Memoirs of a Geisha

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Summary:
A young Japanese girl with strikingly beautiful eyes is taken from her poor fishing village to be raised as a geisha. During tumultuous times and key historical events in Japan's history, she eventually becomes one of the most famous geisha of all time. This is her story as told to an interviewer during her old age.

Review:
Memoirs of a Geisha is one of the best books I've ever read. Rob Marshall has a great directorial eye. Just watch Chicago and tell me it doesn't LOOK wonderful. There are a few problems with this movie before you even see it. First, the book is extremely intricate in detail and storytelling. It would be very difficult to translate onscreen and still evoke the same emotions that one gets while reading it. Second, this movie hires CHINESE ACTORS to play not just Japanese characters in a Japanese story... but they are the FUCKING LEADS! This is absolute bullshit, and a major strike goes to the makers for this bad, name-dropping-for-the-box-office-receipts faux-pas. Already, it seems this movie is doomed.

Now that I've seen it, I have to admit that it was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. I'm also not going to say that it was great, because it certainly wasn't. My biggest complaints lie in that it was obviously pandering to the Oscars; the soundtrack is fucking terrible and ruins a lot of key scenes (such as Mameha's entrance); the book should not be a movie in the first place, and there were a number of other little things that added up to a lot once the final credits rolled that took away from my enjoyment.
From the opening shot, you can see that Geisha is hoping to capture the grand and majestic splendor of what the voting majority for the "Little Gold Guy" love so much. The big name actors for the leads disregard what should have been a given Japanese role, and putting it in English helped establish the certainty of it not being considered a Foreign Language Film. None of this particularly works in the movie's favor. Yes, this movie is screaming "look at me, Academy Awards!"
As I stated, I found the score to be pretty not-good. Sometimes a score can make a movie, and other times it does the opposite. I found myself noticing the music when I shouldn't have, and it made me feel differently than what the scene intended. When Mameha is shown at the front door of Sayuri's house with the umbrella, the score swells and makes lots of noise to build the tension, and then she closes her umbrella, the music stops... and I started to cackle. In fact, I found myself kind of scoffing at the score after every ten or fifteen minutes.
Having read the book and loving it to death, I am obviously biased. At the same time, I feel it would be very VERY difficult to make into a worthy movie. Some books are just too hard to translate honorably to film. If this WAS to be put to the screen properly, it would take a lot of time to establish the many years that it runs through, and should ALSO be done in Japanese. I got confused near the end, when there were American soldiers and yet the geisha still spoke English - or was it Japanese? - and how much English did they speak? Plus, how did Sayuri understand and speak English in her situation, etc... it left way too many questions that perhaps many viewers wouldn't care so much about. I wanted this story to be told in Japanese.
The biggest flaw is the whole idea of Geisha being made into a movie. Bad mojo already began with casting, but the story itself is so delicate, informative, and poignant that it would be nearly impossible to make into a movie that's two hours and fifteen minutes. There are many times when a book is such a good story that all the filmmakers really need to do is follow the book like it's the screenplay, and the movie turns out fine (if not better). Memoirs of a Geisha managed to follow the storyline very closely, but the true beauty of the story was in the details. The movie does have voice-over narration that touches upon the way of geisha and the importance to detail, but it's hardly even a cursory look into what made the book so fantastic. The same detail and poetry also went into the story itself, and to have it be brought to the screen and shown in this movie was disheartening, because if someone sees this movie and likes it, then decides to read the book, the conclusion will be less impacting because they had already been given the inferior abridged version from the film.

I would say that if I hadn't read the book, I would think that Geisha was a decent, but flawed film. The pacing is a little bit off, as if the cadence of their line delivery isn't what it should be. This is one of those movies where I actually wanted them to make some changes from the book so that those who read it after seeing this will not know where the final ten pages are heading. I usually don't like comparing movies to books. Typically, I HATE it. In this case, I can't belp but wish that this was never a movie. It is just one of those very few stories that works best on the page.

In conclusion, I will say that with the time given, this movie isn't that bad. I don't like admitting this, but it's true. This isn't a terrible movie, and if you haven't read the book, it would be even better. However, if you HAVE read the book... you'll know what I mean by the transfer from book to film getting lost in translation. It should have been in Japanese, with Japanese actors, and as a several hour HBO single series epic, or something like that. Now, THAT would have kicked some ass, instead of tickled my chode a little bit like this movie did.

GRADE: C+

Reviewed: 12/31/05