dsa_shea

And sometimes you just have to say no thanks.

Giles

ugh - I didn't think that Crowe could stoop this low, but he did... the writing and some of the dialogue just elicts a 'really? did he/she just say that?' The plot meanders around like it has no focus or real plausibility, it just comes across as a nicely shot Hallmark Channel movie

I'm not a real fan of Emma Stone, but here I so wanted to hit her over the head with a folding chair.

the overuse of ancilary music over the scenes, gets to be excessive and ridiculous. okay Cameron we get it, you don't think we could get an emotion without some music telling us how to feel.

the scene between Krasinski and Cooper just is a total 'wtf?' moment. It's not clever, it just across as cinematic stupidity.

Murray doesn't seem to be playing a character but is more of extension of himself. Baldwin needs to bring it down several notches, he's screaming, er I mean acting to the rafters. McAdams seems like the only credible character and acting from a script that seems to debase everyone else.

inri222

Besides his 80's output, I've never liked any of Crowe's films. Seen all his films up to Vanilla Sky and then gave up.
Here's a funny fact I just found, David Lynch was offered to direct Fast Times at Ridgemont High before Amy Heckerling.

Coral

17% on Rottentomatoes... looks like Cameron Crowe shit the bed again.

His output is so terrible now. I love Almost Famous and for the most part liked the movies before that, but the following 3 sucked and this one looks to be of the same ilk of craptom.

Why So Blu?

Emma Stone plays a half Asian character, because she's not half Asian.

Here's a great write up:

As you may know, Emma Stone plays a character named “Allison Ng” in the new Cameron Crowe movie Aloha. Her character, who’s supposed to be a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese, is meaningfully non-white within the framework of the story; according to Entertainment Weekly, she’s a “Hula dancing expert with a functional knowledge of Hawaiian folk guitar who rhapsodizes about the islander spiritual energy mana when she isn’t attempting to save the archipelago from a creeping military-industrial complex.”

Isn’t it so cool when a former white savior character gets to show her range by being a mystically exotic non-white savior character too?

Before we get any further, let’s recap some facts about Hawaii, natively known as Hawai’i:

It’s an archipelago
settled by Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders
whose destruction at the hands of white people began in the late eighteenth century, when Captain Cook’s crew decimated the native population with tuberculosis and STDs
whose native monarchy was later overthrown at gunpoint by the British in 1843
which was later illegally annexed by the United States with the help of the economically oppressive white minority
which remains U.S. territory despite the fact that Bill Clinton signed a resolution in 1993 “apologizing” to the Native Hawaiians for the “deprivation of their rights to self-determination”
in which white people remain a decided minority at around 25 percent.
Now, let’s recap some facts about Aloha, which was also originally called Hawaii:

It’s a movie
directed by a white man
about Hawaii
called Aloha
starring a 100 percent white cast
in which one of these white cast members plays a woman named “Allison Ng.”
As it happens, the embarrassing contrast between these two lists did not trigger any meaningful change during the long process of the movie’s making. For example, Amy Pascal’s emails on the subject of Aloha included cogent messages such as “I LIKSE HAWAII THE BEST ACTUALLY BETTER THAN ALOHA” and “TOOMANY BONES IN THIS MOVIE” and “if he is alive what is the point of the funeral”—but none about known Asian, Emma Stone.

In other words, many, many people must have observed this casting without raising meaningful issue about it—a group that includes Emma Stone, Emma Stone’s close friends, and the executives who presumably were all, “Emma Stone for Allison Ng? Perfect. Very tight. Subversive, and I just love that the character’s Asian.”

Like every case of big-budget whitewashing, the problem is not so much what this means in the specific instance: if all non-white people in America are dead accustomed to identifying with white characters and inhabiting white narratives, surely (kill me) it is technically allowable to admit the possibility of identification going the other way around. I also will not admit visual plausibility as a viable issue: American history is a history of wildly surprising race-passing, and people of many races and racial combinations are “believable” as any number of the same.

The problem, more, may be visible in the aggregate: the number of people who thought it was fine to make an all-white movie called ~*~ Aloha ~*~ about the only state with an Asian majority population; the fact that—as Fusion pointed out—Asian characters comprise a highly stereotypical 6.6 percent of characters on network TV, despite many of those shows being set in New York City, which is 12 percent Asian, or California, whose percentage bumps up to 15.

But I think the real problem, for me, is that I’m finding this super fucking boring instead of upsetting. The problem for me is I’m that used to it. Asian erasure is so normalized (and much worse, codified in patterns of professional advancement) that I can’t even get my blood up about the idiocy that allowed these castings: Emma Stone as Allison Ng, but also Josh Hartnett as an Inuit sheriff, Jake Gyllenhaal as the Prince of Persia, Carey Mulligan as the “Latina” love interest in Drive, Scarlett Johannson as the Asian lead of Ghost in the Shell—all the while audiences happily flip their shit about, say, Cinna and Rue in the Hunger Games being black.

The real problem is that I long ago figured out I’d just have to rustle up my own disproportionately high self-confidence without ever seeing people who look “like me” onscreen—because it was the only option, and continues to be.

http://themuse.jezebel.com/emma-ston...lit-1708174302

RichC2

I saw that earlier, and frankly as a completely white looking half-asian (my dad's irish genes won), I'm fucking tired of that bullshit. They needed a big name star in the role, and that's the story Crowe decided to write.

greydt

Not trying to sound snarky, but aren't you then admitting that you basically have no idea what it's like from the perspective of the original author of that article?

As a full Asian whole looks completely Asian born and raised here in the good 'ol USA, I spent the last 41 years of my life not making waves about race (and still don't) and can say for the most part that I haven't had too many negative race related issues here in NY...but that doesn't mean there isn't some weird $**t I've experienced that still happens in polite society.

It's a problem.

I ain't bitter about it, and will be glad for the day that any role can be played by anybody...if it goes both ways. Theres not exactly a lot of situations where a character who's originally white or is perceived as white somehow played by an Asian person.

You're "tired of that bullshit"...are you exactly sure you know what that bullshit actually entails?

RichC2

Nope not at all, as I grew up in a mostly asian family and was odd one out for most of that.

What I'm saying is it is a legit situation where a half-asian looks entirely white. It doesn't come up often in movies but when it does it's a terrible thing apparently. I'm not saying racism doesn't exist, I'm saying not every situation of a mis-matched race:role needs to be called out. Though I will acknowledge that I watch a ton of asian cinema, so maybe the lack of asians in movies is a lot less noticeable from my perspective.

They needed a big name in the role, they got one, happens all the time. She plays a half-asian character that looks white, that happens too. The pertinent outrage at things like that are what I'm tired of, not that she has her own issues to deal with.

I think I have general internet fatigue these days, as every single thing gets complained about, which ends up on Twitter, which now gets reported as news.

cungar

At least it's not

EddieMoney

Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous are all films I really, really like, with Say Anything being the best by a wide margin.

However, it's the same formula over and over since. He writes his movies around his soundtracks. The guy is a hardcore dick diddler while selecting his film's music. Then he tries to imagine how a certain scene or conversation would sound while a fucking Bon Iver song plays over the top. His movies are masturbatory music videos with big name actors. Elizabethtown nearly made me homicidal. When Susan Sarandon started tap dancing, I started to shit my pants. I think the people sitting around me enjoyed the smell of my diarrhea far more than the shit they were watching on screen. Crowe has become one miserable fuck of a filmmaker, and "Aloha" sounds no different. In fact, it sounds like this may be the movie where he finally has emptied those blue balls he's had for the past 20+ years...every bad element of his past films have coalesced into one singular, ejaculating mess of cinematic semen, flung on the screen with the same care as a monkey would fling its shit at a wide-eyed four year old. I can imagine him at the premiere of all of his films saying, "Oh, damn, how did I forget to put THAT song in there? I'll have to remember it for next time!"

Yeah, Cameron Crowe has really become awful.

inri222

Become? He's been awful.

Supermallet

Personally I think even Say Anything is trite bullshit. I'll give him Singles, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous. AF is by far his best. Watching that film, you just assume that the director has this amazing filmography. But it's like Richard Rush, he did The Stunt Man, which is so exceptional that you assume that you just discovered this little known American master filmmaker, and then you realize the rest of his films are things like Freebie and The Bean.

inri222

I like the first 3 films Crowe was involved in (Fast Times..., The Wild Life & Say Anything) mostly for nostalgic reasons and despise everything after that (including Almost Famous).

Why So Blu?

I only like Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, and Vanilla Sky. I have not watched any of his films before JM and after VS.

EddieMoney

That's just, your opinion, man. Really like his output through Almost Famous, but even that film showed signs of what was to come. "It's all happening!"

Vanilla Sky has some really ridiculous lines..."I swallowed your cum, David!" Good Lord.

inri222

Airplane confessions.

EddieMoney

Oh, God. Yeah, that was a bad scene.

Mike86

I really like Crowe for Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky, and the documentary Pearl Jam Twenty. I also thought that We Bought a Zoo was okay as a family friendly film. I don't have interest in Aloha though despite the fact it has a good cast.

inri222

Yeah, I remember that scene because "Just Don't Bite It" by N.W.A was playing in the background.

EddieMoney

I think she's the saddest girl to ever hold a martini.

inri222

Cameron Crowe Apologizes for Casting Emma Stone as Asian American

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-am...erican-n369166

wishbone

Yeah, he could have cast Keanu Reeves as Asian Canadian.

hanshotfirst1138

I'm kind of curious, what is Reeves' ethnic background?

Hazel Motes

Haha wow, guess I'm the only one who liked this. I'm a real ham for Crowe's sentimentality. I recognise the film had its share of problems, but the things that bothered you guys didn't really bother me. Emma Stone is just about the cutest thing on this planet.

filmerp

As a hapa born and raised in Hawaii, I was charmed by the character interplay and portrayal of Hawaii from a non-tourist perspective. The entire "second payload" subplot had me scratching my head (why would Cooper's character have access to secret/incriminating information if his job was to simply secure a Hawaiian Nation blessing?), but otherwise enjoyed the love story(s).

As for Emma Stone's character, I could buy her character being 1/4 Chinese due to her look. Hawaiian, maybe not so much. I did feel her character's need to constantly spew out Hawaiian lore to be a bit forced. Her star status and complete lack of pidgin dialect makes her further difficult to buy into, but she makes up for it with manic pixie dust personality.

Finally, I appreciated the dreamy look of the cinematography (viva la film!).

p.s. Re: Keanu from Wikipedia
"His mother is English, from Essex, England. His father, an American from Hawaii, has Native Hawaiian, Chinese, English, and Portuguese ancestry."