Memoirs of a Turkey

After years of false starts and production problems, the movie version of Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha finally got made. The buzz in advance of the movie's release last month suggested Oscar nominations and increased interest in Japanese culture - and the controversy over a movie involving a Chinese lead cast and an Anglo-Saxon director (Rob Marshall) adapting a book from a Jewish author couldn't hurt.

A month or so later, after reviews ranging from indifferent to tough, Memoirs of a Geisha grossed about $30 million in a month. Great news, until you remember that Memoirs cost $89 million to produce, and that it took a month to make at the box office what it took the movie version of "The Dukes of Hazzard" less than a week to make! As for the picture itself, well, I haven't seen it - and I had a desire to, given my interest in Japanese culture - but the general consensus is that it's a pretty picture to look at but doesn't have a lot of substance. Critics who reviewed it favorably only seemed to like it a little, not enough to pronounce it a classic.

The lesson here, of course, is that if you're going to make a movie an exotic culture, you'd better have a strong story behind the pretty visuals. In which case, you shouldn't spend too much money on it, either. Hollywood, of course, will learn the wrong lesson; having made Memoirs of a Geisha for bourgeois white people, they'll conclude that a movie actually has to have bourgeois white people in it to attract that demographic.

And Asians will be relegated to martial arts movies again. :-(

I'll probably still see the movie, but with lowered expectations. Anyway, if you live in the greater New York area, and you truly wnat to understand Japanese culture, go to the place I've been volunteering for - right here.