Ghost in the Shell

Year 10, Day 363 - 12/29/18 - Movie #3,100

BEFORE: This is it, my last film of the year.  I worked out this schedule months ago to end here, roughly on or around this date, so I could still have a couple of days left in 2018 to write my recap post for the year.  (Truthfully, I've already started it, but I'm going to need the next 2 days to finish it.). Like the U.S. government, I've been in shutdown mode for the last week or so, but that was necessary to celebrate Christmas in a different state (physically as well as mentally) and so I could concentrate on the holiday AND the work I had to do at the studio to get Kickstarter rewards mailed out before the break.  You know, the job that pays me money and allows me to devote my leisure time to things like movies and comic books?  Once in a while it has to take priority.

But why here, why now?  Why end on this movie, which doesn't even really seem like it's up my alley?  I've never paid much attention to manga or things derived from it.  I got this film months ago, back when I could still dub films to DVD, and paired it with "Atomic Blonde", though now I think the two films don't have much in common except for strong female leads who fight bad guys.  I guess we'll see.  But this film got earmarked as one of my "one-linkables", meaning that at the moment, it only links to one other film on my list, which was "Rough Night".  With a largely Japanese cast, that's not too surprising.  But the last day of the year is a perfect place for such a film, because I'm going to start a new chain on January 1, and I don't require that the last film of one year links to the first film of the next - it's a time for renewal and starting fresh, right?

Of course, I could sit on this film for another few months, and eventually it would link up to "Avengers: Endgame", but I figure that film will have such a big cast that there should be at least a dozen different ways to link to it.  So I'd rather clear the books of this one, with Scarlett Johansson carrying over from "Rough Night", and be done with it.

THE PLOT: In the near future, Major Mila Killian is the first of her kind: A human saved from a terrible crash who is cyber-enhanced to be a perfect soldier devoted to stopping the world's most dangerous criminals.

AFTER: Lord help me, what did I just watch?  I kind of figured this movie might not be my cup of tea, but I barely understood what was going on throughout the whole film.  I've got to pause here and read the recap on Wiki just to figure out what the hell happened....

OK, here's what I've been able to determine - this is set in a future-era Japan (or perhaps Hong Kong, because they never really say...) where humans are commonly enhancing themselves with cybernetics.  Androids also exist, but their A.I. is still just not as good as human intelligence - so into this mix comes Major, the first human brain transplanted into a robot body.  Though she can't remember her past, she still retains emotions and her spirit, which represent the title of the film, she's like a ghost in a shell.  Her back-story is that she was the sole survivor of a cyberterrorist attack that she can't remember, but now she works for Section 9, an anti-terrorist government bureau.  We see her and her team fighting against robotic geishas who attack a conference of businessmen from Hansa Robotics, which just happens to be the company that built her.  This leads her to an entity that can "hack" enhanced people and make them do things, and eventually to Kuze, the man/machine behind it all.  Then she gets framed for something and the plot gets all murky again, but she eventually learns who she really is - sorry, was - and naturally it's all connected to Kuze and how she came to be what she is.

If you don't know the manga story behind this, and I don't, then it comes across as sort of a pastiche of other films set in the tech-driven future, like "Robocop", "Blade Runner" and "The Matrix".  And I think those films will stand the test of time, even if their sequels don't.  History may not remember this one, because it's a re-tread of the future visions that have come before, and have not happened yet.  It's funny, because technological progress has supposedly gotten faster and faster, like I have to tell people in their 20's about a time when there were no smart-phones and no internet, and they just stare at me like they can't even conceive of that.  But then, why does the future with the flying cars, the cybernetic organs and the VR dreamscape always seem like it's still 20 or 30 years away?  My guess is that Hollywood's entertainment conglomerates still make megabucks from dangling this future in front of us, but if it were HERE, well, then they couldn't really do that, could they?  By the time the super-great future tech is here, I may be too old to enjoy it.

But back to the film.  Major's story also reminds me of Wolverine's, another character who was turned into an enhanced soldier against his will, and didn't remember his past for the longest time.  He also had a connection to Japan, so now I wonder how much of Wolverine's story was ripped off from typical manga plot points.  In his solo comics he would often visit Japan or Madripoor (a fictional Singapore-like island nation with advanced tech, like an Asian Wakanda) and he even had a Japanese fiancée for a time, and he'd end up fighting with Silver Samurai or Viper or other Asian villains.  And now that there's also a female Wolverine (sometimes called X-23) it's hard for me to know which stories are ripping off which.

This film got some bad press in the U.S. for casting a Caucasian actress in the lead role of an Asian character, then got even more bad press when it was revealed that they tested CGI that would make her look more Asian.  Yeah, that's only going to make things worse.  I understand that they'd think that Scarlett Johansson would put more asses in the theater seats, but then if they made her look Asian, then what's the point of casting her in the first place?  Plus it's racially insensitive twice over - "we want an actress to look Asian, but not to actually BE Asian".  Same goes for Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in the "Dr. Strange" movie - sure, a white actress in her 30's can play an Asian sorcerer who's hundreds of years old, but is it really the BEST casting idea?  Then if they had put her in heavy "old" make-up to look more like the character, that would just be like admitting the mistake.

I don't know, part of me hates to end the year like this, with a film I didn't really care for and barely understood.  I turned down chances to see "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" (which could have linked from "Rough Night" via Zoe Kravitz) and "Aquaman" (which could have linked from "Office Christmas Party" via Randall Park) to leave the final slot open for this film, and now that seems like a terrible decision. Time will tell if I made the right decision as far as linking is concerned.  Oh, well, at least I've got the 2018 recap post to look forward to - but I'll work on that tomorrow - and then a new Movie Year begins in just a couple of days.  Where will that one start, and more importantly, how will it end?  I have no idea about that last part - just as I could never have predicted when starting 2018 with "Pee-Wee's Big Holiday" that it would end like this, not with a bang but instead with a very confused whimper, and a shrug.

Also starring "Beat" Takeshi Kitano (last seen in "Johnny Mnemonic"), Michael Carmen Pitt (last seen in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"), Pilou Asbaek (last seen in "Ben-Hur"), Chin Han (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Juliette Binoche (last seen in "Godzilla"), Peter Ferdinando (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Kaori Momoi, Kaori Yamamoto, Andrew Morris, Andrew Stehlin, Lasarus Ratuere, Danusia Samal, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Wincott (last seen in "Forsaken"), Yutaka Izumihara (last seen in "Unbroken"), Tawanda Manyimo, Daniel Henshall, Rila Fukushima (last seen in "The Wolverine"), Chris Obi (last seen in "The Counsellor"), Adwoa Aboah, Pete Teo, Hugh Han.

RATING: 3 out of 10 giant holograms

Rough Night

Year 10, Day 362 - 12/28/18 - Movie #3,099

BEFORE: I'm back from Christmas break, we had a good visit with my parents, saw family and friends, ate a great Christmas dinner and opened some very handy presents, like Marvel DVDs and a toaster and a waffle-maker.  I had no luck at Foxwoods Casino, but my wife came out ahead, then we ate at the buffet, or rather, the substitute buffet since the main one was undergoing renovations.

I went back to work yesterday, and when I got home I found myself without anything dinner-like to put on a waffle, like fried chicken or pulled pork, so I stepped outside to go to the deli around the corner, only to see the sky suddenly get filled with blue light.  Now, I've been a New Yorker for 33 years, and I've seen a lot of crazy things, from steam-pipe explosions to terrorist attacks.  I was here for the big blackout of 2003, and I was about 1 block away from the FIRST attack on the World Trader Center back in 1993.  But I'd never seen the sky fill up with blue light before - my first thought was that it was some kind of explosion, but I never heard a loud BANG of any kind.  So my second thought was that there was a powerful spotlight a few blocks away in Queens promoting something, only there was no beam of light, and the lighting was very irregular.  In my mind, that left only an alien landing, or a North Korean nuclear bombing of Manhattan.

In the latter case, I figured the shock-wave would hit soon, and I'd be vaporized, and one of my last thoughts would be "I wonder if the deli has any small cans of SPAM".  And if it was an alien landing, I figured that would be on the news at 11.  It turned out to be neither, it was an explosion at a Con Ed substation in Astoria, Queens - roughly between me and Manhattan, so you can see how I incorrectly guessed that Manhattan had been blown up.  Oh, sure, I'd lose some friends, my comic shop and some very nice restaurants, but at least the upside would be that I wouldn't have to go to work on Friday.

I've got two more films to watch in 2018, and a few days to do it.  I'm including this one because it depicts a wild night of partying, and New Year's Eve is coming up.  Jillian Bell carries over from "Office Christmas Party", and so do two other actors. 

THE PLOT: Things go terribly wrong for a group of girlfriends who hire a male stripper for a bachelorette party in Miami.

AFTER: Well, it's not really a New Year's Eve party, obviously this is about a bachelorette party, but it's more or less the same, right?  And this feels like it follows in the vein of not only "Office Christmas Party" but also films like "The Hangover" and "Bridesmaids" - when those last two films hit big in 2009 and 2011, I figured we'd soon see a whole bunch of knock-off films.  This feels like one of them, because it's another group of 5/6 women, partying as a wedding approaches, and if you just replace Kristen Wiig with Scarlett Johansson, and real Australian Rebel Wilson with pretend Australian Kate McKinnon, I think you're halfway there.  Make the cast a little more diverse by adding an African-American and some gender-fluidity, and ride the wave of the #metoo movement.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too cynical - but that's how movies get greenlit, by taking one movie that was a boffo smash, tacking on a couple of current cultural trends, and then some studio writes you a check.  If I pitched something like "Mission: Impossible", only with a female lead of color and a male white villain, to ride the current trends in Hollywood, I guarantee I'd get some nibbles.  This is obviously how "Oceans Eight" and the "Tomb Raider" re-boot came into being, right?

But I'm left with the same feeling that I had after watching "Office Christmas Party", which is that the writers probably never attended the type of party in question in real life, because there's never been an office party like that before, or a bachelorette party like this one.  There's the tiniest foothold in reality, but things spin out of control so much, so fast, that it's impossible to believe that all of this, or really, any of this, could really take place.   And every character is an extreme caricature, so that it's hard to believe in any of them, or take any of their actions seriously.  Take the polyamorous couple that lives next door to the girls' rented Miami house - they're like a cartoon version of swingers, there's no attempt to really explain or explore their lifestyle, they just see a pretty girl they both like, and suddenly they're like horny zombies, completely out of control.  Since it's too hard to explain the concept of an open marriage, instead they just become pure representations of id, always on the prowl.  Surely there must be more to it than that.

Similarly, every character here seems to be taken to the extreme of whatever it is that makes them tick.  The activist character can't be just a regular person working for social change at the grass-roots level, instead she has to be the kind of person who chains herself to a tree in order to stop a forest from being cut down, and the best friend who comes on too strong can't just be a little overboard with her planning and her over-sharing, she's got to be WAY far in that direction in an attempt to mine some comedy gold here.  The lead character is no better, she's running for a state senate seat, so she's practically a Hillary clone, someone who is smart and deserves the office, but can't seem to master getting relatable human warmth across in her speeches, and her opponent is a man who's tweeting dick pics, but still somehow ahead in the polls, because he's a MAN.

So I wish the feminist agenda here could have been dialed back just a bit - I mean, sure it's great to see strong women, but does that mean that every male character has to be either an idiot, a stripper or a criminal?  If a man made a film that depicted every woman as one of those things, I bet there would be an uproar about it.  It seems more like if equality is the goal, then this film way overshot it.  And in the one heterosexual relationship in this film that is championed, the groom-to-be mistakenly thinks his fiancée has dumped him, so he desperately drives across three states wearing diapers, like that "sad astronaut" woman did a few years ago.  Right, you're sure to win her back if you take your friend's advice and wear diapers on a long car trip, while pounding Red Bulls and various drugs.

Naturally when events spiral out of control, it's a challenge to know how FAR to make them spin out of control, though recent trends in film have suggested that there's no such thing as too far.  But then when things get so far out of hand, it's a challenge to resolve everything in a way that feels legit, and that's my way of saying that things all work out in the end, but it just happens much too quickly, and therefore unbelievably.  The girls all panic when an accident takes out their male stripper, but the plot ends up going through unbelievable contortions to explain why that turns out to be OK, and none of them end up getting into trouble.

NITPICK POINTS are plentiful here, starting with the fact that the lead character says she can't be seen drinking or doing drugs, because she's running for public office.  Yet as soon as the wine gets poured or the cocaine gets, umm, lined up, there's no stopping her.  Did she just quickly forget that she shouldn't do those things?  Or is she so weak-willed that she caves under the slightest bit of peer pressure?  Or is this just an inconsistent character?

More N.P.s come around when everyone with any sense obviously knows what should be done when an accident occurs, namely call 911 for an ambulance and/or the police.  But these common-sense human actions are immediately rejected, because reasons, and therefore the situations are allowed to spiral further.  But it almost goes without saying that these people should have contacted authorities much, much sooner and could have avoided a lot of frustration, but then of course the film would only be a half-hour long.

And a little bit of research into what goes on at a real bachelorette party would, I'm guessing, have proven that nobody, nobody poses for pictures as a "human friend-ipede".  Because why would they? And do male strippers still dress up like police officers when they show up at parties?  For that matter, did they ever?  Since it's illegal to impersonate a police officer, I'm guessing that this practice has probably happened more times in movies than in real life.  For that matter, I'm calling another NITPICK POINT since a stripper (male or female) and a prostitute (male or female) are two very different things, yet here they're practically interchangeable.  Not cool, ladies.

Also starring Scarlett Johansson (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Kate McKinnon (also carrying over from "Office Christmas Party"), Ilana Glazer (last seen in "The Night Before"), Zoe Kravitz (last seen in "No Reservations"), Paul W. Downs, Demi Moore (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Ty Burrell (last seen in "Fair Game"), Ryan Cooper (last seen in "The Great Gatsby"), Colton Haynes, Dean Winters (last seen in "John Wick"), Enrique Murciano (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), Bo Burnham, Eric André (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Hasan Minhaj, Patrick Carlyle, Karan Soni (also carrying over from "Office Christmas Party"), Peter Francis James (last seen in "True Story"), Matty Blake, Devin Ratray, Bob the Drag Queen.

RATING: 4 out of 10 confiscated cell phones