harry potter and the half blood prince looks fucking sweet. that’s going to have the good visuals and good plot ala star trek, compared to good visuals and ‘this doesn’t make a lick of sense’ for transformers and 2012.
i don’t even care that daniel radcliffe et al are going to be like 25 by the time they finish filming part two of book seven; keeping the insanely good cast the same for the whole series was about the best thing they’ve done on those movies, and those are excellent movies already, some quirks in the adaptation aside.
even the side character students who get like one line per movie are perfect. it’s ridiculous that potter can pull this off so magnificently down to the most obscure little people, but avatar can’t even find three asian kids. (haha, it always comes back to that!)
seriously, though. dragonball casting a white kid as goku? the movie looked terrible and was only marginally based on the manga. i mean, i love chow yun fat, but he doesn’t look anything like master roshi. so i’ll give them a pass.
speed racer? white ppl, fine. john goodman was a brilliant call, and speed was never explicitly japanese, at least in the american version. so that’s fine too.
the trick with avatar, though, is that speed racer didn’t spend the entire movie wearing chinese kung fu robes, doing kung fu based on chinese mysticism, and hanging out IN ANCIENT FUCKING CHINA.
if you’re going to nail all the details of the cultural elements of the show, except the race of the three main characters, you’re actually making it worse. you can cast white kids only if you take the complex tale of warring asiatic nations and reset it in new york city in the future or some shit. you can’t keep the medieval chinese setting and plug in your kid brother as magic bruce lee and expect that to fly.
i mean, you can and you do, but you shouldn’t.
like, maybe you can make a samurai champloo movie, and cast zachary quinto as jin, milo ventimiglia as mugen, and hayden panettiere as fuu. running around in an otherwise faithfully rendered edo-period japan.
assholes.
