Movie Review

If we are to believe what we are told at the end of the film

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

it is unsurprising, then, that Memoirs Of A Geisha contains but a few authentic moments in a film that feels hopelessly and completely staged.

The story of Nitta Sayuri, born Chiyo, who rose from poor fisherman’s daughter, sold by her father at what looks to be the age of 9 to a geisha house in Kyoto, to preeminent geisha of her time is set against both the traditions of 1930s Japan and the changing time after World War II. It presents in great detail the everyday insults and politics among the women of the geisha district and gives a brief glimpse into some customs that in the West are most often misconstrued.

My quibble with this film is not the pan-Asian casting for certainly all the actors, both male and female, turn in competent performances. More, it is that the film commits the cardinal sin of fiction: it tells us what happened instead of showing us and making us feel it. The problem is that this film is not fiction; it is biography. It is as if because it is biography the actors, including the always stunning Michelle Yeoh and the ever capable Ken Watanabe, were constrained from using all but the smallest bit of their skills and craft. Each of the lead actresses, though, gets one of the few authentic moments of connection in the film.

The first comes as Hatsumomo (Li Gong, probably best known in the West for Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box) accosts young Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) in the garden of the geisha house. It is at that moment, looking into the girl’s stunning “water” eyes, that Hatsumomo realizes that she will not be one of Kyoto’s two most desired geishas for very much longer.

The second comes as Mameha (Michelle Yeoh, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Tomorrow Never Dies) negotiates with Mother (Kaori Momoi) for Chiyo’s debt and contract, wagering that she can have the young girl ready to make her debut and clear her debt to the geisha house in six months. The currents and undercurrents of both the words and gestures in the scene are a masterpiece of business negotiation and should be studied by the CEO of every company in the world both large and small.

The last of these moments comes when Chiyo, now called Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; House of Flying Daggers), makes her debut at one of the district’s tea houses. Sayuri’s embarrassment is palpable when she attempts to serve The Baron (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Pearl Harbor) his tea using one of Mahema’s alluring tricks.

I truly wanted to be captivated by this film, to be transported to a world shrouded in myth and secrecy, to feel when I left the theater as if I had gotten a peek behind a curtain that I never should have been aware of in the first place. Sadly, director Rob Marshall and screenwriter Robin Swicord failed to provide.

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An entertaining, capable entry in the franchise, Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, begins the reveal of author JK Rowling’s weaknesses and the reluctance of the franchise’s managers to move the stories out of the kiddie realm.

The main plot centers around the special occasion of the tri-wizard tournament in which students over 17 from each of three wizard academies volunteer to compete in three trials, each potentially deadly. The titular goblet of fire spits out three names via some magical precept thus choosing the contestants. In this case it spits out a fourth through the machinations of Lord Valdemort and his henchmen, and, of course, the fourth name is Harry’s.

Fully inhabiting their characters, Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson as Hermione Granger are all maturing into decent young actors, and there in lies the problem. While Rowling’s books may address the burgeoning issues of puberty and how it changes friendships between the sexes, the franchise’s managers seem unwilling to tackle the subject in any meaningful way. The film does contain the obligatory embarrassment and agony surrounding wanting to ask someone to the school dance and being unable to get the words to form either on time or at all, but there’s just something off about the mix of cliche, frivolity, and pathos with the subject is addressed.

Noted for being the first Potter to receive a PG-13 rating in the U.S., this film amps up the violence in a way that makes the events merely violent and not really threatening. The major flaw with this film, though, is that it feels rushed and disjointed, hurtling toward the foregone conclusion that Harry will come out on top, some way, some how. And here is where Rowling’s laziness as an author springs to the fore: if you’ve seen any of the other movies the game of “spot the villain at Hogwarts” should be a pretty short one.

It’s a long film, but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours on an afternoon, especially if you don’t have to pay full price. Over all, I’d say a 3 out of 5.

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Pride and Prejudice

• I freely admit that I’ve never read any of Jane Austen’s books.

Derailed

• Who knew Jennifer Aniston had it in her to play conniving, manipulative, and dangerously sexy?

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History may reflect that the recent indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was the beginning of the end for a Presidency marked fearmongering and the reduction of civil rights in defense of liberty. This remains to be seen. What is not in doubt is that unlike now, when we lack a coherent, rational critique of the current administration’s policies of torture, fear, degradation, and just plain stupidity, what has come to be known as the McCarthy Era had Edward R. Murrow.

With huge chunks of its text taken verbatim from Murrow’s broadcasts on the CBS program See It Now, Good Night, And Good Luck illuminates the process by which Murrow (David Strathairn) and producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) took a defining role in American culture by taking on Senator Joseph McCarthy and his campaign to rid America of communist agents and sympathizers. Written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, Good Night, And Good Luck is a daring film in a number of ways. Shot in a rich black and white and recognizing how light and shadows can be used to convey mood and using a sometimes too naturalistic sound presentation, this is a film for adults. It relies on the audience to have some knowledge of the time and place in which the events it is presenting occurred in order to understand the story, and it does not pander with a straight-line A to B plot with a pat ending. And it’s good that the film does not pander in this way, because it is telling a real story, one that has a place of ever increasing importance in American history. It is a story that does not end neatly.

Part history lesson and part drama, the film presents the decision of the team behind See It Now to challenge Joseph McCarthy’s blatantly unconstitutional and life-destroying process as institutionalized in House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings of rooting out communists in government service and America’s cultural life as but a chapter in American history. Sealed indictments where the accused was not allowed to examine the evidence, blind “corroborative testimony” in which the accused as not allowed to confront his accuser “proving” the accusations McCarthy and his committee made, and jail sentences with no end specified and without conviction were standard operating procedure during the height of McCarthyism. What is so brilliant about this film is that Clooney and the excellent cast he has assembled let these events stand for themselves. The parallels with and commentary on current events is left as a conclusion for the audience to draw by itself.

Clooney has said that during test screenings for this film the comment that he most often heard was that younger audiences didn’t know who Murrow was. I suspect, though I can’t prove, that this is why the film is bookended by Murrow’s keynote speech from the October 1958 Radio and Television News Directors Association convention in Chicago. In that speech Murrow said:

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show. If Hollywood were to run out of Indians, the program schedules would be mangled beyond all recognition. Then some courageous soul with a small budget might be able to do a documentary telling what, in fact, we have done–and are still doing–to the Indians in this country. But that would be unpleasant. And we must at all costs shield the sensitive citizens from anything that is unpleasant.

I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry’s program planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence. I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is–an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.

Many mark this as the end of Murrow’s active involvement in American journalism, that this speech was but an indicator of the depths of his disillusionment with the direction mass communications – television and Murrow’s beloved radio – were going in their relationships with the American public. It would not surprise me if that were true, and it does not surprise me how prescient Murrow’s words are nearly 50 years later. And those words are the other beautiful thing about Good Night, And Good Luck.

Murrow wrote his own closing statements for See It Now, and with no teleprompter, he read them from either sheets of paper or from cue cards. It is Murrow’s words, so acid tipped in dealing with Senator McCarthy and so brilliantly written, that overcome what is both this film’s strength – presentation of events without editorializing – and its weakness – its failure to convey the hysteria and fear that McCarthy generated with his destruction of lives. Murrow was, in a word, elegant. And it was that elegance that rationally told a story that needed to be told, that was that calm voice in the storm, that opened Americans’ eyes to what was going on in their own backyard. But in the audience, we don’t really get a sense of the desperation of Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise) as he is lambasted in the press, his reputation destroyed without evidence or cause, a lambasting that drove him to suicide.

This movie needs to be seen, and to be talked about, and beyond that it is an excellent film. The naturalistic sound design in a cast filled with so many men with such similar voices and the reticence to really impress upon the audience just how frightening those times were are the only things that prevent this film from being perfect. It rates 4.5 out of 5 popcorns.

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You have to say this for Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel), the man does not shy away from big themes. Nor does he shy away from flawed, complex characters. These two things combined are what make Serenity, even with the flaws it does have, the best science fiction film to come along in the past five years.
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