TWO REVIEWS: BROKEBACK + MEMOIRS

Romancing the geisha and the gay sheep herders

Spoiler alert: Despite my previously-posted gripes with Memoirs of a Geisha, I did, in fact, pay $10 to watch this film. After all, I can't exactly protest a film that isn't even feigning authentic insight into a Japanese subculture. Given the spattering of critical praise, I thought Memoirs would be, at the very least, amusing in the same way as Gigli was. (Yes, I did watch Gigli from beginning to end. Don't ask.)

But as horrendous as it was to suffer through J. Lo as a lesbian thug who falls in love with a gangsta Ben Affleck whose Brooklyn accent goes in and out more often than Wilt Chamberlain during away games, Memoirs of a Geisha is worse than Gigli.

I agree wholehearedly with Dennis Lim at the Village Voice who writes:

Memoirs is deluxe orientalist kitsch, a would-be cross between Showgirls and Raise the Red Lantern, too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp.

Never mind the critical race critiques of this exoticized circle jerk on celluloid.

Memoirs deserves criticism, first and foremost, because it is an unbelievable romance between a nine year-old girl who falls in love with a pedophilic man four times her age (Ken Watanabe). Why does she love him? Because he bought her a snow cone! We, the viewers, are then expected to believe it obvious that this girl would then devote her life to transforming herself from a lowly chambermaid into a coveted geisha/slave whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder ... just to try to be with the hottie who hooked her up with some shaved ice a decade earlier. The film assumes that we want these two to end up with each other, despite that theirs was not a match made in heaven, but rather, a match made on Match.com during a server malfunction.

I haven't seen such little chemistry since my chemistry teacher spent a week telling the tale of how he lost one of his testicles in a motorcycle accident.

I could be biased since I never got past the fact that all the Japanese characters spoke fortune-cookie messages to each other in broken English best used in a noodle commercial with the tagline "made with ancient Chinese secret!"

(Side note: it doesn't bother me as much when a Russian / German / Mexican / Persian / French / Arab / Chinese film character is magically fluent in English when speaking to other American/British characters in Hollywood films. But in my opinion, a Japanese girl in a catfight with another Japanese girl while in Japan - in a movie funded by a Japanese company - should probably be speaking Japanese. And anybody with an interest in seeing this film will be literate enough to read subtitles.)

To be fair, here are five compliments I can pay this film: (1) The tea gardens in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park looked gorgeous; (2) Gong Li is wicked good; (3) the film miraculously edited World War II down to about ten seconds; (4) Zhang Ziyi does a mean geisha rendition of the water/splash dance scene in Flashdance; and (5) Tom Cruise is not in this film.

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Unlike Geisha, Brokeback Mountain is a convincing love story. Director Ang Lee channels the same beautiful quiet he did in The Ice Storm, and thankfully, manages to leave out the cinematic diarrhea that he sprayed over his worst and most incoherent film, Hulk.

As many critics have pointed out, Brokeback is a landmark film precisely because it doesn't have a social agenda or wave some gay pride banner.

There were, of course, key points that I was reminded that the two lovers are men during an era when "gay" was barely in the American vocabulary. In one scene, Heath Ledger's wife catches him passionately kissing Jake Gyllenhaal; the audience (I saw it in LA) chuckled, which, of course, never would have happened if Heath Ledger was simply kissing another woman.

But most of the time, Brokeback was a straightforward (excuse the pun) love story, plain and simple. The irony is that this "groundbreaking" aspect of the film also made the romance/tragedy mundane and familiar, at times. It's not as if forbidden love is a new theme in cinema. While I was invested in and conflicted about their romance (I did feel quite sorry for their wives), I was more moved by the love in other films this year: March of the Penguins, Me and You and Everyone We Know, to name a few.

Thankfully, the acting in Brokeback is phenomenal and the visuals are pure poetry. Heath Ledger deserves all the critical kudos, although Jake Gyllenhaal is equal worthy of awards. Even Randy Quaid, who only has a few seconds of screen time, is stellar.

Especially if you've heard the film falsely labeled as the "Gay Gone With the Wind" or teased as "the first western ever where the good guys get it in the end," I think it's worthy of your ten dollars, in the same way that Memoirs is worthy of your rotten tomatoes.

--Junichi