Memoirs of a Geisha
First reviews of the controversial movie "Memoirs of a Geisha" are now starting to appear in the international press, with early speculations from the New York Times and now Time Asia. Sounds positive, but the real fireworks will start in a few weeks when the yellow-press journalism of Japan and China take up the issue of Chinese actresses portraying Japanese geishas. It's bad enough that Japanese comic books attacking Chinese with blatantly racist diatribes, but I hardly expect less coming back from the other direction.
The cast is a dream team of A-list Asian actors, beginning with Gong Li and Zhang, who enjoyed her own star-is-born career splash at 21 as the airborne vixen of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which became the top-grossing foreign-language film released to that time in North America. Yeoh, another Crouching Tiger eminence, was Hong Kong's top female action star in the 1980s and '90s, and lent her high-kicking glamour to the James Bond series in the 1997 movie Tomorrow Never Dies. Watanabe earned an Oscar nomination as Tom Cruise's regal ally in The Last Samurai.
These are some of the finest, most attractive actors on the globe, and they will help sell Geisha to the Asian audience. (The film opens in Hong Kong on Dec. 9, for its regular run in Tokyo a day later, and in other Asian cities in early January.) But their name value means little at the U.S. box office—less, anyway, than the lure of seeing a cherished novel illuminated on the big screen. "I've gotta believe, in the job that I do, that when you give the audience something that they haven't seen before, they are going to like it," Amy Pascal, Sony Pictures' movie chief, says of her studio's $80 million investment, which is cheap for a film of such grand range, but a lot for one without bankable Western names. "I'm hoping the film appeals to people who have ever been in love."
Or in love with movies, for Geisha revives the sweeping spirit of old-fashioned film romance. It also recalls the bygone day when Hollywood believed it was truly the world's storyteller, and thus could put on the screen epics set in China or India, Java or Japan—so long as the indigenous characters were played by whites. One difference between Geisha and such venerable films of the mystic East as The Good Earth and Dragon Seed is that this one has Chinese and Japanese actors in the leads rather than Katharine Hepburn with Asian eye makeup.
Time Asia Memoirs of a Geisha Link
2 Comments:
You missed this comment by the TIME reviewer:
"Purists may very well complain and for good reason that the three main geishas are played by Chinese women speaking Chinese-accented English, which they were taught to intone in a lightly faux-Asian accent. It is a SHAME that a film with so specific a setting could not have leading ladies steeped in that culture."
are you accusing TIME now of yellow journalism?
To the anonymous person who commentted previously: I suggest you, before illogically and sillily criticizing the movie, you'd better check your comment carefully. If one is even unable to correct his grammar mistakes in only one paragraph, how come that he criticizes others' English? Moreover, I am sorry to say that it is really a BIG SHAME for you as a foolish racialist in the 21th century.
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