memoirs of a geisha Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It's hard to believe, I know, but it's been a whole year since Cinematical was officially born. Actually, our birthday was last Saturday, March 10, but we were so busy with our heads buried in movies we let it slip right by. A lot has changed around here in the past year - we've gone from being a little film blog with former editor Karina Longworth blogging all by her lonesome, to a site with a full-fledged staff, covering festivals, reviewing lots of movies, and bringing you up-to-the-minute movie news. Now Karina has moved on to another project (although we're very glad she's still around writing her excellent new column, Laws and Sausages, and doing some other cool stuff for us), and spandy-new Editor-in-Chief James Rocchi is at the helm, with Martha Fischer and me rounding out the editorial team, working hard to continue to bring you what you've been coming here for, while adding a few refinements here and there. It's been a great year at Cinematical, and we're looking forward to the next one. In the meantime, here's a look back at the past year in Cinematical:

 

Well, the Oscars are over. It's been a long and often mind-numbingly boring Oscar night (especially the acceptance speeches), but we, like Jon Stewart, stuck it out until the bittersweet end. What did everyone think of Stewart as the Oscar host? I was really impressed with Stewart, myself.  I was worried the audience wouldn't be real responsive to his jokes. His brand of humor is political, highbrow and snarky, and I wondered how he would go over with a theater full of insecure movie stars. I loved the Daily Show-style bits they did in-between too, although I think the humor went over the heads of some of the stars. Reese Witherspoon got it, though - she's a smart cookie, don't let the cutesy looks fool you for a second.

Here, for your perusing pleasure, is the list of all the winners and nominees from the major categories (winners are in bold and marked with an asterisk). Give us your thoughts on Oscar night -  the winners, the losers, whose outfits you loved and hated, what you thought of Stewart as the host - whatever your thoughts are, we want to hear them.

 

Both the American Society of Cinematographers and the Costume Design Guild held their annual awards ceremonies in Los Angeles last night, and Memoirs of a Geisha was the night's big winner. In winning the award for Best Feature Film cinematography, Memoirs' Dion Beebe beat out three of the four lensmen with whom he's nominated for the cinematography Oscar, including Rodrigo Prieto, who shot Brokeback Mountain, and Robert Elswit of Good Night, and Good Luck. Memoirs is Beebe's second collaboration with director Rob Marshall; Chicago, their other film together, earned Beebe his first Oscar nomination.

Meanwhile, across town the Costume Design Guild was naming Colleen Atwood their winner for excellence in period film for the gorgeous garments she created for Memoirs. The win was Atwood's second in a row - she was recognized by the guild last year for her work on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Other awards on the night went to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the fantasy category, and Transamerica for Excellence in Contemporary Film.

The recent decision by the Chinese government to ban Memoirs of a Geisha from domestic screens isn't going to stop anyone from seeing Rob Marshall's film. In fact, Chinese citizens have been watching the movie for months: thanks to the country's thriving piracy industry, DVDs of Geisha are widely available for prices much lower than those paid for movie tickets. Though the Chinese government is restrictive enough that it routinely "protects" its citizens from the harmful influence of foreign cultural elements, the fact that roughly 95% of the DVDs available in the country are thought to be pirated (the numbers, obviously, are even higher for banned films and TV shows) sort of removes the teeth from the government's actions. I wonder what the reaction to the ban has been among Chinese citizens - it sounds as if, under current circumstances, it's little more than political window dressing.

After going back and forth with the idea, the Chinese government has officially decided not to release Memoirs of a Geisha into its theaters. The film was supposed to debut on February 9th (already pushed back from January 9th), but a U.S film industry official (I wonder if they get to wear badges?) claims that the State Administration of Film, TV and Radio reversed its decision over the weekend.

Obviously fearing for his life (or job...but life sounds cooler), the supposed official spoke on condition of anonymity. Contrary to reports that a certain sex scene was exciting too many people on the country's censorship board, it seems the main reason the film was pulled is because officials were worried that the sight of Chinese actresses playing Japanese geishas would just be too damn nuts for anyone to handle. And yet, (May I suggest inserting Rob Schneider's name here) continues to show up on American screens every year with little to no backlash. Damn it, stand up for yourselves people!

For those of you looking for a juicy "Screw them Chinese!" quote, I'm sorry to say that all you will get are the following unbelievably underwhelming remarks from Sony Pictures Entertainment spokesman, Jim Kennedy: "We were pleased by their acceptance of the film in November and were disappointed by this decision." Jeez Jim, you think you can maybe say that again, only this time we want to make sure you still have a pulse?

 

BAFTA (The British Academy of Film and Television Arts) announced the "longlist" for their British Academy Film Awards, and something clearly went terribly wrong. While Brokeback Mountain did receive 13 nominations (as did The Constant Gardener and Good Night, and Good Luck), it was beaten out by Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha, which led the pack with 15 total mentions. Um, BAFTA? Did you not hear? Gay cowboys are supposed to win everything, and besides, Memoirs of Geisha really isn't very good at all. Come on, people - get with the program.

There's still hope, however, that the natural order of things will be restored. BAFTA's longlists consist of the 15 films in each category that made it through the first round of voting. A second round - completed on January 12 - will narrow the groups down to five finalists. Sadly, things can only get worse for both Munich, which was late in getting screeners out and is on only two lists (for best director and adapted screenplay) and The New World, which failed to receive a single mention.

 

After I returned home from seeing Memoirs of a Geisha, something made me pick Charles Frazier's 1997 novel Cold Mountain off the shelf. The book is memorable for the way it overwhelms the reader with new information through its mining of an obsolete dictionary of retired words from the Civil War era - tools that are no longer in existence, flowers that aren't common, songs that aren't sung, and so on (I'm still not sure that I know what a tompion or an offscouring is). The point of drowning the reader in detail is to put the author's credibility as a narrator beyond question, and it works. It wasn't until I saw the film version of Cold Mountain a couple of years ago that my opinion of the work was brought down a peg or two. Aside from a crackerjack performance by Nicole Kidman, the story had little to recommend it; there was no real dramatic heft or resonance. I've never picked up Arthur Golden's Memoirs, but after seeing the film I'm convinced that the book must be in the mold of Cold Mountain.

If Memoirs of a Geisha is not about the fine points of time and place in Imperial Japan, then it must be about what it's about. And what it's about-about is the pageantry and romance that awaits a woman who sells her vagina at auction. The film goes out of its way to remind us that geishas are not prostitutes, but so do the escort ads in the Manhattan yellow pages. Pay no attention. A girl who is 'selected' to become a geisha will spend the better part of her reproductive life learning how to please a man. She brings him a tablecloth if he needs a tablecloth, laughs at his jokes whether or not they are funny, makes with cheap entertainments like fan-dances on command, and is always within ear-shot to dispense fortune-cookie aphorisms that do not betray any personal thoughts or opinions or desires. She offers more or less the same kind of companionship as the talking robot from Rocky IV. At the climax of a geisha's geishahood, a bidding war between powerful men erupts, and her virginity is put on the block. If she's lucky.

An Italian cell phone company has won the right to distribute feature films on cellphones just 10 days after they premiere in theaters. Distributor Eagle Pictures previously tried to back out of their deal to provide content for Hutchinson H3G (who provide Italian cell phone services from a base in Hong Kong) once they learned of the cellular company's plan to distribute The Interpreter to Italian cell phones uncomfortably close to the picture's theatrical release. In retaliation, H3G went to court to win the right to break the window – and won. Their next move will be to offer their customers the ability to download Memoirs of a Geisha directly to their phones as early as December 27.

Italian film distributors are predictably pissed. Says Paolo Protti, chief of Anec, Italy's exhibitors organization: "We absolutely cannot accept that a firstrun movie becomes available on mobile devices 10 days after its release." He warns that the exhibitors will fight the ruling with all their might. But H3G is unlikely to back down. Their end goal? To become the first company in the world to offer firstrun films for cell phone download, with unlimited viewing for one week, for about $10.50.

To my mind, there are two questions here. A) would you pay the price of a movie ticket to be able to watch a new release on your phone, and B) if this kind of service was available in the US, what kind of effect would it have on box office and – because you can't really talk about one without the other anymore – piracy? I think $10.50 is stupid high price to be able to watch anything on a cell phone – unless there was someway to easily get the content off the phone and onto some other sort of viewing device, which, from what I've read, isn't clear. What do you think?