Problems for Live Action Films
By blog on Jun. 25, 2009.
After my last post where I wrote of the live-action film of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I have had more thoughts on both that movie and live-action remakes in general.
Okay, first off, as for Avatar… I have to say, I am actually leaning more towards racebending.com’s perception of things. I mean, Katara and Sokka and their people are based on the Inuit… and the casting call for them stated ‘Caucasian or any other ethnicity’. Doesn’t that seem odd? The two actors picked to play these characters are pretty damn Anglo-Saxon looking, and I find that just a little bit sad. It would have been really exciting to see some up and coming actors who at least remotely looked Inuit. So, whilst I will not boycott the movie, I can clearly see that there is some stuff going on there that I would rather wasn’t.
Now, on to what I wanted to say about live-action remakes in general. When you see an actor cast in the role of a character that has only been either cartoon or an image in your imagination – as with characters from books – it is so very highly unlikely that the actor will look exactly like you imagined them that it is sort of ridiculous to try. What has to be attained is the right ‘feel’. Not everyone was perfectly happy with casting choices from The Lord of the Rings, but no one can doubt that the cast really ‘owned’ their characters. They managed to embody them, even if they weren’t the spitting image.
Now, that’s not to say that it doesn’t matter at all what the actors look like, I mean, I care about the Avatar actors so there’s proof to that. But I am also extremely leery of who is going to be cast in The Song of Ice and Fire series that HBO is going to make. I really hope this series will be good, and the actors cast good, but not overly known ones. I think that would work best, I mean, that’s what worked so well for the Harry Potter movies.
On the flip side to that, the Cowboy Bebop film is going to be starring Keanu Reeves as Spike, but I honestly think that could work. Either way, with all these things, people care. People love Cowboy Bebop, they love Song of Ice and Fire, so what they don’t want to see is crappy remakes of them.
Category: Technology