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  1. #1
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    Doctor Strange

    This just got interesting to me.

    Martial Artist Scott Adkins Joins Benedict Cumberbatch in Marvel’s ‘Doctor Strange’ (Exclusive)
    MOVIES | By Jeff Sneider on November 13, 2015 @ 1:19 pm Follow @theinsneider


    LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 13: Scott Adkins attends the UK premiere for The Expendables 2 at Simpsons On The Empire Leicester Square on August 13, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Dave Hogan/Getty Images)

    Scott Derrickson is directing the comic book movie, which co-stars Rachel McAdams and Tilda Swinton
    Martial artist Scott Adkins has joined the cast of Marvel’s “Doctor Strange,” an individual familiar with the project has told TheWrap.
    Marvel declined to comment, while representatives for Adkins did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
    Scott Derrickson is directing the movie, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Mads Mikkelsen, Tilda Swinton, Michael Stuhlbarg and Amy Landecker.
    Cumberbatch plays neurosurgeon Stephen Strange, who after a horrific car accident discovers a hidden world of magic and alternate dimensions.
    Adkins’ role is being kept under wraps, though insiders suggest he’ll have several major action scenes featuring hand-to-hand combat.
    Kevin Feige is producing “Doctor Strange,” which was written by Jon Spaihts. Production is currently under way, Disney will release the comic book movie on Nov. 4, 2016.
    Adkins is a world renowned martial artist whose movie credits include “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “The Expendables 2” and Kathryn Bigelow‘s “Zero Dark Thirty.” He’ll soon be seen in Sacha Baron Cohen‘s spy comedy “The Brothers Grimsby” and Ariel Vromen‘s “Criminal.” He’s represented by the Gersh Agency and LINK Entertainment.
    Gene Ching
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  2. #2
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    First Scott, now Benedict Wong

    JANUARY 21, 2016 3:09pm PT by Borys Kit
    'The Martian' Actor Nabs Key 'Doctor Strange' Role (Exclusive)


    Benedict Wong Getty Images

    The movie is currently in production and heading toward a release date of November 4, 2016.
    Doctor Strange has found his manservant.

    Benedict Wong has been cast as Wong, the good doctor’s trusty sidekick in Marvel’s Doctor Strange.

    Benedict Cumberbatch is starring as Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme in the movie that is currently in production and heading toward a release date of November 4, 2016.

    Wong, the character, is a Marvel mainstay, having been around since the 1960s. He performs healing duties, assists in occult matters, is knowledgeable in martial arts, and tends to Strange’s affairs. Among his functions is to look after Strange’s body when the hero is astral projecting himself into other dimensional planes.

    Wong, the actor, joins Rachel McAdams Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mads Mikkelsen, among others on the roll call.

    Wong did some scene-stealing work when he played a Jet Propulsion Laboratory director in Ridley Scott's Oscar-nominated The Martian and he stars as Kublai Khan in Netflix’s costume drama Marco Polo.

    Other credits include Prometheus and Kick-Ass 2.
    I really like his work in Marco Polo.
    Gene Ching
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  3. #3
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    Doctor Strange Official Teaser Trailer #1 (2016) - Benedict Cumberbatch Marvel Movie

    Gene Ching
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  4. #4
    Greetings,

    WTF? This is a fukkin UK movie. Where are the American actors? It is as if American actors cannot give a Marvel movie any kind of dignity. And it is not just Dr Strange. Take a good look at the large number of UK actors popping up in major roles for the Marvel movies.

    It sucks MAJOR. I would rather see Ming Na Wen or Russell Wong as Dr Strange. They both could really carry that character well.


    mickey
    Last edited by mickey; 04-13-2016 at 01:06 PM.

  5. #5
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    It's not only Marvel movies that have such a preponderance of British (or Australian) actors. It seems as if there are more of them in American TV and movies than American actors. And it's not only when the filmmakers want an accent. Half the 'American' characters in TV and film are played by British/Australian actors trained to use an American accent. I suppose it's more economical to train British actors to speak like an American than to actually hire equally qualified American actors. It's OK once in a while, but the sheer numbers are ridiculous.
    Last edited by Jimbo; 04-13-2016 at 03:41 PM.

  6. #6
    Greetings Jimbo,

    Maybe it is economic in that they are looking to gain dollars from an international market. It is not at all supportive to those actors in the USA who have devoted so much time to their craft. If there was a need to have more "fresh" faces, the American theater industry can definitely provide that. There are even those who do soap operas who can act with the best of them.

    Speaking of soap operas, there was one that was well received in Europe: "Santa Barbara". That soap was off the chain.

    mickey
    Last edited by mickey; 04-14-2016 at 07:00 AM.

  7. #7
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    Interesting piece on THR.

    APRIL 15, 2016 3:57pm PT by Rebecca Sun, Graeme McMillan
    Why Did 'Doctor Strange' and 'Ghost in the Shell' Whitewash Their Asian Characters?


    Marvel's 'Doctor Strange'; Paramount and DreamWorks' 'Ghost in the Shell' Courtesy of Film Frame; Paramount Pictures

    This week in cultural appropriation: Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and a conversation between two THR writers.

    This week, Marvel dropped the first teaser trailer for Doctor Strange, based on its comic series about a critically injured neurosurgeon who travels to the Himalayas to learn mystic arts from a powerful sorcerer known as the Ancient One. Two days later, Paramount and DreamWorks released the first image from Ghost in the Shell, their live-action adaptation of the Japanese manga about an anti-cyberterror task force set in mid-21st century Japan and led by cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi.

    On paper, it reads like a great week for Asian representation in Hollywood — but the Ancient One and the Major are played, respectively, by Tilda Swinton and Scarlett Johansson. And so these two projects — long-awaited by many fans of their source material — instead join Gods of Egypt, Aloha and Pan as recent inductees to Hollywood's Whitewashing Hall of Shame.

    Below, The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision blogger Graeme McMillan and senior reporter Rebecca Sun discuss the similar circumstances greeting the films so far.

    Rebecca Sun: We braced ourselves when the castings were announced, but (just like that Nina trailer) the visual evidence still stung.

    In flipping both race and gender to cast Swinton as a character who in the original comics is a Tibetan-born man, Marvel admirably went out of the box to correct one aspect of underrepresentation in its cinematic universe, but did so at the expense of another. Like its fellow Marvel franchise Iron Fist, it is steeped in cultural appropriation and centers around what Graeme previously noted as the "white man finds enlightenment in Asia" trope.

    Give Hollywood partial credit for continuously trying to cleverly sidestep the Fu Manchu stereotype of characters like DC's Ra's al Ghul and Marvel's The Mandarin — but why is the solution consistently to reimagine those characters with white actors (Liam Neeson in Christopher Nolan's Batman films and Guy Pearce in Iron Man 3, respectively)? The Doctor Strange movie doesn't need its Ancient One to look like Lo Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, but there are creative ways to interpret the character without yet again erasing an Asian person from an inherently Asian narrative.

    Graeme McMillan: The casting of Strange is a very frustrating thing; it's not just the Ancient One that's racebent — Baron Mordo, a white man in the comics, is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor in the movie; you see him for an instant in the teaser — but it all seems to be done with little thought about the implications of the changes. While I'm happy to see a "white role" played by a black man in the movie, Ejiofor's casting reinforces the implications of Thor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the Iron Man movies that every white hero gets a black sidekick in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (see also Zoe Saldana in Guardians of the Galaxy, but there, she's painted green, because space).

    Switching the Ancient One to Tilda Swinton feels similarly well-intentioned, but thoughtless. On the one hand, yes, you're trying to sidestep the stereotype present in the source material, but in the most lazy way short of making the character a white man. Wouldn't a younger Asian actor have offered enough of a play on the trope — not to mention a play on the character's name — while also avoiding the utter tone-deafness of having Strange head to Tibet in order to learn about enlightenment from another white English person.

    Sun: Too many stories, from Lawrence of Arabia to Avatar, relegate natives of a culture to background players and, at best, mentor, antagonist, love interest or sidekick. In Doctor Strange, Swinton fills the mentor role, Mads Mikkelsen is the villain and Rachel McAdams seems to be the damsel, leaving British actor Benedict Wong to play Dr. Strange's personal valet.

    Of the four, he's the only one not glimpsed in the two-minute trailer, which mostly features Benedict Cumberbatch's Dr. Strange wandering through streets in Nepal and Hong Kong and learning magical martial arts from Swinton in a temple beautifully appointed with traditional Asian architectural features. In other words, Doctor Strange is a movie that looks very Oriental, except for the people part.

    McMillan: To make matters worse — or, at least, more frustrating — there's the fact that, in the casting of Cumberbatch, Marvel managed to sidestep the possibility of offering up a nonwhite, non-male lead in one of its movies for the first time. Unlike, say, Iron Man or Captain America, there's nothing inherently gendered or racially-specific in the lead character's main concept — while it's unlikely that anyone other than a white man would be chosen to be the figurehead for the U.S. Army in WWII, or the head of a multinational arms manufacturer built up by his genius father, all that's really required of Dr. Strange is that they're a successful surgeon who suffers a terrible accident that sets them on a new path afterward. That role, literally, could have gone to anyone.

    That train of thought points me toward a theory put forward by comic writer Kurt Busiek on social media recently — namely, that Dr. Strange as a character is an early example of the comic book industry whitewashing itself. The idea, as Busiek lays it out, is that artist and co-creator Steve Ditko "conceived Doc Strange as a stock 'mysterious Asian mystic' type", and later actually changed his look after writer Stan Lee wrote an origin in which he was Caucasian.

    It's a weird coincidence that offers a worrying excuse to those supporting Marvel's decision to whitewash the Ancient One for the movie: It has historical precedent! Perhaps Doctor Strange, for all its positioning as a project that opens up horizons to new realities and new possibilities, has an accidental metatextual purpose of demonstrating how tied to the safer, cowardly white "norms" entertainment can be.
    continued next post
    Gene Ching
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  8. #8
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    Continued from previous post

    Sun: Which brings us to Ghost in the Shell and that first-look image of Scarlett Johansson this week. Ghost in the Shell (at least all previous iterations of it) also is set in Asia, albeit a very different one from that of Doctor Strange. There is no indication that the name of Johansson's protagonist has changed from the source material — IMDb still lists the character as "Kusanagi," although the press copy released alongside Thursday's image refers to her simply by her police rank, "the Major." That photo continues to send an ambiguous message — Johansson appears in a short black bob and darkened eyebrows, hewing closely to how Kusanagi is depicted in the comics.

    Traditionally, this is a fan's greatest hope — an adaptation as faithful to the source material as possible. But in this case, Paramount/DreamWorks seem to have retained all the markers of Kusanagi's Japanese identity — her name, her basic physical appearance — except for the actual ethnicity of her portrayer. Perhaps the whitewashing controversy wouldn't have gone quite as viral had the producers cleanly erased all traces of the material's origins, as Edge of Tomorrow did in adapting the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill and anglicizing protagonist Keiji Kiriya into William Cage, played by Tom Cruise.

    McMillan: The comparison to the (lack of) outrage met with Edge of Tomorrow is an interesting one, but perhaps a more appropriate one is the response to the multiple attempts to make a live-action Akira with non-Asian actors — which is to say, any of the numerous American attempts to make a live-action Akira. Both Akira and Ghost in the Shell are better-known properties than All You Need Is Kill — which started life as a prose novel, which arguably also allowed for more visual/racial deviation as a result — and so any attempt to move away from the (to fans) iconic elements of the original are likely to be met with, at the very best, apathy or dismay. Add in the implied racism of casting only Caucasian actors, and you have something that seems utterly guaranteed to upset almost everyone.

    By far the strongest response I've seen to the Ghost in the Shell casting comes from indie comic writer Jon Tsuei on Twitter, where he argued that the story is "inherently a Japanese story, not a universal one" because of the context in which it was created, specifically the cultural relationship the country had with technology, and how that feeds into the characters' relationships with tech in the story.

    I'm not entirely sold on that line of thinking, I admit — in part because I think that the relationship with technology has become a universal thing in the decades since the original manga was published 27 years ago — but it touches on the degree to which the story is interconnected with the culture in which it first appeared. Watching filmmakers misunderstand that to such a degree as they appear to have in casting alone doesn't really offer much hope that they'll manage to handle the themes of the story with any greater sensitivity.

    Sun: The reaction to Johansson's Ghost in the Shell look reminds me of the backlash when the Nina Simone biopic starring Zoe Saldana was released last month. In both cases, the filmmakers went to some lengths to alter the appearance of their leading ladies, rather than cast actresses who more naturally matched the subjects. What makes these two examples different from the countless instances of actors transforming themselves for a role — Steve Carell in Foxcatcher, Nicole Kidman in The Hours — is that Asian women and dark-skinned black women rarely get to be the leads in Hollywood movies. So whitewashing any Asian character is unfortunate, but keeping the character Asian-ish (but not actually Asian) is salt on the wound.

    Many online commenters have trumpeted Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi as the ideal live-action Kusanagi — no one has come closer than her to doing it already, as robot pilot Mako Mori in Pacific Rim. Many other actresses of Asian descent have been mentioned as well, but the harsh truth is that their combined star wattage doesn't even come close to touching Johansson's.

    And therein lies the problem: A Kikuchi (who is four years older than Johansson) — or a similar Asian-American actress — couldn't have debuted as the daughter of John Ritter and Sean Connery, as Johansson did in her early films. She likely wouldn't have gotten her big break as an equestrian-loving teen in Montana opposite Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer. (She might have made a good Rebecca in Ghost World.) She couldn't have effectively played an outsider in Tokyo in Lost in Transition, which catapulted her to stardom, or a Dutch painter's muse in Girl With a Pearl Earring, or Woody Allen's muse in Match Point, Scoop or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She couldn't have played a London magician's assistant in The Prestige or Mary Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl. And most of all, she never, ever would have been cast as the Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

    So how does an Asian actor become famous enough to play an Asian character? Judging by Speed Racer (starring Emile Hirsch), Dragonball Evolution (starring Shameless' Justin Chatwin), Ghost in the Shell and the upcoming Death Note (starring Nat Wolff), Hollywood has yet to answer the question.
    You'd think with the trend towards China, getting some Asian actors in the cast would be good global marketing.
    Gene Ching
    Publisher www.KungFuMagazine.com
    Author of Shaolin Trips
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  9. #9
    Greetings,

    I noticed the date of that article. It was dated after my funk on this thread. The author either read it or was fed it. I gotta find a way to get paid for this. I may have to change my handle for increased recognition. Then I can go after the bucks.

    mickey

  10. #10
    Greetings,

    If the Marvel Universe is understood. There can be more than one Dr Strange. This was shared on another thread. Understanding the MU means that there is much money to be made.

    When it came to The Avengers, I never saw The Black Panther as belonging on that team. I never saw him as being in the same universe as them: just a superhero in a very different world. Yet, when understanding the MU, it is possible to have such a team up.

    mickey

  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by mickey View Post
    Greetings,

    When it came to The Avengers, I never saw The Black Panther as belonging on that team. I never saw him as being in the same universe as them: just a superhero in a very different world. Yet, when understanding the MU, it is possible to have such a team up.

    mickey
    The first time I ever saw The Black Panther was in a 1970 or '71 issue of Daredevil; it *might* have been his first comic appearance ever(?). As far as I knew, it was. And though Daredevil was never an Avenger, he definitely occupied the same Marvel Universe as The Avengers. In fact, DD was teamed/paired with The Black Widow for a time in the mid-1970s. So that puts The Black Panther in that same universe.
    Last edited by Jimbo; 04-19-2016 at 12:40 PM.

  12. #12
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    Magic = No PRC

    Doctor Strange’ Is Going To Be Magical, Which May Cost Them Dearly
    BY: CALEB READING 08.10.16


    MARVEL

    Marvel’s Doctor Strange is filled with mind-bending “Escher stuff” as seen in the first trailer and the Comic-Con trailer. But there’s a reason to be concerned. If they try to explain away the magical aspects with pseudoscientific woo, we have to sit through boring, goofy exposition and try not to groan. (Marvel handled this about as well as they could with Thor explaining magic and science to Jane Foster in Thor.) But if the film references magic or ghosts or other such things too much, China will ban the movie, just as Suicide Squad and Ghostbusters didn’t screen there.

    Marvel stands to make over $100 million in China off Doctor Strange, so they’ve been trying to stay in China’s good graces. Script co-writer C. Robert Cargill claims Tibetan character The Ancient One was changed to very white woman (or possible swan masquerading as human) Tilda Swinton because China would have banned the movie if it referenced Tibet. Marvel denied this, however, but they still haven’t denied that Swinton is actually a swan.

    So you would assume there will be scenes in Doctor Strange where they try to explain away the magic stuff to appease Chinese censors, right? Well, director Scott Derrickson told Games Radar they’re not going to do that:



    “Magic is magic in this movie. It’s not something that’s explained away scientifically. It’s not something that’s easy to define. As magic should be. Magic should be mysterious. There’s mystery to magic and there’s mystery to the tone of the movie. Mystery is a good thing.”
    They’re sort of daring China to ban the movie by not making excuses for the magical elements, but perhaps removing the Tibetan version of The Ancient One is how they’re compromising here. We probably should have known they wouldn’t downplay the magical aspect with something as trippy as Doctor Strange (or “psychedelic” as Mads Mikkelsen calls it in the video above). It was implied in the trailer, when possible swan Tilda Swinton says, “Forget everything that you think you know” that sh*t’s about to get real magical up in here.

    Doctor Strange without magic? How would that even work?
    Gene Ching
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  13. #13
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    I really hope that Hollywood grows some balls and doesn't kowtow to China on this. At least not anymore than everyone already has. It's a very dark day indeed when China gets to dictate what types of subjects/genres the U.S. and the rest of the world gets to watch.
    Last edited by Jimbo; 08-20-2016 at 10:05 AM.

  14. #14

    Failure In Understanding the Marvel Universe

    Greetings,

    The makers of the movies featuring Marvel characters need to understand the universe that is Marvel. These movie makers are too linear and the Marvel Universe (MU) not always that. The people could have used the year 1940 as a time travel access point to Tibet, where the magic and the sacred knowledge still exists. They could have even used the year 1949 as the point of exodus for Dr Strange's teacher. And they could still travel to gateways to ancient Tibet, on the inner planes, for training sequences. What could China say about that then? Our counter argument would always be that the China we have today did not exist at that time.


    mickey

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    I don't think any of that will matter to the Chinese gov't. Surely ANY depiction of Tibet, including apart from China in the past, would be forbidden.

    Besides, the entire magical aspect (which is inseparable from Dr. Strange) is not acceptable to the Chinese, who view it as promoting 'superstitious beliefs'. They want to control the entire world by bringing everyone else in line through the threat of not getting their money. Nothing will be acceptable to them until the Dr. Strange character is no longer Dr. Strange.
    Last edited by Jimbo; 08-20-2016 at 06:22 PM.

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