Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (***1/2)

Everyone knows people they see all the time, often at work, but don’t know much about. What do those people do with their spare time? In the case of Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, who has had roles in Babel, 47 Ronin, and Pacific Rim), a 29-year-old Tokyo office assistant, she spends much of time alone, watching an old videotape of the movie Fargo. Her curiosity is not idle, because she believes she has pinpointed the location of a suitcase full of money that the Steve Buscemi character has buried in the film. This perhaps does not seem like a promising idea for a feature film, but David and Nathan Zellner (brothers, like Fargo filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen) make it work. Lars and the Real Girl seems roughly comparable.

Kumiko is a fish out of water in America, where she barely speaks the language, but also in Japan, where she lives a solitary existence. Kikuchi is in every scene of the movie and creates a character who remains enormously sympathetic even as her interactions with Japanese and Americans are sometimes very funny, even as she behaves deceitfully. There are a couple of nits I could pick with the plot, but the character is always believable. Besides the unique story, I enjoyed this film for its portrayals of infrequent film subjects: naiveté, language barrier, and snowy northern Minnesota. Only the ending was a letdown, but maybe because I wanted to keep watching Kumiko (and Kikuchi).


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viewed 10/25/14 7:15 pm at Roxy [PFS Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14

The Wind Rises (***1/4)

It is perhaps fitting that the final feature by Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki looks back in time. Departing from the fantasy films that make up the bulk of his work, he tells the story of Jiro Horikoshi, whose real-life counterpart designed Japanese aircraft used in World War II. Jiro literally dreams of flying long before the war. The charming sequences in which he converses with the dream-conjured Italian aeronautics pioneer Giovanni Caproni have a touch of the whimsy that characterizes Miyazaki’s other work.

A key element of the story captures the 1923 earthquake that nearly destroyed Tokyo, but most of the film takes place later, when Jiro has begun working for an aircraft-design firm. Looking at the more advanced work being done in Europe and America, he burns with an ambition born of what the film suggests was a national inferiority complex. Arguably, this complex translated into an ugly nationalism, but in Jiro it merely translates into a desire to build better airplanes. The contradiction between Jiro’s pure desire for engineering perfection and the military uses to which his designs will be put is a subtle theme of the film, and the understatement enhances rather than detracts from the bittersweet conclusion.

I don’t think this film is quite the masterpiece that Miyazaki was perhaps going for, given the historical sweep and dramatic themes. In the English-dubbed version, anyway, some the dialogue and its overly bright delivery gives the proceedings the feel of a old-fashioned “family” film. The love story is unusual in its particulars, but conventional in its telling, close to Nicholas Sparks territory. However, if this is the director’s last feature, as he has said it will be, it is not unworthy, and a good choice for those who will enjoy the lovely hand-drawn images but are wary of the spirits and demons that populate many of Miyazaki’s earlier films.

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viewed 3/16/14 3:45 at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/16/14

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (***1/4)

Everyone should be so lucky as Jiro Ono, who early on found his calling and has spent most of his 85 years doing the thing that he enjoys and that gives his life meaning. His life is simple and orderly; his Tokyo sushi bar is small, with ten seats, serving unadorned sushi and nothing else, save a slice of melon after the meal. His customers book a month in advance and pay a minimum of 30,000 yen for an experience that may last as little as 15 minutes. Jiro has two sons; the elder works for him, and the younger one runs a place that is the literal mirror image of Jiro’s, since Jiro is left-handed and he is not.

Except for the rumblings in your stomach, this documentary (by American David Gelb, but entirely in Japanese) provokes the calmness felt by its primary subject. We learn a little about his history (with gaps), a little about his techniques and his suppliers, and a lot about his philosophy, whose essence is to work hard and repeat until you achieve perfection. Jiro has not yet achieved perfection, he believes, but, according to the food critic interviewed here, who purports to have tried all of the sushi in Tokyo, he is the best.

Those indifferent to Gelb’s luscious close-ups of sushi may be less impressed with this film, but even the mildest of foodies will likely find something to appreciate in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, whose inspirational quality (heightened with music by Phillip Glass) is an alternative to the bustling Food Channel vibe.

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viewed 3/22/2012 7:00 pm at Ritz East [Landmark Film Club screening] and reviewed 3/22/2012

The Secret World of Arriety (***1/2)

In the beginning of this charming tale, Arriety, now turning 14, bravely ventures outside in daylight, returning with a huge bay leaf that her mother says will last a year. But she has also been seen by a boy, though he is around her own age. This will mean trouble, because the boy is a “being” while Arriety, living with her parents in a small corner of a basement, is a borrower. Borrowers, as introduced in the Mary Norton novel of the same name, are tiny people who subsist on what full-size people don’t need, or won’t miss. This is one of at least five adaptations of Norton’s novel, including a 2011 BBC version, but it’s the first to use another title and, perhaps surprisingly, the first to be animated. In this way, the story becomes as natural as a fantasy, one that is also a coming-of-age story, can be.

The look of the film should seem familiar to those familiar with the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Sprited Away, Ponyo), who adapted the novel but left the directing chores to Hiromasa Yonebayashi, one of his animators. It’s less frenzied and has few of the grotesque touches common to Miyazaki’s other work, but the colors are just as gorgeous, and there’s a warmth to it. (The dialogue of the adults, at least in the dubbed U.S. version, is similarly stilted at times.) Incidentally, while the larger humans appear to be Japanese, the borrowers do not. (Arriety’s dad, voiced by Will Arnett, seriously reminded me of a young Harrison Ford. Amy Poehler is the voice of her mom.) They are in a foreign land. Compared to mainstream American animation, this is not necessarily slower, but it’s much quieter, content to carry the story forward visually at times. The plot is simpler than other versions of the story; the tone is sincere, not comedic. (A mildly villainous human, voiced by Carol Burnett, does seem a little goofy, though.) Although it gently raises the subject of death, it should be enjoyable to beings of most ages.

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viewed 3/8/12 8:30 pm at Riverview and reviewed 3/8/12 (updated 3/18/12)

13 Assassins (***)

This samurai adventure from the prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike starts off being slightly confusing, with a bunch of characters being quickly introduced. But it actually follows the familiar formula, pioneered by The Seven Samurai and followed by The Dirty Dozen, Ocean’s Eleven, and so on, of having a cast of heroes join together to defeat a common enemy. That enemy is also a samurai, one poised to wield political power cruelly, but that’s of secondary performance once established. The second act is sort of a road movie, albeit one without motor vehicles, or any vehicles at all, as the assassins plan to meet the enemy. It’s occasionally gruesome, but with a minimum of actual battle scenes. The third act, the finale, is the payoff, at least if you like watching spectacular mass battle scenes with the dirty dozen plus one vastly outnumbered. Besides lots and lots of swordplay, some novel battle techniques aid the underdogs.

The film’s most notewortthy aspect is serving as an antidote to many of the mythic Asian period films that make warriors and aristocracy into larger-than-life figures, not to mention the sentimentalizing Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai. (It suggests that many samurai weren’t really great fighters, and least one of the warriors turns out to be scared of bugs.) This is set a few decades earlier than the Cruise drama* but also explicitly deals with the impending decline of the samurai. Despite having samurai protagonists, it also depicts the flaws of Japan’s feudal (pre-1867) system. The main characters, in fact, are explicitly violating the code of loyalty in order to protect the people. As the bloody finale foreshadows, that code would soon outlive its usefulness.

*in 1844, coincidentally just one year before the recently released Meeks Cutoff

IMDB link

viewed 5/22/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/11

Summer Wars (***1/2)

Hollywood may be churning out more animated films than ever, but still hasn’t sold Americans on the idea that they don’t need to be family films. (The grown-up oriented, US film My Dog Tulip managed to make about $200,000, or nearly 1/2000 of what Toy Story 3 did.) But the Japanese have no such reservations and made a big hit out of this. Not that it’s altogether serious. In a perfect world, it would have captured the same audience that went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, although the fantasy element is more of a sci-fi thing here. (The version I watched was dubbed very competently, though I didn’t recognize the actors’ names.)

The main character, Kenji, is the sort of nerdy boy who’s often the hero of this type of story. He’s a math expert with no romantic skills who earns some money as a “code monkey” working for the giant computer network Oz. (Think Facebook on steroids.) Of course, there’s a pretty, popular girl, Natsuki, who recruits Kenji for an errand. That turns out to involve taking a train to Nagano, a less-populous area where Natsuki’s family is about to celebrate her great-grandmother’s 90th birthday. All goes well until Kenji’s math wizardry accidentally unleashes a malevolent computer program (Love Machine) that threatens to foul up the family holiday, much of the world’s Internet connection, and worse.

Who is behind this malfeasance? Kenji? Natsuki’s bad-boy uncle? The United States military? And who will be able to stop it? Maybe Kenji. Maybe great-grandma, who humorously wields her rotary phone and list of contacts going back 60 or 70 years. In a world where the electronic infrastructure has gone haywire, the low-tech wizard rules. And when you can’t play computer games, you can always play cards, like the Japanese favorite koi-koi, which is woven into the plot. Alas, only a little is done with the idea of our over-reliance on technology.

The whimsical plot is perfect for animation. The villain’s avatar kind of reminded me of one from the TV show South Park, though the artistry is much better, and the humor is less vicious. The hand-drawn style helps gives the film a warm feel that is well-suited to the story. While the idea of the geek saving the day is fairly familiar turf, the originality lies in Natsuki’s truly colorful clan, who are sometimes at odds, but ultimately come together when the chips are, literally, down.

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viewed 1/27/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/28/11

Parade (***)

Tokyo is such a densely populated city that it seems like a fair number of the movies I’ve seen set there have this a subtext. Here four roommates, two of each sex, share an apartment, each coming and going and living the haphazard lives of twentysomethings. The movie is divided into segment focusing on each roommate: one who’s fallen for his best friend’s girlfriend; one who spends her time hanging out, waiting for her movie-star boyfriend’s occasional calls and hatching plans to uncover the call-girl ring that might be operating next door; one who’s kind of a wild girl; and one, the oldest at 28, who seems more stable than the others and is the only one shown working. And there’s a fifth roommate, a skinny homeless kid who happily shows up one morning to the confusion of the others. In the course of the film, we find out a little about each character, and they learn a little about each other. If there is a unifying theme, it’s how well do we know the people we know? (At one point, a couple of the roommates speculate on whether the newcomer might be the local serial killer, but his crimes turn out to be more petty.) The film is intriguing, but probably aimless for some tastes. The ending is possibly shocking, open to interpretation, but kind of anticlimactic rather than satisfying. One woman I heard, walking out of the theater, put it more succinctly. “Bunch of looneys,” she said.

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viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/17/10

Freakonomics (***)

For those unfamiliar with the title, it’s the name of a 2005 non-fiction book subtitled A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. The economist was Steven Levitt, whose teddy-bear voice graces linking segments in this multi-part documentary. Also on hand is journalist and coauthor Stephen Dubner, who does a podcast that was an outgrowth of the book’s success. (There’s also a blog.) In the film’s four segments, prominent documentary filmmakers tackle subjects also explored in the book.

  

Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock’s opening segment about baby names is typically (for Spurlock) whimsical, with lots of random man-on-the street interviews, “cute” illustrations and editing. It pretty much sticks with the data in the book, which has to do with differences how in race and class affect what people name their kids. While on the one hand it suggests that names matter much less than other factors in predicting success, it also shows that résumés with typically black names (Tyrone, eg) were less likely to get a callback than identical ones with a "white” name. However, it's unclear whether this effect is entirely due to the perceived race of the applicant or if some is due to the name itself. In fact, the segment never really pins down whether names have no impact on the way others perceive you, or a small but real impact. Still, it’s fun to watch.

Alex Gibney’s segment about cheating among sumo wrestlers is predictably more serious. His interviews and information go beyond the book to explore the role sumo in Kapanese culture and to draw a parallel between corruption in the sport and recent chicanery in financial markets, which he has also explored in Enron: The Smartest Guy in the Room and other films. The way the cheating was detected is also ingenious. (That part was in the book.)

Eugene Jarecki’s (Why We Fight) brief segment, called “It’s Not Always a Wonderful Life,” has more jazzy graphics plus an ironic juxtaposition of scenes from It’s a Wonderful Life in a segment that presents Levitt’s conclusions about legal abortion leading to less crime.

Finally, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp) present “Can a 9th Grader Be Bribed to Succeed?” Of the four parts, this one is the lightest on actual data (and fancy graphics) but is also the only to feature conventional storytelling, specifically about two of the students. It’s not the best (Gibney’s is), but it may be the one that most appeals to non-documentary fans.

From an informational standpoint, only Gibney’s adds to the information found in the book, though Grady’s segment adds emotional content. So it’s not a must-see for those who’ve read the book. For those unsure whether the hidden sides of things are worth exploring, this movie’s a mostly entertaining introduction.

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viewed 8/25/13 on iPad [DVD transfer from Philadelphia Free Library] and posted 9/8/13

Departures (***1/4)

The surprise Academy Award winner in the foreign-language film category is, for awhile, something like a Japanese Six Feet Under. Happily married but unhappily laid off (from playing cello in a bankrupt, second-tier Tokyo orchestra), timid Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) returns to his hometown and half accidentally takes a job “encoffining” the deceased. Some of the early scenes are played for laughs, as when Kobayashi’s first job turns out to be playing the deceased in a training video. Gradually, the humor gives way to a sort of circle-of-life vibe, as we see how the job—one heavily stigmatized in Japan—is not about caring for the dead so much as comforting the living. Probably the sequences in which Kobayashi performs his rituals could be edited a bit more tightly, and the story arc is predictable, but the setting is novel and the actors playing Kobayashi’s calm boss (Tsutomu Yamazaki) and chipper wife (Ryoko Hirosue) are appealing. The movie works a little hard to be “moving,” but, aided by the Joe Hisaishi score, actually is at times.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/24/09

Tôkyô Sonata (***1/2)

Just like the main character in Laurent Cantet’s Time Out, middle-aged Mr. Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his job but doesn’t tell his family, continuing to put on a suit in the morning as he heads to a job center and a free-food line. But where the French film mostly sticks with its main character, this is much more of a family story. At home, Sasaki barely communicates with his wife and seems mostly a disciplinarian to his two sons, a stern figure even as he is meek with others. The other members of the family have different dreams and desires—the younger boy wants to play the piano—but the father seems lost.

Mr. Sasaki has the mentality of a salaryman in an age where downsizing has come even to Japan, and in subtle ways director Kiyoshi Kurosawa draws a parallel between the character and the country. Just as Mr. Sasaki must painfully re-evaluate his life, Japan has had to re-evaluate its place among nations, including participation in military missions. This is more of a subtext than a theme, but worth noting. In fact, the movie as a whole is quiet and contemplative—until the last third or so. Then there is a surprising and strange turn of events that comes out of left field, but makes the movie more compelling, and even serenely beautiful, than it seemed like it would be. A performance of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” makes a lovely coda.

IMDB link

viewed 5/7/09 at Ritz Bourse

Tokyo! (**1/2)

Three directors, three segments.

The first part, Michel Gondry’s “Interior Design,” is probably the best, and for most of its length the most conventional. The Tokyo Gondry (Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) portrays is cramped and expensive, like many large cities. (The segment was adapted from a graphic novel called Cecil and Jordan in New York.) The main characters are a filmmaker and his girlfriend, who’ve just moved to the city and are temporarily sharing a friend’s tiny flat. Just as the plot and characters have been developed, though, it takes a turn for the fantastic, with the ending ultimately too abrupt and unsatisfying.

On the other hand, Leos Carax’s (Pola X) “Merde” was unsatisfying throughout. Featuring one of the most irritating central characters since Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered, a crazy red-haired dude who comes up from the sewers and creates mayhem, it’s the only segment featuring non-Japanese characters. Possibly it is saying something about the country’s cultural homogeneity. Or not.

Finally, Japan native Joon-ho Bong (The Host, Memories of Murder) presents “Shaking Tokyo,” the shortest and simplest segment, about the paradoxical isolation big-city residents can experience. Its central character is a hikkomori, a hermit who survives on a parental stipend and delivered food. A chance event leads to his first human interaction in ten years.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/14/09

I Just Didn’t Do It (***1/4)

There are movies about people being falsely accused of crimes, but probably not many where the crime is not murder, not rape, not armed robbery, but groping. In this drama from Masayuki Suo, the writer-director of the original Japanese version of Shall We Dance?, the main character is falsely accused of having fondled a teenage girl in a crowded subway car. Everyone from the police to the prosecutors to his court-appointed attorney tells him to plead guilty, but, as the title says, he knows he is innocent and refuses. Some of what he goes through is peculiar to the Japanese legal system, notably the way a series of hearings before a judge replaces a discrete trial. In more significant ways, though, the issues the movie brings up suggest problems inherent to any legal system. Both the judges and the prosecutors have vested interests in convictions. Corruption is not required to produce unfair results. Meanwhile, the female lawyer eventually assigned to defend the case struggles with her own feeling that the problem of women being groped on subways has not been taken seriously enough. The movie is methodical, and arguably slow, as it depicts step by step how this seemingly simple case proceeds, but it should be required viewing for those who make simplistic arguments about the need to “get tough on crime” without considering the need to protect the innocent.

IMDB link

viewed 4/8/08; reviewed 4/9/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

Nanking (***1/4)

If you know anything about the Chinese city of Nanking, you probably mentally precede its name with “rape of.” In 1937, the Japanese army invaded China, and by November its army had overrun Shanghai and began marching toward the then Chinese capital city, 150 miles away. Already the thriving city had been heavily bombed, but when the soldiers arrived, the real devastation began. This American-made documentary uses the recollections of elderly survivors as well as actors reading letters and testimony from the post-World War II war crimes trial. Surprisingly, there are several former Japanese soldiers on camera, at least one of whom seems rather nonchalant as he explains how married women made better rape victims. They tended to resist less, and the experience wasn’t much good unless there were two participants, he says. A Chinese man, on the other hand, weeps 70 years after the fact as he recounts watching his mother and baby brother get bayoneted and die slowly. There’s a good deal of period footage evidencing the cruelty inflicted, although most of it is in short clips. The bright side of the story, if one can say that, is the efforts of the few remaining westerners, most prominently American nurse Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemingway), to protect the poor people who had not been able to flee the city prior to the occupation. Nanking doesn’t try to explain why the Japanese decided to invade China, or what made the Japanese commanders encourage such inhumanity, but it provides an easy-to-follow summary of one of the several great horrors of the 20th century.

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viewed and reviewed 1/31/08

Lust, Caution (***1/4)

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain follow-up trades rustic Wyoming for stylish Shanghai in an erotic thriller set as the Japanese are consolidating their occupation of China just before World War II. All of Lee’s films are evocative of place and time, and I was drawn into this world from the opening scene, which crackles with maj-jongg tiles being tossed about like the conversation of the women playing, talk of business deals, black market consumer goods, and romantic gossip. One woman is significantly younger than the others, a seemingly naive recent bride. She’s not, but that gets ahead of the story, an adaptation of a novella by Eileen Chang that is loosely based on fact.

The young woman, played by newcomer Tang Wei, is a university student recruited by an acting troupe who are also self-styled revolutionaries who amateurishly plot to assassinate a collaborator. Given a pseudonym, a false identity, and some clumsy, comical lessons in seduction, she becomes acquainted with the powerful man and her own sexuality.\

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reviewed 11/02/07

Paprika (***)

A machine called the DC Mini has been stolen. A revolutionary tool for psychotherapists, it allows people to experience the dreams of others. Misused, it can wreak havoc as reality and dream merge. This Japanese anime is one part mystery, one part pschological drama, and about five parts surreal mindbender. Frog musicians, walking refrigerators, and mad giants abound as a crew of scientists, and one policeman, try not to get lost in unreality. Viewers may briefly get lost too, but the plot actually turns out to be not all that complicated, and almost beside the point. Like the title character, a pixie-like alterego of the therapist who invented her, the adventuresome moviegoer will have fun entering the strange world, both menacing and playful, created by director Satoshi Kon.

reviewed 6/22/07

IMDB link

Letters from Iwo Jima (***)

? Clint Eastwood’s companion film to his Flags of Our Fathers tells the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima from the view of the Japanese, in particular the commander Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and a private played by singer-actor Kazunari Ninomiya.

+ Eastwood’s mostly subtitled film (with a script by newcomer Iris Yamashita in collaboration with Flags scribe Paul Haggis) is most fascinating for its unique perspective. Watching the huge American naval contingent arrive provides quite a different sense from the same scene’s counterpart in Flags. Brief flashbacks and the interactions of the soldiers provide a military and cultural context for the willingness of the Japanese to sacrifice themselves, resulting in a stunning casualty rate exceeding 95%. Yet the movie shows them as brave but not fearless, not the automatons that the Americans suspected. Kuribayashi, the commander, had spent time in America, and his character merges the Japanese and Western sensibilities. Cinematically, Letters gives a more vivid portrait of the geography of the island and the elaborate tunnel system that the Japanese had created in anticipation of the battle. Both Watanabe, who’s played similarly powerful men in The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Batman Begins, and Ninomiya give appealing performances. The 60-years-ago flashback device is more effectively used than in Flags.

- Although powerful, the movie feels overlong at 142 minutes. Additionally, the more historic movies I see, the more I’m convinced of the merits of on-screen titles, which in this case would have better conveyed the passage of time. It’s hard to tell that the battle took over a month, and the war preparations over half a year.

= *** Unlike Flags of Our Fathers, which primarily depicts the aftermath of the battle, this is all-war, all the time. Depicting combat at its most desperate and horrific, it’s a better film than Flags, but it may seem tedious to some.

IMDb link

The Grudge 2 (*1/2)

? A sequel to a remake that is, however, not a remake of the Japanese Grudge 2, though it is nonetheless again directed by and written by the auteur of both versions of The Grudge, Takashi Shimizu. Got that? The important thing is that the creepy dead woman and child are back. This time they’ve got they’re sights on Amber Tamblyn, who plays the sister of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character from the first film. She’s come to Tokyo to figure out what Sis is doing in the hospital, but it turns out that the ghosts are also doing some traveling. No longer confined to an old house, they’re also targeting some girls at the nearby English-language school and a family in a Chicago tenement.

+ Well, no doubt about it, the dead people are creepy. Decreasingly scary, but creepy.

- If the lengthy description above makes it sound like the plot’s complicated, fear not. You won’t fear much, actually, because if you’ve seen the first movie, you’ve seen all there is to fear. Other than the new characters (Gellar’s being just about the only holdover among the living ones) and the new settings, there is precious little to carry the story forward. Over and over, someone is looking at something that suddenly turns into a dead person, sometimes scaring them, sometimes killing them. Tamblyn finally finds the woman who can explain everything, and the woman says, in essence, sorry, you’re screwed. Indeed.

= *1/2 Even fans of the original are likely to echo the befuddled mutterings I heard around me when I exited the theater. I think they were confused by the plot, thinking that there would be one.

IMDb link

viewed 10/14/06 at Moorestown

Memoirs of a Geisha (***)

With softly lit sensuality, this beautiful version of Arthur Golden’s novel outlines the place and function, only partly sexual, of the geisha in Japanese culture and builds a decent plot around their conflicting desires, jealousies, and fears.

I’d kind of expected this adaptation of Arthur Golden’s novel to play on the stereotype of a stoic, selfless Asian, with the heroine bravely rebelling and trying to assert her individualism against a conformist culture. Happily, it’s not so. Directed by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, it replaces that film’s kinetics and quick cutting with softly lit sensuality, set to a quiet John Williams score. It begins with the tale of a girl sold by her father, and the people she came to know as her new family in prewar Kyoto. Zhang Ziyi plays the girl as an adult; her Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon costar, Michelle Yeoh, plays a mentor, and China’s biggest star, Gong Li, a nemesis. Though missing the ritualistic detail of the book, the film outlines the place and function, only partly sexual, of the geisha in Japanese culture. While the people in the story are not particularly deep, they are more than types, and they are different. Their conflicting desires, jealousies, and fears are the basis of the plot. You may not even notice that this plot is built around the thin edifice of a single meeting of a girl and a man (Ken Watanabe).

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circulated via email 12/29/05 and posted online 9/20/13