From Fred, in response to Eddie's statement on SS being played by a Korean.
"It's little shit like that does make a difference. You ever notice that when they do docudramas, shit like "Lincoln," "Titanic," "The Assassination of Jessie James by Coward Robert Ford, and even in period pieces like the remake of True Grit, close attention is paid to detail. How come in most comic to movie adaptions this attention to detail given most credence."
First, the fact that the Arashikage in the flashback scenes are speaking Korean is laziness on the part of the casting and the director but shouldn't be unexpected since the entire film is a study on laziness. It's not lazy because the actors are Korean, but because they didn't care enough that asians would pick up on them speaking Korean. Right now, Korea is going through a film renaissance. It's been booming over there for the last decade where as in Japan, not so much. I have no doubt the casting director just went to a cheap talent agency and got all of their asian characters from where there's a booming industry. It cuts down on legwork, and you can fill your stunt roles, your extra roles and just have to deal with one translator. Just having the kid yell in Korean was easier than having him learn another language and the director was lazy enough to think it wouldn't matter to American ears. There's a lot of ways they could have resolved that portion of the film. But I've heard a lot of protest over Byung-hun Lee which I think is unfortunate because he's a talented actor when he's not in crappy American films
The history of the ninja I think is a little too complex just to pigeonhole them as Japanese. There are origins that seem to illustrate the idea that the ninja was not apart of Japanese society because they weren't originally Japanese but transplants from China that settled in the mountains. Living in a defensible area, and learning a lot of tactics that both countered the samurai way of life and made them valuable, allowed for them to survive and keep their cultural roots through a clan lifestyle.
Now, for the part I always get accused for being a racist for. While Japan was settled by both SE Asian groups and groups that traveled through Mongolia, Manchuria, and the Korean peninsula, what is deemed "Japanese" is a very very very close genetic match to Korea. The reason is, the two have intermarried for hundreds of years. There were neighborhoods in Japan that were Korean and vice versa. But historically, both sides fought against each other in some bloody conflicts and have done some nasty things to one another, as recently as what the Japanese did to Korea during WW2. There's been storied oppression of Koreans in Japan. There's a lot of bad blood between the two nations. I would understand if they want to call us racist for not seeing the difference between vietnamese and japanese, but I'm more inclined to believe that the reason so many Japanese are infuriated by the adult SS being Korean is because of the bad blood and they try to use white racism to explain why we don't get it. It's no different than Ray Stevenson playing a Roman in Rome or a Russian mobster on Dexter.
"It's little shit like that does make a difference. You ever notice that when they do docudramas, shit like "Lincoln," "Titanic," "The Assassination of Jessie James by Coward Robert Ford, and even in period pieces like the remake of True Grit, close attention is paid to detail. How come in most comic to movie adaptions this attention to detail given most credence."
First, the fact that the Arashikage in the flashback scenes are speaking Korean is laziness on the part of the casting and the director but shouldn't be unexpected since the entire film is a study on laziness. It's not lazy because the actors are Korean, but because they didn't care enough that asians would pick up on them speaking Korean. Right now, Korea is going through a film renaissance. It's been booming over there for the last decade where as in Japan, not so much. I have no doubt the casting director just went to a cheap talent agency and got all of their asian characters from where there's a booming industry. It cuts down on legwork, and you can fill your stunt roles, your extra roles and just have to deal with one translator. Just having the kid yell in Korean was easier than having him learn another language and the director was lazy enough to think it wouldn't matter to American ears. There's a lot of ways they could have resolved that portion of the film. But I've heard a lot of protest over Byung-hun Lee which I think is unfortunate because he's a talented actor when he's not in crappy American films
The history of the ninja I think is a little too complex just to pigeonhole them as Japanese. There are origins that seem to illustrate the idea that the ninja was not apart of Japanese society because they weren't originally Japanese but transplants from China that settled in the mountains. Living in a defensible area, and learning a lot of tactics that both countered the samurai way of life and made them valuable, allowed for them to survive and keep their cultural roots through a clan lifestyle.
Now, for the part I always get accused for being a racist for. While Japan was settled by both SE Asian groups and groups that traveled through Mongolia, Manchuria, and the Korean peninsula, what is deemed "Japanese" is a very very very close genetic match to Korea. The reason is, the two have intermarried for hundreds of years. There were neighborhoods in Japan that were Korean and vice versa. But historically, both sides fought against each other in some bloody conflicts and have done some nasty things to one another, as recently as what the Japanese did to Korea during WW2. There's been storied oppression of Koreans in Japan. There's a lot of bad blood between the two nations. I would understand if they want to call us racist for not seeing the difference between vietnamese and japanese, but I'm more inclined to believe that the reason so many Japanese are infuriated by the adult SS being Korean is because of the bad blood and they try to use white racism to explain why we don't get it. It's no different than Ray Stevenson playing a Roman in Rome or a Russian mobster on Dexter.
^^
