Michael Mann fills out the cast of his HBO Max drama Tokyo Vice, though Ansel Elgort is still there
Ken Watanabe, Rinko Kikuchi, and Ansel Elgort lead the cast of the series
TV News Michael Mann
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Michael Mann has expanded the cast of his long-in-the-works HBO Max drama Tokyo Vice, with Japanese actors Hideaki Ito, Show Kasamatsu, and Tomohisa Yamashita joining Rinko Kikuchi, Ella Rumpf, Rachel Keller, and stars Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe. Now, before you question the appearance and general existence of Ansel Elgort, we should point out that Tokyo Vice is based on the memoir of American writer Jake Adelstein, who covered the crime beat for Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun for 12 years. We’re not defending the fact that the Western entertainment industry believes that every story that isn’t necessarily about white people needs to have a white person at the center, we’re just pointing out why that seems to be the case here. (This doesn’t seem to be a Last Samurai-style fictionalization, or at least not as much of one.)
Elgort is playing the American journalist, Kikuchi is playing a Japanese journalist (presumably one who works with Elgort’s character), and Watanabe is playing a police, detective in Tokyo. At least some of the other people in that list up above are playing criminals, which are kind of a crucial aspect to a crime show. Also, Adelstein’s book mentions that an alleged crime boss threatened to have him killed over a story he wrote as a journalist, so one of those people is surely going to be the crime boss. Maybe it’ll be Watanabe? That’d be a good twist.
Tokyo Vice was created by playwright J.T. Rogers, and Mann will direct the pilot and serve as an executive producer. The Hollywood Reporter story doesn’t say who will direct the other nine episodes of this 10-episode series, but we assume they will be less famous than Michael Mann. There’s no word on when it might premiere on HBO Max, but the series has been in the works for as long as we’ve known about HBO Max.
69 Comments
I thought that was going to relate to the allegations against Elgort. I’m sure audiences will love the scene in West Side where Tony tells Maria he needs to break her in.
yeah his PR team really handled that shit if av club isn’t even being snarky about it.
They did…He broke up with her in an immature way.She was upset how he did it and she put him on Twitter blast….But if I am correct the two of them have worked it out and the sexual assault aspect has been debunked etc
I think she was upset she was allegedly taken advantage of as a vulnerable teen fan and put through a traumatic and uncomfortable experience. She has no reason to blast him on Twitter over getting broken up with in a bad way 6 years ago. What you are saying isn’t a fact, so don’t present it as such. You are wrong, the two of them did not work anything out. Where did you gather this information from? I cannot find it anywhere.
According to google, debunked means to“expose the falseness or hollowness of (a myth, idea, or belief)“ Simply admitting to 95% of her story and denying the illegal part is not debunking. His name has not been cleared.
I just imagine some PR hyper-bitch coming over to AVC offices and jangling her keys in front of Barsanti for thirty seconds until he forgot about it.
Literally just rewatched Baby Driver yesterday, and I have no idea what Edgar Wright was thinking in casting Elgort in the lead role.
It’s strange; the dude studied for a few years at the School of American Ballet, his parents are a fashion photographer and an opera director, his grandma fought in Norwegian resistance and was imprisoned in a concentration camp for her efforts in moving Norwegian Jewish children into Sweden, and yet all of these interesting things coalesce around the most boring and charisma-free man you’ve ever seen in your life. Also, having to say “Ansel Elgort” is enough to make me long for the days of powerful studio heads forcing actors to change their names.
C’mon, man, you speak as though Sam Worthington doesn’t even exist.
I have list of Boring Australian Men that I periodically complain about on this site, and Worthington certainly tops it. While you could credibly claim that Sam Worthington is the unholy scion of narcolepsy and beige paint, at least he kind of looks like what you’d get if you tried to draw the late Andy Whitfield from memory, and I liked Andy Whitfield. Elgort just looks like that other bland guy from Ready Player One; no thank you!
I’ll give Worthington this much: When he puts in the effort, he can play a likeable meathead.
He thought he hired Dane DeHaan, and nobody noticed the difference until post.
Not the biggest fan of discount Leo DiCaprio but yeah, he would have been way better.
As much as I respected the craft of that movie, Ansel Elgort and Lily James are such a massive black hole of charisma and charm at the center of it that the whole enterprise really leaves me cold.
I wanna say both of them are also famously hard to work with as well. Definitely James, and hard likelihood Elgort
Starred for your Ansel takedown, but commenting for your Lily James takedown! Agree and agree!
I thought ElgortSheridanTeller was adequate in that his character was a little out of phase with everyone else. I think it hid his deficiencies.
I think Teller is more distinctive, though this also makes him more dislikeable.
It’s funny, I always confused Ansel Elgort with Alden Ehrenreich, and I was pretty disappointed when I found out it was actually the latter who was cast as Han Solo. From a looks standpoint, Elgort seems to resemble a young Harrison Ford a lot more.
Ehrenreich was really good in Hail Caesar. I don’t know of Elgort being really anything in anything.
I would argue that his character was supposed to be that way in that movie, to kind of play off the outsized personalities of the bank robbers
I literally could not get into Baby Driver due to Elgort. He was just bad and sucked the life of out every scene he was in. Which is a lot of scenes.
Why does “Ansel Elgort” sound like a name a shape-shifting alien makes up on the spot when a human asks about him?“Sorry, what’s your name?”“Ansel…”“Er, is that your first or last name?”“…first…”“Ok…and, um, your last name?”“…”“You know, your family name.”“…El…gort…”
I had a similar response to Scott Pilgrim. In that case, I actually think Michael Cera is a solid choice — the problem is that the character is a complete asshole (and in an irritating, rather than interesting, way) who is simply incapable of anchoring the stylishly-directed film built around him.Wright is very talented as a director, but his narrative sensibilities are sorely lacking.
After all the hubbub around Kate (which I have not seen but assume some is warranted and some is manufactured) I was just wondering how it would be nice to see a movie/series that gives a more realistic depiction of the Japanese underworld, something free of ninjas and gun-kata and what-have-you, like a Tokyo True Detective or Wire or something like that.
One of the things I always liked about The Wire was the lack of filler – no drama-setting music, no extracurricular crap to help “set the scene”, just the story and the actors and it worked so well. Reading this piece I immediately thought about David Simon’s early years on the crime beat that helped him have such a clear understanding of what was real. This could turn out to be pretty great if they let the story speak for itself.
It is Michael Mann tho and this is called Tokyo Vice, so I half expect one of the characters to be living on a boat and have a pet giant salamander named Hideki
I Legit thought this was some type of Miami vice spin off.
Wait, it’s not??
Incoming Jan Hammer theme music.
J-Pop cover of “In The Air Tonight” incoming…
There are many Japanese movies that give more realistic depictions of the Japanese underworld. I can recommend some if you’re interested.
A TV series would be nice, though. There are tons of yakuza movies – literally several hundreds, maybe even over a thousand (I am not exaggerating), but my understanding is that TV series that are really about yakuza (instead of say, a comedy about an ex-yakuza that works as a nurse or whatever) are rare, because Japanese TV is under more censorship rules than the TV industry.
I wouldn’t expect it out of America, or any country that isn’t Japan, though.
I meant “Japanese TV is under more censorship than the (Japanese) movie industry” of course. Too late to edit.
I am interested. Throw me a title, please!
LostMeBurnerKeyAgain sorry man I can’t get to your comment to pull you out of the greys. Appreciate the offer to recommend the kind of realistic shit I mentioned.
Somebody else asked for a recommendation, but although I can see their comment in my notifications, I can’t find it here to actually reply to it, even if I activate pending comments, nor does there seem to be a way to reply directly from the Notifications page. Now I see why everyone hates kinja so much!Anyway, yakuza movies started getting more realistic in the late ‘60s, and the jitsuroku yakuza subgenre (“true record”, meaning based on real facts) took over the ninkyo subgenre of the ‘60s around ‘72. The best director among that wave was Kinji Fukasaku, so almost anything he made in the ‘70s is a good bet. Specifically, though:-Battles Without Honor and Humanity
This is his best known. It’s very good, though it’s not my personal favorite. It concentrates on the postwar period, which is when the modern yakuza emerged (their roots go back hundreds of years, though). It’s chaotic, shot documentary-style, and it was made for a Japanese audience familiar with cultural codes, so there may be things you don’t understand at first. You’ll need to pay close attention, because a lot happens within a compact running time. It’s worth it, though. The entire saga is 5 movies long, with three stand-alone “New Battles” movies, but the first one stands well on its own. The second is the best of the sequels; 3-4-5 are decent, but they aren’t as good. New Battles 3 is great.-Yakuza Graveyard
This one seems like a Dirty Harry-type movie at first, but then the hard-nosed cop realizes how deeply intertwined the police is with the yakuza, and how the most dishonest gangs win by allying themselves with power, and ends up doing a 180, befriending a yakuza and falling in love with the Korean girlfriend of an incarcerated boss. Things have probably changed in many ways since, but this movie shows how the yakuza intersected with “honest” society. There’s one scene involving drugs used as a truth serum that seems silly now, but these were the days were the CIA were experimenting with that stuff on unsuspecting citizens, so it made sense then. Otherwise, a great, great movie IMO.There are more, but those two are a good place to start.
Kate was set in Osaka and Tokyo, but actually shot in Hawaii, and even though I got the story, it really had nothing to do with the yakuza cliches it ended up delivering. Some of the gory action was ok.
Watch Giri / Haji on Netflix.
Give Giri/Haji a try. Fantastic show.
ELGORT.SURFBORT.
My son is also called Surfbort.
I thought this article was going to be about the standing sexual assault and grooming accusations against him, and the fact no-one involved in the production thought to re-cast the role when there was ample time. Nobody is upset over him being in it because he’s white. Can the media actually start paying attention to the standing accusations for once? We are aware of them. There is outrage. Do his publicists have all the journalists on payroll?
Eh I believe that’s mostly been debunked
Denying =/= debunking lol. Anyone can lie just like she can or he can. Kind of odd to make it seem like it was false solely based on his word but not have the same mindset for the other party.
you thought wrong dummy
I do believe Twitter GenZ performance commenters need to go outside and touch grass once in a blue moon!!!
Well when trump was president he was such an obvious vile sex pest that it allowed everyone to be disqusted by these weirdo pervs, but now that biden is in office and has had a credible accusation of rape “debunked” by a banned Twitter accounts medium post its given people a lot more free pass. Horatio sans, Chris Delia is all over YouTube, Louis ck is touring again. I think when we buried that accusation of rape it tampered out the flames of this stuff, because in a patriarchy that is led by two speperate ideological factions misogyny is less important if the leader of your faction is doing it.
It sounds like you’re seeking to destroy/continuously defame someone based on a single twitter comment, which has no real backup to it, and has been somewhat debunked via like, every other source besides the ex. So, maybe slow your roll on slandering people based on something you heard somewhere, once, on twitter. If you were walking down the street and someone was standing on the corner screaming “Tom Hanks touched me inappropriately once!” would you take that as fact, and repeat it on websites, and believe that person because they said it loud enough? Is that the standard you apply to celebrity rumors/allegations? Because, um, you may want to reconsider your criteria for multiple purposes, Callie.
I still don’t know what a Tansel Elgort is?
I read the book years ago and really enjoyed it. That said, I’ve come across a bunch of people on the Internet a while back who swear it’s all fake and Jake Adelstein is a fraud. I’m not siding with them for now, but with all the nonfiction authors that casually lie and sometimes get away with it (I was just reading a book about Kim Jong-Il’s kidnapping of a South Korean film director that contains a bunch of easily-disproven bullshit for no apparent reason), I hope HBO did some research to back up Jake’s claims so it won’t blow up in their face.
Ansel. (Inexplicably, confusingly, and maddeningly,) he’s so hot right now.
Ansel. (Inexplicably, confusingly, and maddeningly,) he’s so hot right now.
This was a really interesting book. Elgort seems like an alright fit for the main character. In the book Jake Adelstein mostly wrote it as a man in the middle of a whirlwind of crazy stuff happening around him so Elgort just needs to play fairly straight similar to Baby Driver but no accent please.
I’m guessing COVID really derailed the miniseries Mann was planning about the Tet offensive.
Barsanti is not only the worst writer on this now piece of garbage website, he’s also the worst writer on the entire fucking internet. Ungrey me you cowards.
Elgort is playing the American journalist, Kikuchi is playing a Japanese
journalist (presumably one who works with Elgort’s character), and
Watanabe is playing a police, detective in Tokyo. At least some of the
other people in that list up above are playing criminals, which are kind
of a crucial aspect to a crime show. Also, Adelstein’s book mentions
that an alleged crime boss threatened to have him killed over a story he
wrote as a journalist, so one of those people is surely going to be the
crime boss. Maybe it’ll be Watanabe? That’d be a good twist.But we already know that Watanabe is playing a police, detective in Tokyo. It’s right there and you wrote it! He is playing a police, detective in Tokyo. Not a crime boss.
lionelhutzbusinesscard.jpg
Nice. I also hate that comma.
But what if this ends up being like The Shield, and the detective is actually a big-time criminal?
But all throughout The Shield Vic Mackey remained a police, detective in Los Angeles. He never became a crime boss. He was corrupted but he was still a police, detective in L.A. .
So wait what are we supposed to be outraged about?
Sam Barsanti’s writing is probably a good start.
I mean, I wouldn’t say good.
sounds like The Wire in Japan with Michael Mann directing??? So in.
Can’t believe executives shoehorned this white person into this Japanese story written by a white person based on a white person, directed by a white person, that also features the other two white people you mentioned in the article. Just inconceivable.
Is Ansel Elgort playing the editor of his high school newspaper? Because that’s the only “American journalist” role I’d buy him as.
What’s a “police, detective”?
Inspector Morse. You know, the Oxford comma!
Fuck all the shitstains who don’t appreciate the genius of your comment.
I was hoping that this would be about a couple of cops, basically Miami Vice set in Tokyo!