SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This movie is a dive into the world of Japanese Geishas. Its a misunderstood profession, full of mysteries even today. However, the film makes everything wonderfully enjoyable, emotional, so intense and engaging that I almost didn't feel the two and a half hours the movie takes. The story begins when young Chyio is sold by her parents to a geisha house. At once, it shows the drama of the separation, and we almost feel the child's excruciating pain in the incessant search for her sister, who quickly becomes the last family she feels she has. Then it will end, as Chyio takes his only remaining path of life: the life in the geisha house, ​​learning their profession by initiative of a mature geisha, who takes her as an apprentice. Other strong themes of the plot are the envy, rivalry between geishas and the difficulty they have to keep a romantic life since they're expected to be single and not behave like prostitutes. In any case, the plot captivates our attention and Chyio, later Sayuri, becomes a character the audience is able to empathize with.Despite having a good Eastern cast, mostly female, the highlight goes to Ken Watanabe, Ziyi Zhang, Suzuka Ohgo and Li Gong. Watanabe is virtually the only sounding name for western audiences, as he has a solid career in Hollywood, but the three female actresses I mentioned have brightened more than he did, as their characters have more presence and prominence than his Administrator. Li Gong is truly hateful as a villain, while the two actresses are the children's/adult version of Chyio/Sayuri. Cinematography, costumes, make-up and art direction are also brilliant and deserves to be congratulated. The film is visually magnificent, and the audience truly understands the effort made to make it realistic and believable. Mistakes or problems? In my opinion, perhaps just the difficult of reconciling English dialogue with specific Japanese terms. If they're terms without strict translation to English this is perfectly understandable. Anyway, since I watched the film with subtitles for European Portuguese, this linguistic issue didn't represent a problem for me, although I admit that English-speaking audiences may feel some difficulty with Japanese terms they don't know.

It is the Story of Sayuri (Suzuka Ohgo), a famous geisha and her extraordinary life. As told by her mother Sayuri is like water, water can carve its way, even through stone and when trapped makes a new Path. Film opens in a unknown village where Chiyo and her sister Satsu forcibly removed from their home. Chiyo is taken care of Geisha's house whereas her sister deemed less attractive sold onto prostitution.She was not born to Geisha , but one day near Sunagawa she met a gentlemen. That man was so gentle to her and give her a cup of sweet ice and money to buy food. In that moment she changed from a girl nothing but emptiness and someone with some purpose. She wants to become Geisha and return his favor. And her Journey beginsGeisha are not courtesans, they are not wives . They sold their skills not bodies, she sings, entertained us. The very word Geisha means "Artist".There are plenty of good things of this movie is Storytelling, Costume Design, Cinematography, and of course the struggling of Chiyo and how she becomes Chiyo to Sayuri . Does she met the gentlemen ?

Is something good just because it looks nice on the surface? Is something normal just because nobody protests against it? And should you give a damn and intervene if it doesn't affect you directly?The far-away foreign lands were unknown and full of mysteries once. I'm a part of the Western civilization, and the Oriental realm of Japan seems like a terra incognita to me even in the XXI century, let alone what it was almost a hundred years ago. And Memoirs of a Geisha is a story shedding light on the secret world of the pre-war Japan. A story of a young fisherman's daughter sold to a geisha house.The intricate cultural details are deep and captivating. The old buildings and pavements catch your attention, the old costumes make you wonder about what could be a reason behind inventing something so complex. All these enigmas wrapped in mysteries leave you a breathless observer on this mesmerizing spectacle called a life of a geisha. And it's very tempting to resort to admiring this unparalleled complexity and to think that a culture so diverse and rich simply couldn't beget anything bad or wrong. Especially when we're constantly reminded of how important it is to follow the ancient traditions. The wise ancestors can't be wrong, can they?This overly romanticized story tries its best to present Chiyo, a common girl turned the most exquisite geisha in Miyako, as some sort of Japanese Cinderella. And so that we don't get lost in translation but still get a taste of the foreign flavor, the actors use an awkward mix of English and Japanese. All to make us believe that what we saw was basically a fairy tale, or a success story at least. That is, that Sayuri is the best thing that could have happened to Chiyo.But why can't I shake off the sense of utter ugliness about this whole film, as if someone decided to dress corpses in fancy clothes and play house with them? Maybe because, despite the excess of sweet delicacy, Memoirs of a Geisha is still a story of a person whose life is broken from the very start, who's forced to cast away everything she ever was or hoped to become, and turn into a slave of the cruel system where men are everything and women are nothing more than painted dolls for their entertainment.It's hard to blame the film for it, for it's not the writer's or director's fault that the Japanese society was so bitterly harsh and cruel towards women. And it's certainly no surprise, since a nation that puts a code of honor, distorted and predisposed towards torture and death, above lives of its own people, can hardly be an example of humanity.But one can feel an almost visceral disgust over the fact that the film openly worships the visual aesthetics of the geisha phenomenon, turning a human life into a show we all are offered to watch if we pay a certain cost. But to blunt our own conscience and make this human circus watchable, we're given a bunch of narrations telling us how a girl should be happy about being a geisha, and how she is happy about the idea of becoming a mistress of a man who simply gave her a sweet treat when she was a child. That less cruelty and exploitation is already a virtue because it could've been so much worse...The world of today has lost the boundaries of the past, and the cultures once confined within the nations bearing them are now for everyone to observe. Some things we eagerly assimilate, some things are just too strange and uncommon to accept, yet are intriguing enough to spectate at. And maybe it's indeed none of my business to judge, but my sense of good and evil refuses to enjoy that cult of human sacrifices, no matter how much silk and paint is used to make it pretty. So maybe it's a good thing that Japan lost that war 70 years ago. And not just so the Western women don't have to please men like geishas, but also because a pretty unfreedom is still unfreedom, even if everyone calls it happiness.

Memoirs of a Geisha is a 2005 American epic film adaptation of the novel of the same name, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment and Spyglass Entertainment and by Douglas Wick's Red Wagon Productions. The picture was directed by Rob Marshall and was released in the United States on December 9, 2005 by Columbia Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures. It stars Zhang Ziyi, Ken Watanabe, Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, Youki Kudoh, and Suzuka Ohgo. Production took place in southern and northern California and in several locations in Kyoto, including the Kiyomizu temple and the Fushimi Inari shrine.In the years before World War II, a Japanese child is torn from her penniless family to work as a maid in a geisha house. Despite a treacherous rival who nearly breaks her spirit, the girl blossoms into the legendary geisha Sayuri. Beautiful and accomplished, Sayuri captivates the most powerful men of her day, but is haunted by her secret love for the one man who is out of her reach.