Keanu Reeves To Star In Cowboy Bebop 439
It excites me incredibly to know that a Cowboy Bebop movie is happening. But it makes me scared to think that Keanu is getting the lead in what might be my single favorite Anime series of all time. I'm very skeptical that he can pull off this role. For now we'll have to wait and speculate who the rest of the cast will be. I'm mostly curious who will get Faye Valentine. And we can only cross our fingers and hope that the soundtrack remains intact.
Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm gonna go out on a limb here:
I think he can do it.
My first thought was definitely 'oh no'. But then I remembered that Spike is a little quirky anyhow... And very, very rarely do they manage to make a live-action with characters that really match the Anime's.
What I'm most scared of is that they'll try to match the voice acting of the English version, instead of trying to get the tone and attitude of the Japanese version. Voice acting makes a huge difference to the overall feel of the character.
Christian Bale as Spike (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd cast Christian Bale as Spike... but that's just because I want to see him in every movie I watch now.
Could work... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Reeves could, actually, work for most of the scenes (Spike tended to be very melancholy and low key most of the time) but the directory will have to really push to get strong emotion out of him in certain scenes (such as fighting Vicious). As for Jet, I think a shaved Ron Pearlman could pull it off pretty well. Not sure who I'd pick for the rest of the parts.
My vote for Faye Valentine (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Japanese? (Score:4, Interesting)
What singing? The music in Cowboy Bebop is mostly jazz of the bebop variety.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't bother. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't quite understand why people dislike Keanu Reeves so much. Well, I think he has a tendency to end up in these lame movies with roles that are easily mocked. I wouldn't call him a great actor, but he's certainly far from the worst. And he's not nearly as obnoxious as others.
My problem with this movie is the fact that it's yet another remake and it will probably be crap. They'll try to reinvent everything, completely missing the character of the original. I expect the end result to be crap much like Speed Racer.
Part of my problem, however, is the source material. Cowboy Bebop is decent, but like most other anime is very derivative and features convoluted storylines. Over the years I've found that anime fans tend to have low standards. As long as it's Japanese they love it. I can't count the times I've read glowing reviews for one thing or another only to find it's not very good. Even what is widely considering to be average anime gets overly positive reviews. And when something is actually pretty good, then it's really blown out of proportion.
My point is why bother remaking anime? The fans will never be happy with it. Few others will know enough about the source material to be interested which means the movie will have to stand on its own merits. At that point, they may as well have just come up with something unique and potentially more interesting. But then Hollywood and unique go together like oil and water.
Speaking of anime remakes, Battle Angel Alita is also coming in 2011, with James Cameron as the director. The manga's storyline has turned to crap, but I still have a fondness for the original story. Even though I'll probably be disappointed I am foolishly looking forward to the movie.
Spike is supposed to be 27 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sounds about right to me (Score:2, Interesting)
But it's ALL about the emotions! (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing which made Bebop great was the larger story-line. The unfolding of the various characters as they healed themselves, or resolved their personal/emotional issues. That's what good sci-fi does these days. --Watch some of the old and loved Doctor Who episodes. The ones we (well some of 'we') thought were so great back when we were kids. By today's standards, they're amazingly FLAT; all about the plot and the cleverness and the adventure, but zero examination of the emotional dimension. These days, people are well acclimated to the science, (or whatever you want to call it). --Exploring that stuff is no longer the point of these stories. The thing we don't get, however, and which we are so driven from an instinctive level to explore is how we emotionally fit within these new concepts. The alternate realities and the high-tech wilderness of it all. People want to know how it feels to be human in an expanded set of possibilities. Emotions matter now. How cool is that?
--I mean, heck, look at the last couple of Bond movies, for goodness sake! 007 has a soul??? --He's a broken man with plenty of murder/lockpick skills, which yeah, we were all dazzled by in the 60's and 70's, but how did he get that way? Turns out, he's deeply messed up and needs a matronly M to keep his threads all tied up from unraveling. --When the question of James Bond's mental stability even crosses the public mind, you know we are living in a new era!
But to explore emotions properly in a story, you need space. Or rather, length. Emotions aren't like car chases; on one moment, off the next. It takes time for lives to unfold and relationships to evolve. Bebop, and Firefly, and Doctor Who needed a dozen or more episodes for these issues to be properly explored. You can't achieve some of the really great moments we saw in those series in a 90 minute format. Not easily, anyway. --They already made a Cowboy Bebop movie. It looked and sounded fantastic. I still listen to some of the tracks now and again. But compared to the lower budget TV series, it was listless and redundant. It was the series which sang!
Same with, "Serenity", which I know is well-loved among fan circles, but my feeling is that the popular reaction came more from the grassroots victory it represented over FOX's short-sighted cancellation of the series than it did from the movie actually being particularly great. It was clever, painfully violent, and tried to cram too much into too little, and when it ended, I was relieved and I didn't miss any of the characters. It was the series which truly studied relationships and the concept of, "Found Family"; that's what made it good. Some of the most powerful moments came with revelations of character which had been building to a crescendo for ages. --When Jane was locked outside the ship, and Mal was going to let him die for being a psychotic monster but changed his mind when Jane demonstrated that he had a semblance of a conscience. Stuff like that is gold, and I just don't think it's within the realm of likelihood that we're going to see anything resembling that in a film. Not in any meaningful way. And certainly not with a wooden post like Keanu Reeves.
Ironically, the problem is that Spike, while being the, 'Strong Silent type', was also a bit of a cheeky bugger with a lot of iron and self-confidence, whereas Keanu has never struck me as having known himself. Always a bit dreamy and confused. Poor, poor casting. --Because, I don't really believe much in, 'acting'; the eyes and unconscious, uncontrollable expressions of a person always come through the actor whether they like it or not.
The Bebop series was a great anime, and I'm as much a sucker fanboy as the next guy, so I'll probably plunk down my. . . Jeez how much does it cost to see a film these days? Well, I'll plunk that down just to see the thing. But, honestly, it would be foolish to expect much.
Heck, I'm still trying to figure out what the heck is going to happen with that Toby McGuire Macross project.
Erk.
-FL