As I mentioned earlier, it seems period pieces often get an easy pass on the Academy for combining production design, makeup, and cinematography. That is how, in 2005, Memoirs of a Geisha scored no less than six Oscar nominations without even being a good movie in its own right. It ended up winning for Best Cinematography, beating out such films as Batman Begins and Brokeback Mountain. Ever since Rob Marshall scored a best picture winner with Chicago, he has been hard pressed to make a good movie, and he still has not succeeded. But Memoirs of a Geisha is a compelling visual experience purely through the efforts of Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe, who manages to bring an eye popping flare to this otherwise rather dull soap opera of a memoir. Best Shot: I'm going to have to go with a whole sequence for this one - when Sayuri performs a dance on the stage as fake snow swirls around her. The color and dynamic lighting in this scene bely the same range of emotion experienced by this character in her experiences as a Geisha.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
