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Topic: lost in translation (Read 503 times)

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lost in translation
« on: Oct 13^th, 2003, 11:28pm »

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if bill murray ever deserved an award for his acting...

Cast: Bill Murray Scarlett Johansson Giovanni Ribisi Anna Faris Fumihiro Hayashi Catherine Lambert

Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Written by Sofia Coppola
Country: United States

Premise
Limited release. Two Americans, a washed-up TV in town for a TV whiskey commercial shoot, and the very young wife of a photographer, meet in Tokyo and spend a weekend hanging out together on a "soul-searching mission."

What We Say

A sure sign that the silly season is over and that we're in to the Oscar-worthy fall is when smart fare like Lost in Translation starts showing up in theatres.
This sure-footed effort by director Sofia Coppola in only her second outing as a feature director (The Virgin Suicides was her 1999 debut) stars Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as Americans at loose ends in Tokyo.

Murray's trademark postmodern irony doesn't play well in any old movie, but it's perfect here. He plays Bob Harris, an American movie star on the wane, reduced to making whiskey commercials for the Japanese market, consoling himself with late-night cocktails and the knowledge that he's pulling in a coupla million bucks for a week's work that no one back home will ever see. Johansson plays Charlotte, the neglected young wife of a workaholic photographer (Giovanni Ribisi).

Any North American who has ever experienced the crushing jet lag of a trip to Asia will recognize the way in which Bob and Charlotte meet. Unable to sleep, they hook up in the rooftop bar of their swanky Tokyo hotel in the middle of the night.
But Coppola doesn't play this as your standard "meet cute," and Bob and Charlotte don't proceed to have a cliché affair. The script (Coppola wrote as well as directed) beautifully captures the sort of intimate shorthand that total strangers are capable of communicating with – and would never think of trying with their own friends and family – and we soon see that Bob and Charlotte are as comfortable hanging out with each other, saying nothing, as doing anything else.

Filmed largely at night in Tokyo's neon canyons, the movie has the dreamy quality of a video game played in slow motion. Not a lot happens in Lost in Translation, perhaps because the characters are too tired to get up to much. Bob's experiences on the set of the whiskey commercials inject some broad ethnic humour into the mix, and there's a hilarious send-up of sexual mores in a scene with a Japanese hooker, but for the most part Coppola keeps the comic volume down, even in the karaoke scenes. A few secondary characters wander through (and there's interesting input from Bob's wife, whom we only hear on the telephone), but for the most part this is a two-hander.

It's the meeting of minds that matters here, and as two lost souls who find temporary shelter, Murray and Johansson are heartbreakingly good.

Review by John TD Keyes

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read, study, reflect, write, read, study, reflect, spell check, write

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