It’s lucky the Academy Awards have expanded their Best Picture Nominee category to 10 because here comes next year’s first entry. RoboGeisha, Noboru Iguchi’s delicate meditation on feminism in Japan, is your typical awards-baiting costume melodrama: Geisha assassins who kill adversaries with deadly swords and chainsaws sprouting from their mouths, transform into tanks, have machine-gun busts, katana-sword hips and… use shrimp tempura daggers to take out the eyes of villains. And that’s just the half of it — we can’t quite describe certain other elements here, so be warned: this isn’t PG-13 material.
On a side note, who is this gravelly genius doing the voice-over — and can he be the new Don LaFontaine?
“Geisha is… robot.”
