Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi land roles in Spielberg's GEISHA adaptation. World gets dumber  

Michelle Yeoh! Gong Li! Zhang Ziyi!

Sounds like ideal casting!

For a movie about Chinese courtesans!! Sigh....

http://www.worldmoviemag.com/index.p...t=News&key=426

What IS Hollywood's problem?!? There are plenty of bi-lingual Japanese actresses who would be far more appropriate for the roles. Sure, they may not have the box-office recognition of these three, but come on. It's a story about Japanese Geishas. Just another case of Hollywood assuming the audience for this won't be able to tell the difference between a Chinese face and a Japanese face. The sad thing is, for a large portion of the audience, they're probably right. It's the kind of ignorance on both sides that breeds my contempt.

When exactly will Hollywood start casting Asians as characters from their respective countries or origin on a regular basis, instead of just scooping recognizable names out of the pool of known-to-white-folks Chinese actors. I know it does happen occasionally (as in LAST SAMURAI or HAROLD & KUMAR), but this whole MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA thing smells like a blown opportunity.

Hopefully this will all turn out to be a case of bad rumour taking flight.

Hell, they could've at least watched the KILL BILL series or some of the J-Horror films that have started turning up on video over here.

I'm a big fan of all three of those Chinese actresses, largely because they play Chinese characters in Chinese films, or Chinese characters in American films, but NOT because they play Japanese characters in films made by ignorant American filmmakers who just want big names (big as possible anyways) above the title.

I can see the trailer now:

After a series of scenic travelogue shots and snippets from the movie revealing pretty scenes of tender love and potential ultimate sacrifice (bet there'll be a pre-harikiri scene, to point up the "Japaneseness" of the endeavour, 'cause that's what those people do, right?), we'll get the usual baritoned voiceover, probably by the guy who did the trailer for the still unreleased HERO who'll start with the inevitable lead-off line "In an age of fuedal warfare, where true love was forbidden," before ending something like this:

"From the producers of Twister..."

"...and the writer of Batman Forever..."

"...and the director of Chicago..."

"...comes the stirring portrait of three women who dared to fight for equality, justice......and love."

"Rush Hour 2's Zhang Ziyi, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon's Michelle Yeoh, and Raise the Red Lantern's Gong Li..."

"...in a film by Rob Marshall."

"MEMoirs of a Geisha."

Sigh

Thank goodness those days are over, although now Hollywood just uses actual Asian actors to occasionally essay watered down bit-part versions of those same stereotypical roles.

Just sick enough for an American studio to require. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Caucasian actor added to the cast, just to give American audiences a "familiar face" to identify with, so that we may vicariously venture into this strange, beautiful, alien world called...Japan with someone who makes us feel all sympathetic and special.

I do. If absolutely no one else does, that doesn't refute my argument. I see no reason for filmmakers in our supposedly enlightened age, on our supposedly culturally blended continent, to resort to this kind of casting anymore. A Brit as a German? Why? Get a German! There are plenty of fantastic bilingual German actors, in case you decided to shoot the movie in English. A Mexican as a Honduran? Again, why? Honduras may not be known as a bastion of world cinema, but there are PLENTy of people in the world, some of them actors, who are of Honduran decent.

But regardless, casting Chinese actresses as Japanese Geisha is grossly insensitive. I'd be surprised if pockets of Chinese didn't resist or protest the idea as it draws closer to production, if only on account of China's historical scars at the hands of the Japanese. This isn't some Hong Kong picture where the role of a villainous Japanese can be played by a Chinese actor who just happens to have slightly Japanese physiognomy. This is a major US studio production that will be passed off as providing insight into the Japanese culture, and it will no doubt succeed in that particular realm by way of location shooting or technical consultation from Japanese historians, it will only serve to reinforce all-too-common perceptions that, as Cameron notes, "they all look the same."



All three of those actresses have played a wealth of different roles, many in contemporary films in which their Chinese heritage has absolutely nothing to do with the plot (even in many of their Chinese pictures). The only way in which they’re limited seems to be when Americans seek to cast them dragonlady action types like Zhang in RUSH HOUR 2. Talk about typecasting.



What kind of Canadian, Matt? A French-Canadian, A German-Canadian? A Greek-Canadian?An Italian-Canadian? A Korean-Canadian? A Chinese-Canadian. From an evolutionary standpoint, the Asian cultures have managed to stay at least a bit more homogenous than the mixed bag of genes that is North America. Remember, it didn’t all start here. Not that we’re all the product of cross-cultural breeding (though many of us probably are), and not that Europe, Africa and the Middle East are not home to large comunities of homogenous people, but as this is a discussion of three distnictly Chinese women playing distnictly Japanese characters when plenty of Japanese actress could have had the parts, I’ll say that if a Black Canadian played a Black American, or an Italian Canadian played an Italian American, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Nor would I if these actors simply played roles in films in which their ethnicity was not central to the plot. Stick a French-Canadian in slicked back hair and a mobster suit and try to convince me he’s an Italian, and I’ll only believe it until I do my research and discover he’s a lilly-white French Canaadian.



Alright, I’ll agree with that.


This is why I stated my hope in the original post that this is all just rumour taking flight. I read somewhere that the original source, before worldmoviemag.com, was a Hong Kong entertainment/gossip publication, but I can’t verify that and regardless, it does seem that they have indeed been cast in the film, but...


...I seriously doubt actresses of their stature would be accept being relegated to secondary roles behind lesser known, but no less talented, Japanese actresses in the leads. I’ve read about half of the book and can say that half of the book does not contain Chinese characters interacting with Japanese characters, but I’ll let final judgement fall to those who’ve read the entire thing.

If I sound like a social defender, so be it. I just think that, if this casting is indeed true, it shows America still has some distance to travel on that road to true cultural understanding.

So. Even with these three Chinese actresses in the leads, there's no guarantee of box-office success. Three Japanese actresses in the roles might be less known to the general public, but that won't make it any less of a good film, just more authentic. I tend to agree the film might make more money with the Chinese ladies, but how much we'll have to see. Personally, I don't think the increase in box office will be exactly astronomical.




The reason nobody in the world could identify all of them is because people are kept ignorant of your cultures not only by attitudes like that, but poor casting choices in mass-consumed movies, particularly A-list pictures like GEISHA.

Stick 30 Koreans, 30 Chinese and 30 Japanese IN GROUPS together in that same hypothetical room and only an idiot couldn't see the physiognomical difference between each group. Sure, there'd be members of each group that might seem interchangeable with the members from the neighboring group - this could happen if you stuck 30 Dutch, 30 Germans and 30 Brits in the same room - but the collective differences would be there. Not that subjective evidence like this means anything, but my girlfriend and her entire extended family is Korean and believe me, the day I met her I knew this beyond a doubt (and impressed her by geekily loaning her a Korean movie), and had I seen pictures of anyone in her family before she told me they were Korean, I would've known they were Korean. The differences are not hard to see unless you've been conditioned from birth not to see them, or have been raised away from people from any of those cultures. The margin of error in identifying people from nearly any culture of the world (based on facial feature, lanuage, accents, etc.) is only as narrow as the worldview of the beholder.



Hogwash. I won't speak for the other non-Asians against this casting in this thread, but those are Chinese actresses. Yeoh and Zhang, in particular, have distinctly different features, but there's no mistaking their heritage: one just comes from north (Zhang from China), the other from the south (Yeoh from Malaysia). Again, only ignorance would see someone mistake them for Korean or Japanese, and it seems there's a lot of that to go around regardless of culture.


I think if anything, this reflects my overall personal attitude on the subject. Nonetheless, the direction this thread has taken is fascinating.

Ooooh, good point. he was so good in that. Doesn't mean that a German actor of equally then-unknown stature couldn't have pulled off the role and won the subsequent career, but yeah, he was excellent in that.

That wasn't my point when I said this:



I'm less concerned about them playing the right type of Chinese (which is a passed on, so much as I am about them playing the, pardon the expression, wrong type of Asian, which is Japanese when they're not Japanese.



I've often wondered about this myself. Your son - and potentially my own children some day, as well as their offspring - could very well one day represent the "face" of a whole new evolved enthnicity. But that's a whole 'nother topic. Myself, I'm more than enough of a Euro-decended mongrel (British, Irish, French, Scottish in no particular order of importance) to pollute my Korean gal's comparitively homogenous gene pool.



Well met, my good man. Excellent point. Don't know the heritage of either of those particular actors. My uneducated guess would be that their ancestries could be traced back to the African continent, which would at least make them of the right type (man, I hate that word) to play such roles. If they spoke with Barbadian or Jamaican accents, however, then the authenticity might have been compromised. African blacks and Caribbean blacks might indeed be descened from the same culture, but they've grown to be distinct in countless ways - just like the Chinese and the Japanese.