part of you is in a catalogue somewhere?" "You, uh.... I think you said something about a team? What's that?" "Are the structures that govern human society prepared to deal with changes to the way we perceive and experience the universe?" "RAAAAAAH I'M A RAGING CORRUPTED CUNTBAG, RAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGHHH!!!" "But...." "RAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!!!!" You get the idea. Dumb.

But still......

I could go on for a while on either good/bad, but this is the fucking spam section, so naw. Look, I was entertained. It was not a waste of money. The theater where I watched was empty -- that's a damn shame. More people are gonna see Baywatch. GiTS: the Whitening 3D doesn't deserve that bad a reaction. It was fine. They choked the life out of it with Hollywood bullshit, but hey, that's every damn movie. Is it an affront to GiTS God? I mean..... yeah....... but who gives a shit what that guy thinks? This is America. Freedom of Religion bitch, that's the fourth amendment.

happy april fools day

You're too late, it's not april fools today.

April fools was yesterday.

@Arkaquiavel

Wait really, I missed it? Shit. I am really disappointed.

Ghost in the Shell was a good movie.

My plan was to contrast it against the 2015 reboot, more than the original source material.

On a sidenote, it is really amusing that this debate about copies being manufactured but possibly missing the soul of the original is centered around GiTS, of all things.

Ghost in the Shell was a good movie.

Well I'm going today. To prep myself I rewatched the original and the (2015 anime) reboot last night. I don't think I need to rewatch the series because at this point I've practically got both gigs memorized.

Lets talk about JonTron and his possibly racist views.

<Snipped quote by mdk> So yeh, I agree with the idea that a balance should exist, but I have doubts that a perfect balance can really be achieved, and I am afraid the push against the use of the term is going too far in the other direction.

@Vilageidiotx

I mean I'm assuming you don't mean "the push against the use of the term" to mean, like, ANY pushback. Because we certainly need SOME pushback. I'll concede that plenty of people are taking it way too far -- and if I sound defensive on that point, it's because in today's climate, even people who dare say "that's not that racist" are themselves declared racist. Which is goes into my first post in the thread, about this being a wretched choice of topic title -- simply by uttering the word 'race' in 2017, one has already stacked the deck. THAT'S the thing that needs to die. Not the subject of racism itself, but the automated gnashing of digital teeth that accompanies its discussion.

Clearly, I haven't figured out a way to slay that dragon yet, but when I come up with something I'll lead with that instead of boo-hooing for some shitty youtube 15-minutes-of-douchebaggery.

Well, let's be honest though ... They both said shit meant to make their own bases angry at the other side.

If we're being honest, they both seemed to say shit meant to make their opponent's base angry at themselves.

I'm not going to defend Hillary Clinton though. I don't want to have to do that.

This conversation gets way more fun for me if we talk about DNC chair candidates instead.

Oh dear...

Point well taken. I'm from New York so my experience is essentially the polar opposite of everything you said -- so I'm arbitrarily calling it a draw. A shitty, depressing draw.

I always thought the Christian bakery thing was kinda funny because selling cakes to gays isn't exactly a sin, biblically speaking. That being said, in this case we are talking about a backlash receiving a backlash, or else, an attempt to publicly stand against something receiving a public stand against it. Hell, even the bathroom bill is mostly just silly virtue signally (goddam that word). So some virtue signalling got virtue signaled against. That's politics in the 21st century.

Politics in the 21st century make me want to live in the dark ages.

Lets talk about JonTron and his possibly racist views.

It's only blaise if we consider these (racism not being taboo vs racism as an overused taboo) separate issues. I think it is a sliding scale, personally, where on one end (racism not being taboo) we have systematic violence, and on the other (racism as an overused taboo) we have stupid shit happening in public but being systematically contained. What I am afraid of is this fight currently taking place against the tabooification of racism is going to recreate systematic racism that right now is at least somewhat (though not completely) tamed.

@Vilageidiotx

I don't like this word 'taboo.' I'm not arguing that racism should become more okay -- I'm arguing that we oughta be a lot more critical of the use of the word (and its various derivatives). Which ties into my one-man crusade against the prefix "anti-" in political discourse, and my lesser-crusade against the "pro-" prefix. The only utility in these identity-based descriptives is divide-and-conquer exploitation of whatever issue.

Hopefully that clarification helps explain my stance, so that the following responses become more cogent:

A: Trump was elected. The race taboo didn't end his chances.

I was actually thinking of Sessions, tbh, but let's run with Trump. Hilary's entire campaign was -isms and -ogyny's and -igots and etc.'s. We don't have data to say exactly how many people bought into it, but the outright hysteria that has followed the election should be some indication. This language is dangerous and its irresponsible (and/or exploitative) use is reprehensible.

The basket of deplorables was, in my opinion, a tactical error.

Heh. Heh heh heh heh. Heh. Well that's one way of putting it. To the latter point, let's dispense with the fiction that Barrack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. But seriously -- the only issues I can think of (and I've been thinking so long that my brain turned into Marco Rubio) in which the right has 'shit on' democrat voters are homophobia and abortion. Trump ain't your GOP gay-basher, for damn sure, and the abortion shittery has been (at worst) a level shitting field, so I don't think it's really comparable. But then again for every "guns and religion" jab there's a "welfare queen" return-fire, so it might just be fair to say politics is a black hole of awfulness from which no light can escape, and move on.

Also, why is it now "Social bullying" to shop with your dollar, so to speak? I do not see the North Carolina situation as bullying at all and I think it is hyperbolic to suggest it.

I lifted that from here, NC bathroom bill was just the most quantifiable cost-analysis. Not a perfect fit, because like you said, boycott is pretty civil. The 'bullying' charge is coming from, like, you can't say anything that goes against the uberprogressive new-normal without severe backlash. Christian bakeries might've been a better example. There's a buzz-phrase in /r/T_D called "the tolerant left," so if you like I can pull up about a million other examples which are probably all better -- but again, harder to quantify than the revenue loss from NCAA ball in NC.

Ghost in the Shell was a good movie.

Please refrain from posting if you haven't seen it and only want to regurgitate the popular opinion you've heard.

@Awson

No.

Lets talk about JonTron and his possibly racist views.

It is true that taboos have been created in the past by evil regimes, but I don't think this means the creation of taboos are a slippery slope kind of thing. If a regime comes to power with a plan to commit systematic white genocide in a western country, not by the scary fear of pluralism thing white nationalists have, but by systematic violence, then I'll be proven wrong.

@Vilageidiotx

Setting the bar at "Systemic genocide" is pretty blaise. Consider: after seeing a headline "JonTron's Possibly Racist Views," are you (a) more likely or (b) less likely to watch JonTron's videos? If a candidate for office is accused of racism for 14 months, do you think that candidate is (a) more likely or (b) less likely to be elected, regardless of policy? If half the nation is thrown into a basket of deplorables, your racists, your homophobes, your misogynists, how likely is it that afterwards the two sides of the argument are going to be able to come together?

And yeah, we're talking about race in this thread because title, but this goes way beyond all that. North Carolina is losing hundreds of millions of dollars for the crime of having the same bathrooms as last year. Social bullying is the absolute norm. That's a very bad thing. The fact that it hasn't escalated to actual SYSTEMIC violence, only scattered POCKETS of violence, does not make that okay.

Lets talk about JonTron and his possibly racist views.

<Snipped quote by mdk>

I'd also contend that there is no such existence of positive outcomes that directly or indirectly stem from anti-thought taboos established for the purpose of hopefully extinguishing returns of prejudicial practices to modern life. Not only that, anti-thought taboos have a tendency throughout history to be at the center of some of the most violent, murderous regimes and political groups of all time.

@Dark Wind

I dunno about 'no such existence,' because I mean I do think for example that the workplace is more generally pleasant now that it's taboo to smack a woman's ass for no reason. It's not that benefits cannot be derived from dogmatic values -- it's just that there's a cost associated with those benefits, and the costs and benefits rarely exist in a state of equilibrium. Either it's obviously the right call, or it's really harmful. The issues we're juggling today (like, idunno, is your health insurance racist?) are generally really harmful, and we shouldn't be standing idly by while it happens.

edit: You totally did qualify that statement, so this is more strongly worded than it needs to be, but I'll just leave it anyway.