KManX89 said:
MrWayne said:
My stance on this whole racewashing thing is, I don't care as long as the movie is good. Those who adopt the source material should decide how stricktly they wanna stick to it.
It's easy to point at negative examples for "racewashing" but hard to point at positive examples because the whole point of well made "racewashing" is that you don't notice it.
A few examples of movies or other works of art who stick very loosely to their source material and/or "racewashed" characters:
-The Departed(2006): Whitewashed the whole cast and location
-Oldboy (2003): very loose adaptation of the manga which definitely benefited the film, also racewashed all characters to korean
-Ghost in the Shell(1995): Major Kusanagi is almost a different character as in the manga
-superhero comics: comics have a long tradition of constant reimagination
Also this thought that "actors should only be casted based on how good they play/ suites the role and not based on their skin color" is very naive. for many roles the skin color determinate how well a actor is suited for said role, I doubt they would have casted a black/asian actor for Derek Vinyard in American History X if only they had played better than Edward Norton.
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Except, by completely ignoring the source material, it's no longer an adaptation, it's strictly a reimagining of said work, big difference. If they completely change the character, it is no longer that character except in name (which is where the whole GINO-Godzilla In Name Only acronym came from for Godzilla 98). It would be like if they made Batman a living humanoid bat who eats people in the middle of New York City instead of the technological crime fighter we all know him to be from the comics. You can claim "it's up to the adapters of said work" all night and day, but that shit wouldn't jive with anyone and for good reason. Or hell, if they changed Superman into a transgendered alien or gave Ellen Ripley a sex change in a hypothetical reboot of Alien (turned her into Allen Ripley), I guarantee you it would be met with the same level of shit-flinging, it's easy to see why.
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Well then it's a reimagining. Are reimaginings a priori bad? You just gave a bunch of worst case scenarios for a reimagining, I give you a best case scenario, West Side Story a modern reimagining of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
You see, it all depends on whether the adaptation /reimagining is good or not.
