It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Rex Reed’s not smart enough to write a deconstruction like that, Armond would have been angrier, and Morgenstern…uh, I can’t think of him having a writing style.
My guess is Dargis.
The one movie I have completely no interest in seeing this winter.
Hay Yo!!!
If there’s one thing this movie needs is Critical praise to keep afloat. Not so much I guess. So the bad year for Sony gets worse.
Popular books don’t always translate into good movies.
Gotta be Armand since I know Rex loved the movie.
Neither Rex or Armond are that clever (maybe Reed was in his heyday). I don’t know Joe’s work very well, but look at this dead giveaway of NYTimes style: “Ms. Zhang, Mr. Yakusho, Ms. Gong.” It can only be Ms. Dargis.
Actually, at first blink I thought it was Dennis Lim’s piece in the Village Voice, he isolated the same problem with. The. Line. Readings.
So Ms. Zhang and Ms. Gong are using different paradigms for how their surnames and family names are ordered. Sounds like asking for confusion to me.
if this movie really did cost 85 million $ (according to mojo), it’s going to lose lots and lots and lots of money. 30% tomato reading isn’t going to help
My friend from Beijing says her name is pronounced “Jang Zee-Yee” there.
But try as I might, it always comes out “hot-ee.”
“So Ms. Zhang and Ms. Gong are using different paradigms for how their surnames and family names are ordered. Sounds like asking for confusion to me.”
I didn’t think they were. They’ve been known for a long time as Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li, but according to Western usage, they would be Ziyi Zhang (I guess she is starting to go by that now) and Li Gong. So Ms. Zhang and Ms. Gong are both consistent.
Zhang is crazy hot indeed, and she was really great in 2046 (I love Wong Kar-Wai, though his movies are admittedly an acquired taste). But Cold Mountin’ is not looking very good at all.
I’ve never heard of her as any other name than Gong Li. Did she switch it?
Either way, it seems silly to change one’s name just to keep westerners from getting confused when the change is even more confusing.
No, I think Zhang is the only one of the two who’s doing the name swap thing. But “Ms. Gong” is proper usage even without her doing any switch. Nobody would refer to Wong Kar-Wai as “Mr. Kar-Wai.”
I know. But now one actress is going by the standard Chinese usage (Gong Li) and the other is going by the westernized usage (Ziyi Zhang). Annoying.
Totally failed to notice the Ms. Zhang stuff, which yes, would have been a NYT red flag. The reason I knew it had to Dargis was the reference to Madonna’s Drowned World tour stage show. There’s no way any of those guys are hip enough to have dropped that one.
Memoirs is slowly starting to look even less like Cold Mountain and more like The Last Samurai. Some techs and a supporting nod. eep.
I’m glad they mentioned Ziyi in 2046. She was brilliant in that. It’s a shame she wont get any Oscar buzz for THAT performance.
“My friend from Beijing says her name is pronounced “Jang Zee-Yee” there.”
How have you been pronouncing it?
It is a big budget and I don’t think it can make its money back domestically, but if this performs internationally like “The Last Samurai” did, it won’t matter.
It won’t (no Tom Cruise).
It’s really hard to know how the Japanese audience is going to respond to this. I think that they’re counting on the fact of these three Chinese actresses who are not unknowns in the Japanese market, plus well-established studs like Ken Watanabe and Koji Yakusho to help sell it. (Why aren’t any major Japanese actresses in the film? Because their industry has rarely nurtured young Japanese actresses, not to the extent that they ever even imagined they’d be taken seriously in the West. It just so happens that these three outstanding non-Japanese actresses are both boxoffice-friendly throughout Asia. Fact is that at present there are NO Japanese actresses in the same age range that have the same ability to mimic English. The last one was Yoko Shimada, and she’s at least 50.)
We might consider that Arthur Golden’s original novel was not a huge seller in Japan, even in translation, although I vainly imagine that I think it’s as perfect an imagination of what Japanese mores of the time were; if you’d slapped a copy at me and said “read this” without telling me who wrote it, I would have actually taken the Golden book as exactly what it claims to be.
Putting Watanabe and Yakusho in it is designed to draw in even more of the young female audience that powers Japanese boxoffice these past couple years, though I wouldn’t be surprised if “Brokeback Mountain” outgrosses it. Now THAT’S the type of thing that young Japanese female ticket buyers are dying to see. Doomed Westerners’ love affairs? They spin years’ worth of comic books around that stuff.
By the way, Dave, thanks for not (yet) referring to Dargis as “the Man”.
Ziyi’s publicist decided that getting rid of the H in her first name and listing her names in the American fashion (surname last) would make it less confusing especially since she was appearing in a lot of movies for Zhang (last name) Yimou (first name)…which of course, makes no sense, since they still have the same last name.
So now she’s Ziyi Zang? That sounds like something you would call a Muppet. Or a Harry Potter character.
Geisha was always going to have a rough go of it in America, and now this may deliver the fatal blow. BUT the lack of depth which has become apparent in the Oscar race could give it a Best Picture nod. So I’m trying to ignore all of the Chinese-Japanese-names-reviews stuff and wait to see if there’s a smidgen of a good movie in the middle of this.
Why was Geisha destined to have a rough time in the US, regardless of how the movie turned out? The book was very popular here, and period films set in Asian countries with everyone speaking accented English can do just fine with US audiences and with Oscar, a la The Last Emperor.
how can anyone even try to compare this with the last samurai? that was an action film with the worlds biggest star. this is based on a book and has no name asian cast. well no name in the us and thats what matters for us box office.
If this was good it would have made box office. A grand romantic story with a huge best selling book behind it? Think Bridges of Madison County.
Admittedly, The Last Emperor went nine-for-nine at the Oscars, but it did not become a hit until after the awards and prestige because of Columbia’s ambivalence.
That’s why I didn’t have high hopes for Geisha. Nothing to do with the movie itself, but, sadly, there is a huge population of moviegoers who have either never seen Asian cinema or primarily identify it with kung fu and samurai pictures. Pisses me off, but that’s the way it is, and these people are not going to be eager to see a film like Geisha no matter how good it is.
I sort of agree, Mr. E, but Geisha does have the advantage of being adapted from a very popular novel. Surely lots of the people who read it have zero knowledge of Asian cinema beyond kung fu and samurai, but would be willing to see this movie if the buzz was good.
Geisha needs Sam Jackson in it. Then you can find me there.
I can’t wait to see this movie. Maybe because I absolutely LOVE the book. How can someone screw it up? Impossible to do.
“Okiya ain’t no goddamn country I ever heard of! They speak English in okiya?”
Oh, Blu, “how can someone screw up the book, impossible to do … ” how sweetly naive. Hell, I thought the book nearly unfilmable because it’s so internal, but it appears they’ve isolated the basic story, which is a good one.
The late TV spots for this one are vaguely neurotic, it’s like they’re not sure how to sell it, but I think it will at the very least find the market “The Joy Luck Club” did (a minor hit as I recall, and a damn good movie), and that’s just Stateside. It’s going to clean up in Asia, unless Japanese audiences decide that the picture is completely inauthentic. Comparisons to “The Last Samurai” don’t really obtain, except that one reason that picture was huge in Japan (really unnatural numbers) was because it was considered by Japanese one of the only accurate Hollywood pictures about their own history. If this picture has managed the same, Chinese stars or no, then it’ll go through the roof there.
What will it do here? Well, it WAS a bestseller, it DOES look at least physically stunning … and we’re not stuck with Madonna in the lead (anybody remember when she was actively campaigning for it? I’m shuddering, and not from the cold.)
It’s a great book. If they mess it up they can only blame themselves. Can it be done? Sure. Happend a million times with great works of fiction. But if it is, than someone really messed up.
As bad as this sounds I believe it is true. If you want to sell a movie with an all asian cast in America there better be some damn karate in it. I personally don’t feel this way but to say this movie wouldn’t be a hard sell is ridiculous. Hell you couldn’t sell a US semi-prostitute movie today, doesn’t matter if it was based on a popular book or not. But none of this will get in the way of Oscar nods, the academy loves women playing prostittues.
Well, Pat Morita was signed for it but he got sick.
I just don’t see the market for this but I didn’t read the novel.
It’s 29% at Rotten Tomatoes. This one is sinking fast.
Fresca: “The Joy Luck Club” was a hit back in 1993, and none of those characters were prostitutes, and there was no kung fu either.
Furthermore, a geisha is not a prostitute. This is a common misconception. The geisha were and are (there are almost no geisha nowadays) ENTERTAINERS. The untouchability of the geisha was supposed to be part of her enchantment; she was supposed to be a creature from another world, a better one than that we live in, but who had deigned to touch down to earth and condescend us a visit. As well, she was supposed to at least seem to be educated, and was expected to have a dizzy array of fascinating stories, jokes and songs to thrill the room with. The movie looks like it may be trying to capture some of that, but until I see it, I have no idea how well they’ve done. Though I think it’s the Jami Bernard review that says that the whole thing is best appreciated at the level of a 30s Hollywood costume epic, and to be taken no more seriously than that. A shame perhaps, but as already noted, I never imagined how they could even do onscreen what the novel did. Probably one reason Spielberg bailed, as he gets older, he’s recognizing his own limits.