Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Up front, I am not particularly well-versed in anime, so I am the exact wrong person to write this up. I hope Scott Green can come in and spruce up this posting with an actual informed opinion, but I figured I should at least get the conversation started. Keanu Reeves will topline 20th Century Fox's big screen adaptation of the very popular COWBOY BEBOP series. A relative unknown screenwriter, Peter Craig, is attached to pen the adaptation with Sunrise Inc. (original anime producers) working closely with Fox on the adaptation. Reeves will play bounty hunter Spike Spiegel. That's what I know. Maybe it's super great casting, but even though I have no idea what the source material is like, I have a feeling that there might be some... uneasy feelings about this. Right or wrong?
Scott Green here, The character of Spike Spiegel is that of a noir, tragic hero crossed with an embodiment of Bruce Lee's "like water," with a healthy dose of Monkey Punch's not-so gentlemanly gentleman thief Lupin III. He's haunted by how his previous life within a crime syndicate ended, but he also has full of primal mischief. A favorite scene from the episode "Gateway Shuffle" involves his partner, ex-cop Jet Black holding a suspect believed to be connected to an ecoterrorist bio-weapon, while speaking to an old contact via video-conference. Meanwhile Spike's found a strange vial. He begins trying to twist it open. He puts it on the ground and begins stomping on it. The suspect really starts sweating. Finally, Spike places it on a shelf, pulls his gun out and shoots off the outer casing. For the most part, the character has an oceanic disposition; fluid with a lot doing on below the surface. According to Variety Peter Craig will script the film. Sunrise's Kenji Uchida and Shinichiro Watanabe will serve as associate producers alongside series writer Keiko Nobumoto. Erwin Stoff will be producing and Joshua Long has been named executive producer. There's talk that the script is based on the anime's first episode "Asteroid Blues," concerning a the "Red Eye" drug, which speeds up the perception of the user.* Because it's ridiculous to expect any perfect anime to film cast translation, my pick for Spike Spiegel is The Long Goodbye era Elliott Gould.... with Jean-Pierre Melville directing 
