The rant about "whitewashing"

Totally agree with you.

And for the people who agreed with Maninding, this is the kind of ridiculous logic you're supporting.

PC pussys are taking over the planet. The meek will inherit after all.

He apparently doesn't know anything about his own (Filipino) culture. If he did he wouldn't care about people whitewashing a Japanese film. My bro's ex in-laws are Filipino and the dad-in-law was always sour towards the Japanese after what they did to the Filipinos in WW2. To me it sounds like that guy was trying to cause a controversy.

Completely agree!! Everyone is so offended nowadays and can't wait to call someone or something racist! There is nothing racist about this film at all. The locals were all Japanese and the tourists were white. What is racist about that? Is it racist just to be white now?

Thank you for providing a refreshing, articulate and sensible retort to The Love Life Of An Asian Guy’s florid complaints. The only statement I disagreed with was: “[the] filmmakers who clearly didn't do anything wrong.” What they did wrong was to make a very bad, silly film – but that is really a question of taste, not racism.

Along the same lines: “Plenty of Japanese movie fans have posted making it abundantly clear that they don't see anything wrong with the movie” certainly proves that there are Japanese people who are not particularly bright. One of Love Life’s, (LL), complaints seemed to be that the Japanese are incorrectly viewed as being uniformly intelligent, wealthy and free from mental disorders. Far from criticizing the film, LL should be overjoyed that its existence is puncturing some of these myths.

When I was a little kid I used to watch Speed Racer on television. By the time I was six years old I had lost any illusions that the Japanese were all brilliant, rich and possessed of perfect mental hygiene. I didn’t need to see any tentacle porn to learn that Japanese people are human beings and therefore can have issues just like everyone else.

One or two other points about LL’s screed were particularly striking, and frankly made me wonder if the whole thing was just an elaborate prank:

1. LL implies quite clearly that authorities in Japan are anxious to minimize publicity about a suicide rate of supposedly epidemic proportions, and the forest that many people use as a place to end their lives. This may very well be true, and if it is, then the first place LL should be directing his passionate, fervent, evangelical fire is toward those very authorities. They are in a far better position than just about anyone else on the planet to assess the matter and do something constructive about it.

With that in mind, consider what happens in the film: the sister (twin 1) who lives in the US receives a telephone call from some unidentified official in Japan telling her that her sister (twin 2) was seen going into a forest where many go to kill themselves. And that’s it. Twin 1 tries to get more information, find out how long twin 2 has been missing, if anybody is looking for her, and so on, but the official (in a bizarre, almost German or Serbian accent) only verbally shrugs his shoulders, says there is nothing to do and hangs up. This unsatisfactory exchange is the film’s primary rationale for why twin 1 feels the need to jump on a plane immediately.

After arriving in Japan twin 1 wastes time wandering around looking for a good sushi bar and snuggling up to her computer in bed to look at old pictures of the missing twin 2 and other such nonsense, instead of knocking down the doors of the police, pestering the US Embassy, looking for a good private detective, or even just a translator since she doesn’t speak Japanese.

(This part of the film did betray some technological bias: to wit, according to much of Movieland, every damned laptop in the universe is made by Apple, and they always make sure you know it, too – but that’s really another matter.)

Now, when twin 1 finally gets to the forest she encounters the same attitude: nobody can help her, and more importantly, nobody is interested, except an American journalist, based in Australia, (apparently just so he can use the term “walkabout” once and not sound too fatuous), who picks her up in another bar. Lo & Behold, he is going into the forest with a Japanese guide the very next day and takes her along. This supposedly accidental encounter is how twin 1 is able to actually look for twin 2 at all. What’s striking is that, up to this point, apart from the initial telephone call, no one of Japanese descent is really involved – at least not in a pragmatic way.

The film becomes even more ridiculous and while watching it, I took the above plot points to simply be sloppy writing. But perhaps the filmmakers were reflecting and highlighting the officially indifferent attitude LL griped about. Far from adding to the problem, if anything, the film called attention to it.

Furthermore, the film was almost exclusively shot (both studio and location) in Serbia. I think only two or three very brief scenes at a grammar school, an airport and a hotel view were actually shot in Japan. Maybe a street scene or two, as well. I have no doubt it was less expensive to shoot the film in Serbia, (it seems Eastern Europe and the Balkans are all the rage for mid-to-low level horror movie locations these days).

But now I wonder if another reason the production wasn’t in Japan was because the filmmakers got a chilly reception when the folks who supply filming permits and such things learned what the movie was going to be about. I doubt the producers of Lost in Translation (2003) had many difficulties of this type. If there really is any whitewashing (in the traditional sense of the term) going on here, it seems to be by the Japanese authorities.

Once again, LL’s criticisms of the movie are on a very unstable foundation. Maybe actually seeing the movie first might have helped. Drawing conclusions and boycotting something you know nothing-to-very-little about sure sounds an awful lot like bigotry to me.

Of course, offering to help is one thing, but it has always been my understanding that it is, or used to be, generally considered rude to try and force your assistance on capable strangers who may not need it and haven’t requested it. That is the self-righteous behavior of an intrusive busybody, not a noble humanitarian.

However, LL is clearly an expert on these matters, bravely adopts other people’s causes as his own – whether they exist or not – so he must be fully inoculated against the moral turpitude and failings less virtuous mortals suffer from. It just isn’t possible for someone so opposed to bigotry to be at all bigoted themselves; and we know LL is very opposed to bigotry because he wrote and told us so himself. And I had an uncle who discovered a cure for which there was no disease.

2. It is no secret that Hollywood – particularly in past times – almost exclusively cast actors of European descent in leading roles regardless of the character they were playing. It also is no secret that such characterizations have ranged from ridiculous to benign to blatantly racist. (Just as an aside: it is an actors job to use their talent to convince the audience they are the person they are pretending to be. It doesn’t seem that portraying people of widely different backgrounds and heritages is inherently racist – that question is decided by the nature of the portrayal.)

Focusing on representations of Japanese characters, it is interesting that LL passed over the plethora of WWII-era (and later) movies, or Peter Lorre starring in the Mr. Moto series – two instances that immediately come to mind. Instead, LL provides only two examples of Hollywood’s endemic racism toward Asian characters, and more than anything else, the ones he chose made me wonder if his whole tumult was just a spoof.

One is a movie that, as I understand it, stars Scarlett Johansson (of Lost in Translation fame) called Ghost in the Shell (2017). I can’t help but be skeptical that she would actually be portraying a character of Asian descent, as it would seem to be rather ludicrous, but who knows? An Egyptian actor named Omar Sharif once played a very believable Russian in the title role of David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago (1965).

However, since Ghost in the Shell isn’t slated for release until March 31, 2017, it might not be out of line to assume that, like The Forest, the chances are excellent LL hasn’t even seen it. Unless one happens to be an industry insider with the right credentials, it appears one must possess their soul in patience before accurately evaluating the film’s doctrinal purity on these points.

But what really had impact was LL’s other exemplar: The Conqueror (1956), starring John Wayne as Temujin, better known as Genghis Khan, and directed by that old-time Hollywood middleweight Dick Powell, (another case of a pretty good actor thinking he would make an even better director – we’ve seen the results many times). It has been decades since I thought of this particular strip of celluloid, but I have actually seen it. It took about two hours to watch and twenty years to forget.

The Conqueror is a sixty-year-old, laughably horrible vanity project of Mr. Wayne’s that opened to deservedly awful reviews and poor audience attendance. Even John Wayne’s most ardent fans have a hard time painting a smiley face on this ill-conceived disaster. Like the belief that Richard Grieco really is an actor, nobody ever took it seriously, except possibly the people who made it – and I wouldn’t even count on that. Suffice to say that it is now October 3, 2016 as I write, and at this moment The Conqueror’s IMDb rating clocks in at a very generous 3.4.

According to Wikipedia, the late Mr. Khan, one time ruler of the Mongol Empire and not the mortal enemy of Captain James Tiberius Kirk, was born in 1162 and died on August 18, 1227 – he’s a bit past his relevance expiration date, for some things, at least. John Wayne is still dead as well. So is Dick Powell, and the expert prognosis is that none of them are going to recover anytime soon. I can’t believe anyone outside of a university sociology department would seriously propose this ancient, terrible movie as a compelling example of contemporary anything except very poor judgment. And I wouldn’t even try to speculate on how LL came to learn of its existence, but I’ll bet the farm he hasn’t seen this one either.

Moreover, without doubt John Wayne must have had his good points, but a range of acting abilities and sophistication were not two of them. Hollywood appreciated his popularity but never had any illusions about his capabilities. According to lore, Mr. Wayne lobbied fiercely for the title role in Franklin J. Schaffner’s excellent film Patton (1970), but the character’s complexities were deemed way beyond him. He tried every door – and he knew which ones to try – but they were all closed. And a darned good thing too: it is one of George C. Scott’s outstanding performances.

If these are the only additional examples LL was able to come up with to support his thesis – one new release (or pre-release) that nobody you know has yet seen and may not even contain any “whitewashing”, and another that probably required digging in a musty, dusty, damp, silverfish-infested basement to unearth – I fail to find his strident yelps at all convincing.

By the way, Serbia has beautiful forests.


XYZ

Do not follow the Internet yurei, do not listen to them they are not real. They will tell you lies, they will cry fake tears, they will claim transgressions that never happened... they will do all this hoping it destroys you. Beware.