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kajnrig

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Everything posted by kajnrig

  1. kajnrig
    This is the only article I've read that has any sort of numbers for the international gross so far, and it paints a grim picture for its success, though I predict it'll be mildly successful in the end. NOTE that it dives into the whitewashing issue insofar as it affected returns. (tl;dr - Not very, or at least unquantifiably.) I know we've had our fair share of discussion on the matter, so I'll quote the only relevant part below: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/ghost-shell-how-a-complex-concept-whitewashing-critics-kept-crowds-away-990661 It will have to make up some $50-60 million in China and Japan to cover its production budget, and another $100 million for marketing (at least that's what I'm guessing; apparently it's common practice to ballpark marketing costs at 90-110% of production costs). That's a slightly more daunting task than I originally thought. I doubt it'll make much in Japan, since Japan just isn't big with theater (Pacific Rim, since someone mentioned it earlier, had a total of $14 million there), meaning China will be the one to look at (Pacific Rim in China made $112 million). (Numbers from Box Office Mojo.)
  2. kajnrig
    You mean the arm cannons/behind-cockpit guns? Those are railguns?
  3. kajnrig
    It would have been too much hassle. Even the Hs only has the most minimal gold parts, with the majority of colors being represented by the decals. They would have had to engineer two entirely separate molds for ostensibly the same(ish) craft.
  4. kajnrig
    Dang it. I was looking through my trove of kits trying to find mine so I could scan the decal sheet for you, only to realize that I don't have a 1/48 kit of the VF-1. (The YF-19, yes. The VF-1, no.) I felt really sad about that. Best of luck.
  5. kajnrig
    Hm... I'd say go with the 1/48 ones based on size alone. It'll do better to scale them down than to scale the 1/72 decals up, if you get my meaning. Do you have any particular decals in mind? Or are you just hoping to "mimic" the decals/placement from the kit to the toy? (I mean, obviously it won't just be a matter of scaling down to 1/60 anyway, the proportions are too different, but hopefully you know what I mean.)
  6. kajnrig
    From Appledaily Facebook page: April Fools joke or not, I'd watch it. It looks dumb in the best way.
  7. kajnrig
    I dunno, I think that one peaks at 2 like most trilogies do. Maybe the Star Wars prequels? But I like Phantom Menace more than Attack of the Clones, and even if Revenge of the Sith is the best, it's still not good...
  8. kajnrig
    Just got the final ending of Nier, some 70+ hours in (with half of that time spent on the first playthrough). Good game. Go play it. EDIT: Make sure you backup your save periodically.
  9. kajnrig
    Dang. And I'd been working on a response to various points over the course of the last few days, too. Oh well then. In trying to answer my own question, I came across this: http://movieweb.com/ghost-in-shell-movie-2017-box-office-predictions/ It's predicting a not too hot debut (10-15 million domestic) owing to competition from the likes of Beauty and the Beast and Power Rangers (though the whitewashing certainly doesn't help much either). It also had this press-release synopsis that isn't really spoiler-y but is enough so to warrant it, methinks. Bolded are parts that stuck out to me for better or for worse. Also of interest was this Forbes article, which focuses on the third trailer and potential box office numbers compared to other big March releases (with luck, it'll perform around the same as Lucy owing to ScarJo influence): https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2017/03/27/scarlett-johanssons-ghost-in-the-shell-gets-a-last-ditch-trailer/#448bc17445e9
  10. kajnrig
    This showed up randomly in my Youtube feed. Some info on the reviewers: One of them saw the original movie, the other didn't, neither have seen or read anything else GitS. tl;dr = Falls far short of the original(s), but isn't an out-and-out trainwreck. Middle of the road, underwhelming (basically what I expected it to be, plus racism). Seems that's the opinion of most people here as well.
  11. kajnrig
    Just paid for my two re-releases. Hope everybody got theirs as well.
  12. kajnrig
    5:50 - Apparently yes. Visor and veil.
  13. kajnrig
    I'm not art historian, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'd argue there's nothing about the "Japanese expression" of anime that precludes it from being anime. Actually, it's precisely that expression, those ideas applied to animation that originated in the Japanese industry, that make it the movement that it is. To put it another way, the European Renaissance included distinct expressions that influenced and were influenced by other expressions of that movement. The French Renaissance, Italian, etc. etc. etc. all sort of fed into each other. Maybe it could be said that the "Anime Renaissance" started in Japan and "anime" ideas wormed their way into American animation, French animation, even Middle Eastern animation (apparently a show called "Torkaizer," never heard of it). I dunno. Anyway. ....ehhhhh..... Is there tracking data on this movie at all? As in how well it's projected to do? As much as I'm railing against it, part of me does hope it ultimately does well, but that trailer doesn't fill me with much hope for its quality. It doesn't seem like general enthusiasm levels are all that high, either (what a shock), at least in America. It'll probably do better in China (and Japan? maybe?).
  14. kajnrig
    Neat monster girl anime Interviews with Monster Girls ended this weekend with a decent 12-episode run. While I really liked it, the final two episodes fell victim to the anime trope of The Heartfelt Narration, where the protagonists espouse about all the things they've learned and what they're grateful for and so on. There's a long stretch in the second-to-last episode where it's just three girls talking to the camera one after the other, and the animators did what they could with what they had, but you could tell they were running out of steam. And final episode is the "beach" episode, because of course there has to be one. To its credit, the show subverts the trope as much as it can - it takes place in the school pool, for one - and spends no time at all creepily sexualizing the underage cast; in fact, there's a good amount of focus on the attraction between the two adults. A+ for not being Creepy Anime Bullshit.
  15. kajnrig
    I dunno about that much, but it is a good movie. That ending was all sorts of cheese, though, and kind of took me out of the movie. First Class is still a better overall X-Men movie, but this is as good as a Wolverine movie was ever going to get, I think. I'm glad they decided to get rid of the baggage of all the other movies, too. The relationship between Logan and Charles got a bit too real for me at times, made me honest to god tear up at one point.
  16. kajnrig
    Eh. Someone brought it up, and I'm fine with discussing it. I try not to drag it on because I know most people here aren't as comfortable and/or interested in it as I am, but if someone wants to discuss it, then I'm game. /shrug
  17. kajnrig
    That's... not at all what I said, but I'm not gonna keep arguing the point. Cheers.
  18. kajnrig
    I wonder about this, too, and how prevalent this thinking is in Japan. I was always under the impression that, generally, Japanese audiences understand anime characters as "Japanese" (insofar as nationality is at all applicable to anime) whenever it comes to how they specifically interact with the characters. But then again, anime in Japan encompasses literally all animation; the term isn't used nearly as specifically as it is here. Heck, the "term" isn't even a term, it's just a Japanese tendency to shorthand EVERYTHING. And even here people argue that stuff like Avatar, Wakfu, Samurai Jack, Adventure Time, etc. fall under the American definition of "anime." One Youtuber likens anime to historical art movements like the Renaissance, modernism, etc., which I think is a... better way to understand it, but anyway. They also didn't organize their society around race like we did, so... Like, I get what you guys are trying to say, but you're comparing apples to oranges here. If Japan had won the war, let's say, and they continued their experimenting on Chinese and Korean POWs, and brought over a bunch of Chinese and Koreans and settled them into the slums of Japan and then systematically leeched off of them financially and socially for the next seventy years, meanwhile marveling at how primitive "mainlanders" are, and in the meantime Korea recovered from the war and made a sick-ass action movie, and then Japan started saying to themselves, "You know what? We don't like racism anymore," and then took that sick-ass action movie and recast it using Japanese actors who had infinitely more exposure than their Korean-Japanese counterparts, THEN that would be more comparable to whitewashing. You can bet that Korean-Japanese population would be throwing up as much of a fuss over the casting decision as Asian Americans are over GitS's whitewashing.
  19. kajnrig
    Yeah, I got that same feeling, too, now that I think about it. The beginning dragged, and after the conflict ratcheted up and the alien had no more new tricks up its sleeve, I started getting a bit bored. Not enough to not want to see it to the end, but enough to notice time passing.
  20. kajnrig
    Saw it tonight. Enjoyed it well enough. Spoilers in case you care:
  21. kajnrig
    Are the mecha/monster designs as bad as they look in the trailer? Also, I heard the Power Ranger-ing doesn't actually start until the last 30 minutes or so. Confirmation?
  22. kajnrig
    This also points to the distinction between "Japanese" and "Japanese-American." To Japanese-Americans, World War II's most personal memory is the internment camps; to the Japanese, it's the atom bomb. There's cultural crossover for sure, and it's definitely worth noting how and where they view the same thing differently, but too often this sort of stuff gets used to try and delegitimize minority American perspectives. If Japanese people are okay with whitewashing, then Japanese-Americans should shut their mouths... except Japanese people by and large didn't have to deal with the consequences of whitewashing, Japanese-Americans did. Anyway, however else I feel about the movie, it does have some damn impressive special effects. It's nice to see Weta bringing their A-game; I don't remember them working on any "big" projects since King Kong. The Hobbit movies, I guess, but I didn't watch past the first one, so...
  23. kajnrig
    And yet they consistently find a way...
  24. kajnrig
    For those of you still wondering about extending the battery life:
  25. kajnrig
    The Hasegawa kit allows you to build that section with the guns deployed or stowed; the gold that covers the barrels in fighter mode can apparently open, eject, or otherwise make way to expose them. It's a mechanism that just didn't make the transition to the toys, models, and animation. The Bandai kit omits these covers entirely and just has the barrels exposed all the time, even in fighter mode. Bandai kit: http://dalong.net/review/etc/md03/p/md03_91.jpg
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