Visuals/Theatrics/Gook Alert - What is this? A rave??l
Or evoking Martha Graham?
- Bland. Every requisite element of a typical, big Hollywood production is delivered in moderation. A little too balanced.
- Uninspiring. In no way is it thought-provoking.
- No dialogue in Japanese. All dialogue delivered in some mix of Chinese-North-American-British-accented English, complete with English-style intonation and phrasing. Therefore, "the biggest drawback to having Chinese actors playing Japanese roles in an English-speaking film is, perhaps not surprisingly, the stilted dialogue and interactions. Instead of the dramatic flow afforded by a foreign film performed in in its own language, like Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, to name two random examples, Marshall's actors are inhibited by the inherent limits of the language barrier." Moreover, "The playwright Doug Wright, hired to polish the shooting script, was kept on during the production to rewrite lines that the actors found too difficult to pronounce." Apparently, the director and producers didn't feel it is necessary to be verbally authentic to the Japanese culture. Therefore, it almost made viewing the film as played out seem surreal.
- Gong Li is the only redeemable actor on board.
- The visuals (set and costume) provide some redemption.
Verdict:
As Sony and Columbia had to answer the question "would American moviegoers be grabbed by a film that did not at least include a white performer in a starring role, as have so many East-meets-West Hollywood movies, from Marlon Brando in heavy eye makeup in 'The Teahouse of the August Moon' to Tom Cruise in 'The Last Samurai'?"; this film delivers an already-Westernized version of a story produced in such a way to maximize their reach of the target demographic - the North American audience. (NA's)
The rebuttal: "Mr. Lee said those who object should get over it. 'American films are less American every day, because you have to please a world audience,' he said. 'There's less authenticity, so it's more accessible. Do American directors care about Japanese life more than the Japanese? So what? They'll probably still watch it with great interest."
SoW's response to Mr. Ang "sell-out" Lee: Loved "Eat Drink Man Woman" Ang - really, loved the thoughtful poignancy. So I hear that you've moved on since then into the arms of Columbia, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Sony, yeah? Now the brethren of Hollywood has got your ass, paying lip service is unavoidable if a player (such as yourself) wants to avert the possiblity of being skinned alive. So yes, in order to support this rather overbearing industry, let's vanilla-ize things even more for the NA's. Yes, let's. Now, that's progress.
SoW & co. gurantee you, attentive readers, that this film will only perpetuate whitey's misperceive notion of the "exotic orient". Spielberg's works has gone downhill since A.I. Why Mr.King-of-La-La-Land? Why?? Whatever happened to the intelligent sensitivity you shown for cultural and racial tensions in Empire of the Sun? Don't bother forking over your moola to see "Geisha", but it's ok if your boo is doin the forking.
*Note to the piracy popo dutifully standing guard tonight: I would rather fill my PPC's SD card w/ kayne, gwen, and the manuscript of my erotica novel than record this film to unleash onto KaZaA. So go ahead and unwind your bunched up panties.
*I've been a long-time reader of Liam Lacey's film reviews for obvious reasons. He gave 2-1/2 stars for MoG in his review, which is pretty much bang-on:
Lost in Adaptation
The Globe and Mail, R7, Dec. 9, 2005
Full of falling rain, fluttering silk, John Williams's music and whispery voiceover, Memoirs of a Geisha is one long oxymoronic exercise in attempting to show delicacy through overkill. Adapted from Arthur Golden's 1997 long-researched novel, the narrative emphasizes the mysteries and exoticism of geishas, portrayed not, ahem, as close cousins to prostitutes, but as practitioners of a kind of female monastic art "as forbidden as it is fragile."
Geisha, the voiceover informs us, means "artist." The movie emphasizes a world of mysterious rituals of hair and face-painting, correct bows and music, which, incidentally, has something to do with keeping businessmen entertained and drunk. (All of this is in sharp constrast to the hardscrabble lives of the women depicted, for example, in Mikio Naruse's films.)
Memoirs talks refinement and ends up feeling like toned-up schlock. It's the episodic tale of one young girl, Sayuri (Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang), and her rise from child slavery to become the top geisha in town. "Never was there a story like mine," says Sayuri, which suggests she never heard of Cinderella.
Memoirs is directed by Rob Marshall, the former theatre director who hit the jackpot with his debut feature, the multi-Oscar-winning Chicago, a couple of years ago. Working with a crack design team and crew, he has created another movie of small substance and radiant surfaces. Rather improbably, the two movies have more in common than they should, as Memoirs plays out like a backstage story filled with cat fights and sexual intrigues.
But before Sayuri was Sayuri, she was a blue-eyed girl named Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo), sold into bondage by her peasant mother, separated from her sister to work as a servant in a geisha house under the imperious charge of the Mother (Kaori Momoi), and subject to the tempestuous whims of the house's chief breadwinner, the beautiful Hatsumomo(Gong Li). In a pivotal, if incongruously perverse, moment, nine-year-old Chiyo falls in love with a rich businessman, known as the Chairman (Ken Watanabe), when he sees her crying on the street and buys her a sweet. The Chairman then becomes her Prince Charming, who inspires her to become a geisha in order to try to land him.
Though the initial childhood portion is in Japanese with subtitles, the movie switches to a cast of mainly Chinese actresses speaking stilted English. (This is jarring, given that the backdrop of much of the movie is a Sino-Japanese war.) Fortunately, there's an outside force to give her character a push. Chigo's fairy godmother arrives in the form of a famed geisha from another house, Mameha (Michelle Yeoh, who is fluent in English), who makes a financial deal to school Chiyo, now rechristened Sayuri, in the geisha arts. This pits Sayuri against Hatsumomo and her protegee. The movie reaches its pretentious peak at a "virgin auction" when she does a free-form performance dance (think Martha Graham in platform shoes) before the leering businessmen, and earns a record bid for her hymen.
All of this feels lavishly ridiculous, though only Gong seems to recognize and relish it, as she dives into the fire-breathing, Joan Crawford potential of the overripe material. Zhang, who was heartbreaking in Wong Kar-wai's 2046, here shows the range of a porcelain doll.
The movie's third act involves the disruptive effect of the Second World War on the geisha lifestyle, but as with Scarlett O'Hara, war and deprivation helps bring out the heroine's true depth of character. She even has a chance to help the Chairman for favours previously bestowed, as the Japanese start making deals with the Yankee invaders.
Memoirs, by extrapolation, can be seen as reinterpreted through Hollywood eyes: Arcane exoticism meets obvious bombast.
As Sony and Columbia had to answer the question "would American moviegoers be grabbed by a film that did not at least include a white performer in a starring role, as have so many East-meets-West Hollywood movies, from Marlon Brando in heavy eye makeup in 'The Teahouse of the August Moon' to Tom Cruise in 'The Last Samurai'?"; this film delivers an already-Westernized version of a story produced in such a way to maximize their reach of the target demographic - the North American audience. (NA's)
The rebuttal: "Mr. Lee said those who object should get over it. 'American films are less American every day, because you have to please a world audience,' he said. 'There's less authenticity, so it's more accessible. Do American directors care about Japanese life more than the Japanese? So what? They'll probably still watch it with great interest."
SoW's response to Mr. Ang "sell-out" Lee: Loved "Eat Drink Man Woman" Ang - really, loved the thoughtful poignancy. So I hear that you've moved on since then into the arms of Columbia, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Sony, yeah? Now the brethren of Hollywood has got your ass, paying lip service is unavoidable if a player (such as yourself) wants to avert the possiblity of being skinned alive. So yes, in order to support this rather overbearing industry, let's vanilla-ize things even more for the NA's. Yes, let's. Now, that's progress.
SoW & co. gurantee you, attentive readers, that this film will only perpetuate whitey's misperceive notion of the "exotic orient". Spielberg's works has gone downhill since A.I. Why Mr.King-of-La-La-Land? Why?? Whatever happened to the intelligent sensitivity you shown for cultural and racial tensions in Empire of the Sun? Don't bother forking over your moola to see "Geisha", but it's ok if your boo is doin the forking.
*Note to the piracy popo dutifully standing guard tonight: I would rather fill my PPC's SD card w/ kayne, gwen, and the manuscript of my erotica novel than record this film to unleash onto KaZaA. So go ahead and unwind your bunched up panties.
*I've been a long-time reader of Liam Lacey's film reviews for obvious reasons. He gave 2-1/2 stars for MoG in his review, which is pretty much bang-on:
Lost in Adaptation
The Globe and Mail, R7, Dec. 9, 2005
Full of falling rain, fluttering silk, John Williams's music and whispery voiceover, Memoirs of a Geisha is one long oxymoronic exercise in attempting to show delicacy through overkill. Adapted from Arthur Golden's 1997 long-researched novel, the narrative emphasizes the mysteries and exoticism of geishas, portrayed not, ahem, as close cousins to prostitutes, but as practitioners of a kind of female monastic art "as forbidden as it is fragile."
Geisha, the voiceover informs us, means "artist." The movie emphasizes a world of mysterious rituals of hair and face-painting, correct bows and music, which, incidentally, has something to do with keeping businessmen entertained and drunk. (All of this is in sharp constrast to the hardscrabble lives of the women depicted, for example, in Mikio Naruse's films.)
Memoirs talks refinement and ends up feeling like toned-up schlock. It's the episodic tale of one young girl, Sayuri (Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang), and her rise from child slavery to become the top geisha in town. "Never was there a story like mine," says Sayuri, which suggests she never heard of Cinderella.
Memoirs is directed by Rob Marshall, the former theatre director who hit the jackpot with his debut feature, the multi-Oscar-winning Chicago, a couple of years ago. Working with a crack design team and crew, he has created another movie of small substance and radiant surfaces. Rather improbably, the two movies have more in common than they should, as Memoirs plays out like a backstage story filled with cat fights and sexual intrigues.
But before Sayuri was Sayuri, she was a blue-eyed girl named Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo), sold into bondage by her peasant mother, separated from her sister to work as a servant in a geisha house under the imperious charge of the Mother (Kaori Momoi), and subject to the tempestuous whims of the house's chief breadwinner, the beautiful Hatsumomo(Gong Li). In a pivotal, if incongruously perverse, moment, nine-year-old Chiyo falls in love with a rich businessman, known as the Chairman (Ken Watanabe), when he sees her crying on the street and buys her a sweet. The Chairman then becomes her Prince Charming, who inspires her to become a geisha in order to try to land him.
Though the initial childhood portion is in Japanese with subtitles, the movie switches to a cast of mainly Chinese actresses speaking stilted English. (This is jarring, given that the backdrop of much of the movie is a Sino-Japanese war.) Fortunately, there's an outside force to give her character a push. Chigo's fairy godmother arrives in the form of a famed geisha from another house, Mameha (Michelle Yeoh, who is fluent in English), who makes a financial deal to school Chiyo, now rechristened Sayuri, in the geisha arts. This pits Sayuri against Hatsumomo and her protegee. The movie reaches its pretentious peak at a "virgin auction" when she does a free-form performance dance (think Martha Graham in platform shoes) before the leering businessmen, and earns a record bid for her hymen.
All of this feels lavishly ridiculous, though only Gong seems to recognize and relish it, as she dives into the fire-breathing, Joan Crawford potential of the overripe material. Zhang, who was heartbreaking in Wong Kar-wai's 2046, here shows the range of a porcelain doll.
The movie's third act involves the disruptive effect of the Second World War on the geisha lifestyle, but as with Scarlett O'Hara, war and deprivation helps bring out the heroine's true depth of character. She even has a chance to help the Chairman for favours previously bestowed, as the Japanese start making deals with the Yankee invaders.
Memoirs, by extrapolation, can be seen as reinterpreted through Hollywood eyes: Arcane exoticism meets obvious bombast.
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