Oldboy: The Failure of Lee’s Remake, and the Power of Park’s Extreme

Warning! Spoilers abound. Park Chan-Wook’s “Oldboy” has 10 years later, the screenplay was adapted into an american film, also entitled “Oldboy”. This time directed by Spike Lee and starring Josh Brolin, the announcement of the film was met with a lot of fan lamentation and premature lambasting. This visceral reaction was only validated when the…

“Ghost in the Shell”: An Adaptation Haunted by Controversy

It hasn’t been an easy time for the cast and crew of Paramount Pictures’s “Ghost in the Shell (2017)”. The Hollywood adaptation of the seminal Japanese manga and anime classic have had an uphill climb of warding off criticism from all over the net over whitewashing and cultural appropriation. Now that the film has finally…

12 Studio Ghibli Films that are Adaptations

I remember first hearing about how the legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki himself was going to adapt the book “Howl’s Moving Castle”. I yelped out loud and began shaking. My favorite Japanese animator, animating my favorite book by my favorite author? It was just too good to be true. While the film’s departures from the novel…