Watching Ghost in the Shell right now.
I thought I'd be thrown of by Johansson's
"long-nosed-ness" (Yes, after all the whitewashing-brouhaha and re-watching some of the original 95 footage, I 'get' that the Major really has a Asian features. Funny how that didn't sink in so much before).
Instead, her
gait keeps throwing me off - somebody must have told her to
"walk more like a man" or something like that, and it looks horrible. I guess they wanted to emulate that feeling of
weight to the Major that the 95 anime conveyed; that she may
look like simply a tall-ish, athletic woman, but really is a 400-pound combat cyborg.
But it often it ends up looking horribly stilted.
Some scenes it works, but there, her body-language is rather like that of a young man barely out of adolescence trying to look tough (shoulders hunched forward, making a half-turn & talking over her shoulder instead of turning fully around, world-weary perma-scowl - the works). Other scenes it just looks weird - her stride far too wide for her frame, her arms either held stiffly at her sides or swinging like she's half a meter taller than she is and she holds her shoulders like she's having a
bastard of a crick in her neck.
It's weird because those are mannerisms that so many men know from puberty - when you try to figure out how to 'walk like a man' and mostly end up either looking like your body is remote-controlled by a gaggle of stoned Marsians, or like you're desperately looking for a bolt-hole.
Whoever told her to do that, I want to slap them.
EDIT: Finished with GiTS2017. Not awful, not awesome. The built-in-whitewashing at the end is creepy as fuck. Major gets beat up too often. They killed the Cyberpunk but there's lots of Koi and blinkenlights and garish holos. Some scenes are pure magic, straight out of the Anime.
Edit:
* Interesting take (actually four of them) on GiTS 2017 casting debate and Asian actors in western media - by four asian actresses.
* My 2 cents? The Major is a very tall and very muscular woman with amazing motor control. ScarJo is barely 1.60m. I'd have casted somebody like Zoe Bell (an Asian Zoe Bell would of course be better). Why Zoe Bell? You ever seen Death Proof? Because she's big and athletic and (not-Hollywood) beautiful and she has jaw-dropping motor control, and she can jump into a driving car through the window like it's nothing at all. Somebody spliced cat-genes into her motor cortex - and that is how I picture the Major would look and move.