biblical worldviewing

I’m breaking a long silence on my blog (sorry about that, I just have been pretty absorbed with a certain girl that I am now courting… I should probably write something about that sometime!) just so I can post a film review on a movie that was really pretty horrible (a film that was suggested by the same certain girl).

This movie was especially excruciating. Especially, not because it was a horrible movie through and through, but especially because it actually had potential to be good, and could have been saved. The ruin of something good is far more tragic than the ruin of something awful to begin with.

The movie started out well enough in a stylized, story-tale type of cinematographic narrative, with voice-over that worked for it. With the backdrop of a pastoral yet feudal fishing village in Japan and the two young girls being sold to a geisha house in the city, one might even expect a spell of a narrative to be woven using character and plot action in a fashion that has a rich heritage in Japanese and Chinese filmmaking. Not for Spielberg, though. He had to go and make the movie American Hollywood.

Nothing about this movie is really Japanese. It’s like those books for white kids in the local library in the children’s section. They are illustrated stories about or guides to different world cultures. As a former white child in the public school system, I remember all those books. I remember reading about Indians, Eskimos, Chinese, Africans, Amazonian, all drawn with smiles on their faces, and explaining to me about their words for things, always in italics. It would be plain English until one of the children said something like “Mother dresses me up in my mukluks“, and you knew that mukluks was an Eskimo word because it was in italics. What does this have to do with Memoirs? I felt that this movie was entirely non-culture specific, except for those interjections of the italicized words, words like geisha, kimono, and danna. Like those children’s books written to expose white kids to foreign cultures, I feel like this was a fully American movie that was using the culture of Japan in a gimmicky, artificial way.

The unfolding and ending of the movie is obviously American Hollywood, and the ending had me (and even the girl I was watching it with) wanting to wretch due to the sappiness and melodrama. Oh and that voice-over that worked at the beginning became really kind of ridiculous towards the end, when you realize to your dismay that this film actually takes itself seriously as a truthful, legitimate story. Like I said, it had potential. My advice would have been to stick with the more stylized and fanciful mode of story that it started out with, rather than turning into a loaded movie that thinks it actually has something to say about love, womanhood, and beauty.

This is no better than a Japan-ified version of The Notebook that puts on pretensions of a real, artistic film.