China series: To release or not to release

Turns out they - the Chinese government - didn't release the film "Memoirs of a Geisha" in their country. The publicity surrounding the film's release here in the New Age Empire, I thought, was excessive. After all that jazz, the critics have come out with a "yeaaaah...we were waiting for... this?!"

At the risk of being politically incorrect, I'll say this about the trailers I saw. The movie is about Japenese geishas ("skilled workers" in Japanese; "high-class prostitutes" in Chinese) played by Chinese film stars, made in English. All this transcultarism and language hybridization results in dialogue delivery that can at best, be described as robotic. I don't if it was the white face make-up or their discomfort with English, but their words lacked any emotions. I haven't seen the movie, and my comments are based on a 4 minute trailer.

Anyway, to get back to the censorship story, LA times says,

"CHINA'S DECISION TO BLOCK the release of the film "Memoirs of a Geisha" has nothing to do with the film's political content, which is nil. Nor is it related to the fact that Hollywood has mangled a story about a rarefied Asian icon from a bygone era, the geisha. Beijing's reasons for censorship are even more distasteful: racial prejudice and cultural competition between China and Japan."

An elephant's memoirs - Los Angeles Times