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Thank you eric! I was at a loss...

And let's not forget hollywood just wholesale stealing stories from other cultures then putting white people in a role that doesn't exist and then missing the entire fucking point of the story.

Yeah, 47 Ronin, I'm looking at you.

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I find a lot of these complaints to be pretty silly. Particularly the roles of 40+ years ago, like John Wayne as Genghis Khan, etc.

And The Last Samurai is awesome. OK, Tom Cruise (white guy) is the main character -- because he is a lens through which an American audience can reflect on the respect that he gains for the real (Japanese) samurai. All the roles that the script/plot dictates should be played by Japanese people are. I'd even argue that the title doesn't refer to Tom Cruise's Nathan Algren, but rather to the whole group of samurai (notice how the word can be plural or singular) led by Ken Watanabe's Katsumoto.

There are some (plenty of?) legit gripes about "whitewashing" movies, but accusing movies like the The Last Samurai of it (when they are actually doing things exactly right and making a movie FULL of non-white roles played by non-white people) seems counterproductive to the argument...

To be fair, they also use black people in roles in historical movies or settings where black people in reality didnt exist, which is equally stupid.

Perhaps we could all just get used to the idea that sometimes actors pretend to be people they're not.

Wait what? Is it automatically ok if the skewed / whitewashed role is written into the script? You do know that this kind of skew doesn't come about by the kkk kidnapping black actors at gunpoint in the middle of filming and replacing them with white ones?

If a Japanese director were to make a movie about the civil war, but chose to make it about a Japanese fighter who comes to the US, becomes the most kickass soldier of the Union, makes personal friends with Lincoln, and convinces him to stay the course on emancipation... that would be pretty weird, even if the argument went that this was the only way a Japanese audience could identify with this obscure historic time.

If that were to happen, I would guess that the Japanese audience would be insulted by the proposition that they can't understand other cultures without a 'Japanese guide' helping them care and comprehend.
It's terribly sad to me that average Americans are so infantile that, for the most part, they don't even see that their intelligence is being insulted when an American is inserted into another countries history/mythology for their benefit.

Which would be fine if it wasn't so one-sided, or (in lots of cases) just fucking terrible.

I mean, Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffanys? Even if that a horrible caricature, it would still be just horrible.

Funnily enough, The Last Samurai is probably the least offensive on the list since it's primarily a story ABOUT an outsider learning a new culture (the idea that he would equal one of them with a sword is laughable, but that's a standard narrative trope anyway).

Well, at the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, there are more white people in america than other colours.

Would we really care if a bollywood joan of arc or hamlet was played by an indian actor?

Whenever this sort of thing comes up, I'm always reminded of the vital question of Columbo's right eye. Does Columbo have a glass eye, or is Peter Falk's glass eye playing the role of a real eye?

"Automatically ok"? Not necessarily. But in cases where it makes sense, at a stretch even "plot sense" for the character to be there; yeah, I think that is OK.

The Last Samurai isn't a documentary. But, the general historical justification for Tom Cruise's character being in Japan is pretty much valid. Meiji was interested in the West -- clothes, technology, weapons, and military. He actually did hire Westerners to train his army, although from what I read it sounds like they were German, French, and Italian rather than American. Still, the movie portrays the general situation/setting with at least *decent* broad-strokes historical accuracy. LOADS of movies deviate from even this degree of historical accuracy *way* more without drawing complaints; particularly if their main purpose is entertainment and not education / documentary.


Your hypothetical reverse movie makes some valid criticisms. Even though it would have been historically possible for a Westerner to be in Japan at the time -- even to be involved with training a Western-style military -- it would be unlikely for such a person to get captured, run into a Shogun that speaks English, become a badass (or at least passable) samurai warrior, and end up playing a major role in politics and significantly influencing Emperor Meiji.

My defense against those criticisms is that, for me at least, the movie is entertaining; which is kinda the point. Your "Union Samurai" movie might be equally entertaining and therefore given an equal pass on historical inaccuracies by me.

The whole characters as a "lens through which the audience can appreciate a culture/history outside their own" issue is (slightly) more weighty to me. I don't think those are often necessary, but I don't feel like my intelligence is being insulted if the movie maker feels that they are in order to sell tickets.

I love the Chinese historical novel "Three Kingdoms". A few years ago, John Wu made the movie "Red Cliff", mostly about one particular battle in the historical period portrayed in that book. For the Chinese audience, Wu made the movie in two parts, summed up about four and a half hours long. For the US / West, he made a version trimmed to just over two hours. Why? Because he (and a team of market researchers, I'm sure) knew that very few Westerners would go to see a 4+ hour long movie, entirely in Mandarin Chinese (with subtitles), about a piece of Chinese history from ~1800 years ago that very few in the West have ever heard of or know anything about.

I think the full 4+ hour long movie is great. In my personal top 10 favorite movies of all time, ahead of most Hollywood stuff. But I also understand that there's no way that movie would appeal to all but a tiny, tiny fraction of Western viewers in that full-on 4+ hour format. But, even though I personally think the cut-down 2 hour "US" version is drastically inferior to the full cut, I am glad that he made it because it gives a suitably accurate introduction to the subject matter to more people in the West (just like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Dynasty Warriors" videogames do), and makes that tiny, tiny fraction of Western people that know anything about it a little less tiny. While being entertaining along the way.

For other movies, sometimes the best way that a filmmaker can sell a movie to an audience that otherwise might not accept it (at least in large enough numbers to justify the production costs) may be to insert one of these "lens" characters for the audience to identify with. I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with that. It might not work for movies that are taking a more hardline approach to historical / contextual accuracy (ie., if Tom Cruise showed up in "Red Cliff" in circa 200AD China), but outside of those situations, if that is what the studio thinks it will take to sell tickets... Cool.

The Last Samurai is, like @ChaosEngine said, a movie primarily about an outsider learning a new culture (and accepting his own past). He serves as that lens character, but actually the hows and whys of his character arc are the main points of interest in the movie, at least to me.

I'm sure that an awesome, historically accurate movie could be made dealing with young Emperor Meiji, Takamori (who Katsumoto seems to be based on in The Last Samurai), and the influence of modernization on Japanese culture at the time. It could be made with no Western "lens" character, no overt influence by any particular individual Westerner, and be entirely in Japanese. But that movie wouldn't be The Last Samurai, wouldn't be attempting to serve the same purpose as The Last Samurai, and very likely wouldn't sell as many tickets (in the US) as The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise!) did. That wouldn't make it a worse movie, just an apple instead of an orange.

You know, I read a recent interview with John Oliver where he is very emphatic that his show is "comedy" and that, despite what people want to read into it, he is not making political statements. I think if I had watched this video before reading that interview I would have scoffed (as others here already have). But it's pretty clear to me now that he and his writers know exactly what they are doing.

Basically, this video is the result of John Oliver saying, "You know, when you think about this history of racism in American cinema you can find some pretty fucked up stuff. How can we make a joke out of that?"

It's not designed to be an actual literary critique, it's meant to use the facts to play up a punch line. I'm pretty sure John and his writing crew know that "The Last Samurai" does not refer to Tom Cruise's character (i.e. just because the character is trained how to use the sword and armor does not automatically make him a samurai), but it's easy to see how they can make a joke out of the ambiguity of the title and Americans' tendency for self-centeredness (I'm sure there are people in the U.S. who think the title does indeed refer to Cruise's character).

I actually don't have a problem with actors "playing outside their ethnicity" (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean). I'm reminded of the recent controversy about the video game Uncharted 4 which has a white actress voice-acting the role of a black South African character. The Creative Director responded to the controversy by pointing out that a white character is voiced by a black actor in the same game, and that the decisions were made based on the choosing the best actor for the role--not on what the actor looked like in real life (read more about the story here).

As CG progresses and digital characters become a norm, I think this is an issue that's only going to get greater in the film industry. In our demand for political correctness will we demand that the actors physically resemble the characters they are portraying onscreen? That seems a bit absurd to me. But so too is the idea of excluding people for consideration from roles based solely on the color of their skin.

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