Ghost In The Shell

From BBC Website:

Spielberg In 3D
With his studio boss hat on, Steven Spielberg is masterminding a live action version of Japanese Manga classic Ghost in the Shell. Dreamworks has nabbed the rights to the futuristic cartoon cop caper and plans to turn it into a 3D movie with proper actors and everything.
The film will follow the adventures of a top secret unit that specialises in techno crime. First published as a comic in 1989, the series has spawned three anime movies a TV series and a bunch of videogames. "Ghost in the Shell is one of my favorite stories" Spielberg told Variety. "It's a genre that has arrived, and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks". Either that or he's been watching Saturday morning telly with his kids again.

Is it me, or is everything going Live Action these days? Is it me or is Hollywood pilfering a lot of ideas from Asia these days? Is it me or is every other movie that comes out a comic related film?

No, no Stephen, it's not just you.

I like comics, I love them in fact and have really missed them during my stay here in Japan. Comics are awesome and more power to the creators if they can take their intellectual properties to the massive audience that cinema has. But film is also awesome, and in film stories that can't be told in comics are totally possible.

this device is totally cinematic, it can't be repeated in comic, or book without greatly diminishing the effect

I was watching a heavily comic influenced film just two days ago, heavily comic influenced but not a LIVE ACTION film of a comic. In fact it's actually based on a Philip K Dick story. Theirs a device in the movie where multiple permutations of the same event are laid over one another and played out at the same time, and considering that 'comic-time' isn't real time (not that film time is either, it's actually the illusion of actual time) then this device is totally cinematic, it can't be repeated in comic, or book without greatly diminishing the effect.

So why aren't more films just being films? Why aren't we seeing more innovations like 'bullet-time' instead of seeing frame for frame recreations of comic books?

I'm hoping that it's just a stage that the industry is going through, I'm hoping that although it's very vogue now to borrow from comics, in a few years time maybe the Hollywood will realise how much of a boon it really is, and how much they could really differentiate film and comics (without the use of gimmicks like 3D) from each other.