Whitewashing!: Netflix's "Death Note" movie blasted for lack of Asian cast

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/23/entertainment/death-note-whitewashing/index.html

Really?

The cast looks pretty good for a story taking place in America, and it's not Asian free, Watari is being played by Paul Nakauchi, so WTF is the problem?

Some people apparently have too much time on their hands.

Let's just outsource all of Hollywood to China.
They're gonna own it in 10 years anyway.

It is stupid, though. There aren't any Japanese actors to play characters written as Japanese? We don't have to have white guys slathering on brown paint to play Mexicans anymore. This isn't the 1950s, it's 2017. If you're going to make an explicitly stated cast of characters who are Japanese, then hire Japanese actors to play that cast. Otherwise, don't say that the characters are Japanese. This applies to other areas as well. Seriously, get your shit together, Hollywood.

I remember back in 2002 when some group got mad because the Attack of the Clones made HISPANICS looks bad because Jango Fett looked Hispanic.

Never mind the fact that Temuera Morrison is a Maori islander from New Zealand. That's irrelevant. He looks Hispanic, so that means that Hollywood thinks that all Mexicans are criminals.

You can't make this racial nonsense up.

I think WordForge has too many white people. I vote we replace @John and @Paladin with Asian actors.

One the one hand, yuck, there doesn't need to be a live-action version of Death Note, certainly not one re-set in America.

On the other hand, other than the Shinigamis, there's pretty much nothing essential that's culturally Japanese about the series. Hell, the title and instructions in the titular artifact are written in English.

If they got Willem Defoe to play Ryuuk, I might give it a watch.

There was already a Japanese live action adaptation of Death Note. This is yet another adaptation. People don't seem to understand that adaptations do not have to be exactly like the source material(s). Now, I don't know all the details, but I'm guessing this is much like every other foreign film that has been adapted for American cinema, and has American characters in an American setting. For example, The Ring takes place in the US and not Japan. Having it do so would actually be completely pointless, because the film that it was based off of exists. Death Note exists. Making a live action version exactly like the anime is pointless because the anime exists. Making it exactly like the 2006 Japanese film would also be pointless, because that film already exists. This is no different than any other foreign film, The Sound of Music included, which was remade for an American audience, so it is stupid and pointless to whine about white-washing, even setting aside the double standard the kind of people who typically whine about "white-washing" tend to have. You'd be further ahead to whine that these remakes do not need to be made and people should just watch the originals with subtitles. Most people wouldn't go for that, so you'd be wasting your time, but it would be less pointless than whining about "white-washing" in an instance like this.

You don't have a "Chinaman's chance" of making that happen. Uh oh....I spoke too soon! I think....I think I'm.....

How the hell is casting a white actor to play a white character "whitewashing"?

You could replace me with John Cho. You'd even get to keep the name!

Yeah, that's a bad example.

Or our non-union Mexican equivalents...

There was actually quite the hullabaloo about that.

Even though the original character was a white guy, "certain parties" think that the live action guy should have been Asian, because of "cultural appropriation" and all such nonsense, because apparently the mere fact that the original character WAS white was somehow intolerable.

But when Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four is suddenly a black guy after having been a white character for sixty years, why then any actor can play any role and it's all good.

God save us from this kind of horse shit.

When white characters get turned black we are told they are just modernizing it but when non-white characters get made white those same people cry racism. Fuck those racist whiners. The owners of the intellectual property get to do what they want and the rest is just race baiting nonsense.

True story: The guy who wrote that song was on drugs and thought his penis was shrinking thus the "I think I am turning Japanese" part. He said it on a radio interview many years ago.

Light Yagami was renamed Light Turner and is notably a white dude in this version.

That said, it's America so I don't expect an entire Asian cast....but Seattle has a huge Asian population, so I don't it's crazy that the lead could stay Japanese (or half-Japanese if TIIC are too lazy to find two Asian actors to play his parents).



Also, I'm just gonna leave this here

Case closed

All that being said:

All of this.

Oh holy, I was joking about them getting Willem Defoe, but they did!! I'm on this!

You get full credit for intellectual consistency, but I have to deduct marks for not outright stating that you support the characters remaining Japanese.

B-

For me, the inconsistency was that Sue wasn't made black as well (unless the movie made mention of one of them being adopted).

Oh, and also that it was a particularly suck ass F4 adaptation in spite of that.

I didn't really care about that and I don't care about things like Scarlett Johanson playing the Major in Ghost in the Shell.

I go to the movies to be entertained, that's it.

That there are people moaning about Iron Fist having a white guy when the character is actually white is beyond fucking ridiculous though.

My concern in these matters is that the movies we're talking about are adaptations, either from other movies or some other media, like comic books. Presumably the people who make these adaptations do so because the original was just that, original. And successful and popular. So why, then, would you adapt a work from another media and make random or downright stupid changes to it? If you don't want to respect your source material, write something original rather than making a bastardized copy.

Imagine if, for example, someone decided that they were going to adapt Bloom County into an animated movie, but Opus wasn't going to be a penguin, he was going to be a lobster. Or Charlie Brown wasn't going to be a depressed little kid but a streetwise lesbian teenage girl on the run from the evil L.I.N.U.S. organization. That's the level of stupid many of these things reach.

Hold on, now, I'm liking the Charlie Brown idea. That may need to happen.

Hey, since you missed the original thread on account of being dead, what do you think about the new Spiderman movie casting a mixed race actress as Mary Jane Watson? Some folks here were crazy upset.

@garamet @Diacanu, stop everything you're doing and make this pitch into a movie.

Ooooh, edgy. Get this one into production immediately!

Can't we wait for this to be an acting disaster before they whine about a white actor playing a white guy? Maybe my version of death note is different, but both light and L were not Japanese in my version.

L was....well, L. According to the authors of the series, he was a mix of several races.

But given the rest of Light's family weren't sporting Hollywood Spawn names and he lived in Tokyo, I'm not sure how he could be mistaken for anything else but Japanese.