Memoirs of a Geisha

Like Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha also aroused angry controversy before anyone ever saw it. Japanese commentators denounced the producers for hiring non-Japanese in principal roles. Chinese commentators denounced Chinese actors for agreeing to appear in a film that treated their hated enemy sympathetically. By and large, those issues are sloughed off by most critics, who suggest that Geisha is not really so much an Asian film but a typically Hollywood one. It's not such a big deal that Chinese women are playing Japanese roles. It's just showbiz, writes Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News. Indeed, the slick production is at the center of most of the criticism of the film. 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, writes Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe & Mail. Fellow Torontonian Peter Howell of the Star, concludes: This is a movie for the ear and the eye, not the brain and the heart. Likewise Claudia Puig writes in USA Today: With its gorgeous cinematography, costumes and production design, Geisha is a visual feast, but it lacks emotional heft and leaves the viewer strangely unsatisfied. Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times comments, If the book was celebrated for its meticulous attention to historical detail, the movie's heart belongs strictly to Hollywood. And Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer offers what he admits is a cheap joke when he describes the film as pretty as a picture and soulless as a Hollywood producer.

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