Title: Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
Director: Rob Marshall
Actors: Michelle Yeoh, Ken Watanabe, Li Gong, Ziyi Zhang, Kaori Momoi and others.
Run Time: 145 mins.

I started this entry a while ago, put it in draft and forgot al about it. That's not very smart, is it? Well, anyway I'll try to finish it as well as possible.

On the 5th of May, I took my sis to the movies, because her birthday was on thursday the 4th and she had friends over, so I couldn't take her then. We, both, really wanted to see this movie, because the trailers looked spectacular and my sis has a new found Asia obsession. It is almost as huge as my Ireland and Aus/NZ obsessions.

The trailers weren't lying. The movie looked amazing. It started out real dark, when the main character, Chiyo, is taken away from her home with her sister. She doesn't know where she is going and it is all very confusing. That confusion has also been translated to the shots. They are quite quick when Chiyo's sister is being driven off and she, herself, is being pulled into a house. It is also raining very hard and that adds to the sadness of the moment.

It turns out to be an Okiya (spelling correct?). There she becomes a slave and has to work all day to make Hatsumomo's, the geisha of that Okiya, life better. In the meantime her parents die and her sister has become a prostitute. She makes a plan with her sister to escape but she falls from the roof and gets hurt. She can't go to school anymore and her parents, in teh meantime, have died.

Then one fine day, she meets a man, who changes her life. He makes her feel better when she's crying at a bridge. This event makes her determined to one become a Geisha for him. When the biggest competition for Hatsumomo wants to help Chiyo, who's name by now has become Sayuri, become a Geisha her dream seems to become true. But is the life of a Geisha as fun as it seems?

I thought the movie was very beautiful, but the story was quite slow (and a bit predictable). The movie was quite long and i think they could have cut at least 15 minutes out to speed up the story a little. I guess it wasn't supposed to be a quick story, but a moving work of art, like a Geisha. I thought it was truly a spectacle to watch and it had just the right amount of drama in it. Sometimes, the names were hard to follow, because there were so many people with interesting names. But I'm sure they would say that of Dutch names as well. I give it an 8/10. Now, I want to read the book.

P.S. Hatsumomo is quite the cutie!