Cameron Crowe’s upcoming romcom, Aloha, was scheduled for a Christmas 2014 release. Sony didn’t feel confident enough and held the movie for a May 29 release. The cast is filled with prominent white actors, including “odd bird” Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams, Emma Stone, Bill Murray, and Danny McBride. Page Six has a new story about how the film is already a disaster. Amy Pascal called the movie “ridiculous” because “it never, not even once, ever works.” Sony has placed an embargo on film reviews and cast interviews until the night before Aloha hits theaters.

More trouble is brewing. An Asian-American group has criticized Cameron Crowe for “whitewashing” his cast in manner of Ridley Scott’s Exodus. The group accuses Crowe of hiring white actors for their recognizable faces rather than casting realistically for Hawaii’s demographic:

An Asian-American group is blasting Jerry Maguire director Cameron Crowe for having “whitewashed” Asian-Pacific Islanders out of his new film set in Hawaii.

A blistering press release from Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) charges that Crowe’s troubled new rom-com, Aloha, which opens next week, reserves virtually all of its prime roles for white actors — a stellar cast including Bradley Cooper, Bill Murray, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Alec Baldwin, Danny McBride and John Krasinski.

“Caucasians only make up 30 percent of the population [of Hawaii], but from watching this film, you’d think they made up 99 percent,” says MANAA’s Guy Aoki, a former resident of Hawaii.

“This comes in a long line of films — The Descendants, 50 First Dates, Blue Crush, Pearl Harbor — that uses Hawaii for its exotic backdrop but goes out of its way to exclude the very people who live there. It’s an insult to the diverse culture and fabric of Hawaii.”

The group points out that minorities can be enthusiastic ticket buyers: The seventh installment of The Fast and the Furious has sold more than $300 million worth of tickets in North America — 75 percent of those to non-white fans.

The biggest roles for Asian-Pacific Islanders in the film, Aoki claims, are for “Indian pedestrian,” “upscale Japanese tourist” and “upscale restaurant guest.” “They didn’t even have names,” Aoki adds. Referring to Crowe’s comment on social media that he wanted to play off the rich history of Hawaii, Aoki says, “How can you educate your audience to the ‘rich history’ of Hawaii by using mostly white people and excluding the majority of the people who live there and who helped build that history — APIs?”

[From Page Six]

From the impersonal description of the Asian-Pacific Islanders that do appear in this movie, it sounds like the film has been largely whitewashed. I can see why the MANAA is upset. Hawaii is usually portrayed as an exotic backdrop, a Disneyland of sorts with hula dancers being the only representation of Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders. Crowe made what looks like a throwaway romcom, but that’s no excuse. He also made specific mention about how he wanted to honor Hawaii’s “rich history” through this tale. So why the whitewashing?

Here’s the trailer for Aloha. It looks like a really bad movie.

Movie stills courtesy of Sony