When it comes to adaptating stories, which liberty taken bothers you more?

Cafe Society
21

Well, yes, at least compared to the Chinese. There are obviously a lot more Chinese than Japanese in the world, and in the US there are more than twice as many Chinese-Americans as there are Japanese-Americans. So if we assume that a roughly equal percentage of Chinese and Japanese people are going to become good actors, we’ll still have a much larger number of good Chinese actors both worldwide and in Hollywood.

But more to the point, regardless of how good they might be, there are precious few internationally known Japanese actresses. No cite, but I remember this as being the explanation given by the filmmakers for why the three biggest female roles went to ethnic Chinese actresses. There are no Japanese actresses as well-known to Westerners as Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, and Gong Li, so if the studio was concerned with star power then they were kinda stuck.

At the time Geisha was released I remember trying to think of Japanese/Japanese-American actresses who’d be at all recognizable to American audiences, and I couldn’t come up with many. There’s Keiko Agena, best known as Rory’s Korean friend Lane on The Gilmore Girls, but her background is mostly playing supporting roles on television so she was unlikely to land a lead role in a major Hollywood film. There’s Youki Kudoh, the female lead in the film adaptation of Snow Falling on Cedars, but she actually is in Geisha in the role of Pumpkin. Otherwise the only likely candidate would be Koyuki (The Last Samurai), who IIRC doesn’t speak English.

That said, I also find the idea of geisha with Chinese accents rather silly, like having Scarlett O’Hara played by an actress with a distinct German accent. And seeing as how there were three big female roles, the studio might have taken a chance on a talented but not super famous Japanese actress for at least ONE of them. I haven’t seen any of her movies so I don’t know how she’d be in the role, but Rinko Kikuchi is about the same age as Zhang Ziyi and presumably could have played Sayuri. She was unknown in the US at the time of Geisha, but just a year later she appeared in Babel and received an Academy Award nomination.

22

I’m going to agree that Michael Clarke Duncan is the definition of this. He may have been black, but he pulled off the look, feel, body of the character perfectly.
Michael Chiklis is another example of someone who doesn’t look quite like the character should, but has the essence of Ben Grimm down perfectly.
Comic book characters are interesting this way. We have anywhere from five to 80 years of how the character should look, and almost none of how they move. But they do have strong personalities…

And, again, while Chris Reeve looks nothing like how Superman did traditionally, he had the core right. That worked just fine.
(Really, the Curt Swan Superman was a barrel-chested weight lifter type.)

23

OK, age usually doesn’t bother me too much, although when an almost 40-year-old Steve McQueen played a teenager in “The Reivers” I was a bit uncomfortable with that. But I said, I can live with that.

But when they took male, white, rather intellectual bookseller/burgler Bernie Rhodenbarr (sp) from “The Burgler Who…” series of mysteries and made him a female, black, not overly intellectual character in the film “Burgler”. I was a bit thrown.

Also when in the movie “Chorus Line” a whole new main character appeared that was not in the Broadway musical “Chorus Line” I was a bit thrown.