my favourite book is now a movie...

so, my favourite book - Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden - has been made into a movie.

i'm afraid i will hate it, but will no doubt go anyway. i have a not-so-secret crush on michelle yeoh.

cbc online has an article about it which does not bode well: Eastern Exotica - Memoirs of a Geisha is the latest example of Hollywood’s misrepresentation of Japan

here's a quote:

Arriving at the midpoint of the film’s 144 minutes, Sayuri’s society debut is meant to be a showstopper. It is — though perhaps not in the way director Rob Marshall intended. Performed amid dramatic blue light, fake snow and exquisite swaths of kimono, Sayuri’s dance seems better suited to a Paris couture show than a 1930s Kyoto theatre. It is a phantasmagoria of Japan-ness, stylized to the point of kitsch.

Since the scene in Golden’s novel is considerably more low-key, Marshall and production designer John Myrhe are the ones responsible for its visual opulence; indeed, the sequence wouldn’t have been out of place in Marshall’s Oscar-winning version of the musical Chicago. The extravagance of the scene is another example of Hollywood’s decades-long tendency to present Japan in the most outlandish terms possible.

*sigh*