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Memoirs of a Geisha is like an expensively mounted Las Vegas floor show. Its hokey story elements would feel right at home: the protagonist grows up poor, trains and trains for her ticket out of obscurity, has showdowns with rivals, and, well, you know the rest. The only thing it lacks is the toe-tapping musical numbers. That's too bad, because a few songs by, say, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, embellished with the obligatory koto and wind flute flourishes, might have made Geisha more entertaining. It's a shame to see Rob Marshall descend from Chicago, a fine tongue-in-cheek musical rooted in kitsch, to a kitschy movie that apparently aspires to authenticity and "class." At the heart of the story, based on a novel by a white man and filmed in Japanese-y West Coast locations such as the tea garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, are the geisha characters played by Chinese actresses Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi (sorry, I just can't bring myself to transpose her name). Like everyone else in the film who matters, they speak English. As unnerving as this is to listen to, it's made more distracting by the rainbow of accents deployed: some real, some fake, and some that change over the course of the film, which signifies ... I'm not sure what. After World War II ends and the U.S. occupation begins, some of them seem to be actually speaking English, as characters, that is, because the Americans can understand them. By this time, the language issues are more engrossing than the story itself, which has few surprises up its richly embroidered silk sleeve. I'll give Geisha its due: There is at least one scene that's truly tense, maybe even suspenseful, and the formidable cast strives to bring something deeper to a film that's as shallow as a teacup. But even the vaunted costumes get short shrift in Marshall's rote Hollywood direction. The camera never lingers over anything for long, always jumping ahead to the next melodramatic plot development. Of course, there is some camp value to the whole spectacle. The actors never play it to the hilt, which could have made for a cult classic, but sometimes the leads seem to know what's funny here: After Japan dominated Asia for nearly a century and was held up as the epitome of East Asian culture and style, Chinese actresses from the mainland and once-occupied Malaysia get to play the country's celebrated icons of refinement as bitchy, backstabbing, and vaguely slutty. That may not be fair or realistic, but there's a certain ironic justice in it.