Two new "movies based on books"- Pride & Prejudice, Memoirs of a Geisha

I am looking forward to watching these movies which got released this week in India. P & P has got good review fro critics here. This latest version has been nominated for couple of Oscars also. Although one thing is for sure. Mathew Macfayden is no substitute for Colin Firth as Mr Darcy.

Memoirs of a Geisha the international bestseller written by Arthur Golden is an absolutely fabulous and riveting book. I strongly recommend it to those who have not read it so far. Its unlikely that the movie will match up to the brilliance of the book. Here is one of the reviews I read on the Net: "One thing is for sure, the film is gorgeous. There are scenes where the colour seems to bleed off the screen, and some just look like portraits. That being said, the film seems to have forgotten subtlety as a facet of art. Memoirs of a Geisha feels like a distinctly American period film, a fabrication marked by artificiality. Instead of using the actors as a vehicle for conveyance, our eyes are instead drawn to the set design, the framing, the cinematography. As a Chinese-American, it was strange for me to see three actors who don't look Japanese play the part of the geisha. Additionally, the fact that the film is in English also proved problematic because although Michelle Yeoh's English is quite polished, Li Gong and Zhang Ziyi's English is definitely not. Much of the time, I was struggling to understand what they were saying (a gripe that I've seen mentioned by many others). The inconsistency of the dialogue (e.g., different accents from different characters, sporadic Japanese words during English conversation between characters)detracted from the film for me, because I had to keep asking myself, "Why is this not in Japanese?"