so i had my gigli post where i trashed a film. now, i'm gonna rep for the ying-yang and get down on my knees for a flick.

no, not brown bunny.

Lost in Translation

anybody lucky enough to see this soon, post your thoughts here. i'll put up reviews as they come in.

nepotism is a bitch. godfather III is a pain. this is the new calling card. this is that new day.

SOFIA COPPOLA

respect it

written and directed by sofia coppola

starring bill murray, scarlett johansson, and anna faris.

from imdb.com:
'Lost in Translation' is the story of two Americans (Murray and Johansson) who meet and spend a wonderful week together in Tokyo. Their lives are enlightened even more when the bump into a young action movie star (Faris) who is staying in the same hotel as them promoting her film 'Midnight Velocity'.

release dates:

USA 12 September 2003 (Los Angeles)
USA 19 September 2003 (limited)

lost in translation also was screened during the telluride and toronto film festivals.

http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/tiff2003/tiff2003_4.html

I have already seen one of the best films of the festival, and its quality matches the buzz. Simply put, Sophia Copolla's Lost in Translation is an amazing motion picture. There may be some controversy over whether she truly wrote the screenplay on her own (there are sequences that argue that she at least had help from someone with a little more experience in life and marriage), but that doesn't impact the final analysis. This study into the unfathomable depths of human relationships has more honesty than 95% of the movies I have seen this year. Beautifully photographed with some amazing shots of nighttime Tokyo (and I thought Times Square was garish!), and a gorgeously composed scene of two characters reflected in a plate glass window as they hold a conversation, this movie has a look to match its acting and content.

The film details the "accidental" relationship that develops between Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). Bob, an internationally recognized actor on the downside of his career, is in Tokyo filming a series of ads for a whiskey company. Charlotte, a recent Yale graduate, is accompanying her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) on a business trip. However, she spends most of the time alone. Bob and Charlotte's first few encounters are casual - on an elevator, in a bar. Gradually, however, they begin to seek out one another and a bond develops. The two eventually spend nearly every waking hour together, holding deep conversations and finding ways to avoid the eventual parting that both know must occur.

Lost in Translation is smart and perceptive about how people interact on a personal level. It portrays the disorientation of the two main characters flawlessly. They are two normal individuals who might not offer each other more than a smile under ordinary circumstances, but, put together in a place where they don't understand the language or customs and have no one else to turn to, their attachment is potent. In a strange sort of way, Lost in Translation reminded me of Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away, where two characters discover that the intensity of their relationship is predicated upon their circumstances. Take them off the island where they are marooned, and it all evaporates. The situation is similar here. The closeness shared by Bob and Charlotte is likely not something that would survive in "the real world." Will it get a chance? The screenplay cleverly leaves the decision up to the viewer.

The rich dialogue sparkles, and spans a variety of topics. The characters discuss issues both deep and shallow - from the search for the soul and the meaning of life to how couples communicate after long years of marriage. There's plenty of room for non-intrusive, low-key comedy, such as the blinds that automatically open in the morning to let in the light or the showerhead that is too low for Bob. Then there's the call girl who invades Bob's room and demands that he "lip" her stockings. (She actually means "rip.")

The relationship between Bob and Charlotte remains at the film's core, and remains platonic despite strong sexual undercurrents. A deep bond of friendship takes root, which leads to something more sublime than what we normally see between male and female characters in movies. The romantic tension starts out subtle, but builds until every scene throbs with it. There never really is a release, but the last, perfectly-pitched scene alleviates some of the pent-up pressure.

The lead performances cry "Oscar!" (Whether nominations will follow remains to be seen. Who knows with the Academy?) This is unquestionably the best performance ever given by Bill Murray. The word "perfect" is rarely used in association with the work of an actor, but it is deserved here. Murray is mainly serious, but he gets the opportunity to throw in little bits of comedy (improvised by him?) that are understated enough that they don't damage the flow. Best of all, as a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis, Murray never seems to force anything. This is a far cry from The Razor's Edge. Matching Murray beat-for-beat is the luminous Scarlett Johansson, whose work here should catapult her into the elite circle of young female actresses (alongside Natalie Portman, Kirsten Dunst, and Reese Witherspoon, to name a few). Johansson has been wonderful in a handful of other movies (Manny & Lo, The Horse Whisperer, Ghost World), but never has her work resonated the way it does here. And, what Murray and Johansson display goes far beyond what is conventionally referred to as "screen chemisty."

If you get the sense that I applaud this movie, you are correct. Lost in Translation requires a certain amount of patience, but it is by no means a slow or lugubrious endeavor. Director Copolla has done what any young director wants to accomplish: improve upon a successful first feature. As good as The Virgin Suicides is, Lost in Translation is superior in almost every way. When Top 10 lists are released at the end of the year, this title will feature prominently on a number of them (including mine).

http://www.flipsidemovies.com/lostintranslation.html

Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola are an odd pair of Hollywood birds: the former a one-time comic headliner who eased away from stardom into some brilliant independent work; the latter an ex-laughingstock who vanquished her disastrous acting debut by helming the excellent Virgin Suicides. With Coppola's skills now firmly rooted behind the camera, she enlists Murray to bring her sophomore effort to life. The resulting Lost in Translation draws out the best in actor and director alike. By turns a social comedy, existential drama and unconsummated love story, it both solidifies her auteurial voice and gives him a perfect art-house reflection of his early career persona.

On the surface at least, Murray's has-been movie star Bob Harris matches the disaffected smart alecks of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day. He arrives in Japan to shoot a whisky commercial, separating him from his emotionally distant wife and a burgeoning midlife crisis. Unfortunately, Tokyo's whirlwind assault proves little respite: the culture bewilders him, he can barely understand his hosts, and jet lag has produced a severe case of insomnia. Initially, he endures it the way Murray's other heroes do -- with long-suffering silences punctuated by snide verbal jabs. But then one night his sleeplessness drives him to the hotel bar, where he runs into another American: the newlywed Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), whose photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) has all but abandoned her to his work. Despite the vast difference in their ages, the two slowly form a connection, which blossoms into something larger as the film goes on.

The scenario closely resembles that of American Beauty and dozens of other Lolita-esque melodramas: the elder man seeking a younger woman to find fulfillment in his empty life. But like Murray's performance, Lost in Translation blooms beneath the surface. The Virgin Suicides was marred by moments of tentativeness, where Coppola fell back on camera gimmicks to bolster her storytelling. No such hesitation can be found here. Only her voice endures, a quiet and eloquent passion that rapidly sheds her rookie nerves. She revels in subtleties, and understands as few others the value of a meaningful silence. The film charts Bob and Charlotte's not-quite romance without falling back on histrionics or broad dramatic sweeps. Instead, it relies on the actors to deliver information through expressions and gestures rather than words. Murray takes to the challenge like a duck to water; his wise-ass facade hides real depths in the character, which emerge to touch us when we least expect them. Johansson, too, plays a delicate game of impression vs. reality, disguising her loneliness beneath an impetuous bon vivant. The two match each other imperceptibly well, their chemistry brought out under Coppola's disciplined oversight.

So too does the funnier side of Lost in Translation develop into something special. As a culture-shock satire, it mines Bob's dilemma to extraordinary effect. Murray's comedic talents haven't lost a step, and the bafflement he displays at his surroundings is undiminished by his character's serious side. While Coppola sees the humor in Japanese society, she takes care not to appear condescending or bigoted. Indeed, she laughs as much at western confusion as eastern oddities, and finds her sharpest material in the slow seepage of American culture into Japanese mores. Though belly laughs are rare (Coppola eschews such broadness) some of the quiet gags here are as funny as anything you'll ever see.

But the film's greatest strength comes from its sad wisdom about relationships and the way its protagonists recognize how precarious their connection is. This is not a romantic fantasy where miserable people discover happiness in each other's arms. Neither is it a cautionary tale of yearning for what you can't have. Rather, it celebrates these two without ignoring the harsh reality that they can never truly be together. More importantly, it doesn't blind them to their dilemma the way so many other films treat similar couples. They know where they are, they know where it's leading, and they choose to accept what they have rather than lose it to delusion. Lost in Translation succeeds on the novelty of their belief -- a rarely seen dynamic that comes to beautiful life before us -- and on the two odd Hollywood birds who know how to do it justice.

http://www.themovieboy.com/directlinks/03lostintranslation.htm

The second film from writer-director Sofia Coppola (following 2000's best motion picture, "The Virgin Suicides"), begins jarringly and without a firmly grasped rhythm. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a middle-aged Hollywood actor coaxed into leaving his family and coming to Tokyo to film a whiskey commercial in exchange for a $2-million paycheck. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a recent Yale grad without any discernible future plans who has accompanied her photographer husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi), to the same overseas city. Being constantly left alone while John chases his next assignment, Charlotte feels empty and lost. For a while, so does the viewer, as we are offered varied, disconnected glimpses of both Bob and Charlotte as they go about their days in a landscape as foreign as the lives they come to realize they have been living. And then Bob and Charlotte—staying in the same hotel—share an elevator ride that ends with a reciprocal smile of acknowledgment, and everything shaky about the preceding twenty minutes suddenly falls into place. It is clear that director Sofia Coppola knew exactly what she was doing all along.

Lyrical and deeply touching, "Lost in Translation" is, first and foremost, the tale of two human beings lost both in their own lives and in their surroundings who unexpectedly discover a kindred connection. From the very beginning, all Bob and Charlotte can muster asking themselves is how they have ended up where they are. Struggling through a wildly different culture than their own and dealing with a serious language barrier, they are stuck in a lonely rut. However, when on their second run-in Bob and Charlotte lock eyes across their smoky hotel bar, the moment they share is not simply one of desperation between two Americans in a foreign setting, but something more. Although Bob is about 25 years Charlotte's senior, their ages are a refreshing non-issue, and when Charlotte approaches Bob and strikes up a conversation, they find themselves understanding each other with more clarity than their significant others' ever have. Writer-director Coppola's assured screenplay never feels the need to enter into a conventional romance between her two central lost souls, but allows the relationship to play out through a more natural set of developments. The result is as intimate, humane, and heartfelt as any love story this year.

Second, "Lost in Translation" is an utterly gorgeous travelogue of Tokyo and its bordering regions. Director Coppola wisely offers no information about the characters' vital backdrop other than what they themselves know, thoughtfully putting the viewer in a place without any advantage over their protagonists. As unusual as the culture and language is to Bob and Charlotte, it is just as bewildering to us. Nonetheless, through its scenic camerawork by cinematographer Lance Acord (2002's "Adaptation"), Tokyo is presented as a rapturous visual delight, unlike any other place on Earth.

Relatedly, Charlotte makes her way late in the film to the city's bordering countryside and ancient temples, and all that needs to be said about the Japanese culture's poignant fight between the past's customs and the present's modern ways—and Charlotte's self-recognition of this very fact—is achieved through a series of completely wordless shots. Not stopping there, Acord and Coppola choose to shoot much of their film as if there is a struggle going on over what framing subject should be in focus and what shouldn't. Sometimes, it takes a few moments for the characters to clear up in a particular scene, as if even through their aesthetic presentation they are constantly on the verge of getting lost in their surroundings. In terms of their innovation and their narrative importance, each shot is simply exquisite.

In essence a two-character motion picture, the picture's ultimate success or failure falls upon the heads of Bill Murray (1998's "Rushmore") and Scarlett Johansson (2001's "Ghost World"), and there will likely not be a more accomplished screen duo for the rest of the year. As Bob Harris, Murray injects his own brand of quirkily winning humor to some scenes, such as a hilariously nightmarish experience on a piece of exercise equipment, and a large helping of unblinking humanity to his every moment. Murray's Bob is a man almost indifferent to his emotionally dead marriage as he continues to go through the motions of his family life and flagging career, and the actor plays these often unspoken subtleties with pitch-perfect grace.

The 18-year-old Scarlett Johansson, playing someone about four years older than she, matches Murray with a wise-beyond-her-years turn that is not surprising from a young actress who has proven her talent in the past, but most definitely is unanticipated. There is true depth, not to mention an emotional tug-of-war, within Charlotte's interior that speaks far louder than words, and it is a testament to Johansson's startlingly mature craft that she nails each and every layer of her complex character.

Giovanni Ribisi (2000's "The Gift") and Anna Faris (2003's "May") turn up in vital supporting roles that are purposefully archetypal rather than three-dimensional, all in the name of further giving Bob and Charlotte very real wake-up calls. Ribisi plays Charlotte's husband, John, as a man who loves his wife without really taking the time to prove it or listen to her. Meanwhile, Faris has some fun as a flaky Hollywood actress in Tokyo promoting her latest action film who is shallow without ever becoming intentionally vain. More could have been done with Faris' small role as Kelly, but all that really needs to be said about her is summed up in her final scene, as she gleefully and cluelessly embarrasses herself singing karaoke to Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better."

The music, with especially notable song selections from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Phoenix, Happy End, Kevin Shields, and My Bloody Valentine, is pitch-perfect, lovingly accentuating every scene they are accompanying rather than merely an excuse to sell soundtrack albums. This is no more true than in the film's two most alive moments—a karaoke free-for-all in which Bill Murray does a charming rendition of "Peace, Love, and Understanding" and Scarlett Johansson performs "Brass in Pocket;" and the heartbreaking closing sequence, which manages to be both hopeful and tragic at the same time without stepping into easy sentimentality. Every last element of "Lost in Translation"—save for the beautiful love story at its center—symbolizes with brilliant clarity the disorienting feeling of being out of place and lost in an alien setting, and it is done without any signs of a heavy hand.

In her sophomore effort, writer-director Sofia Coppola has proven she has the very same filmmaking talent as her father, Francis Ford Coppola, if not more so. She has a way of getting to the heart of her characters and really, truly trying to understand them and their place in the world. "Lost in Translation" is a fascinating and highly original piece of work, while at the same time a compassionate love story that never rings false. When its closing moments arrive, simple and pure, it may just blindside you with its sheer cumulative power.

http://www.filmcritic.comhttp://www.filmcritic.com/misc/ . . .

While filmmakers like Brian De Palma and Neil Jordan have escaped to France to make labors of love, Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides) chose Japan. Two characters working through transitions in their lives while stuck in foreign environs rejoice in a quickly bonded friendship. A pleasantly simple story, matched with fine performances by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, topped off with stunning cinematography that allows the setting to mingle with those who inhabit it.

The recently wed Charlotte (Johansson) lazes around her hotel room, waiting for her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) to return from another crazy day of shooting. She spends some of her days wandering into cultural parks and entertainment, but finds herself stifled by a lack of direction. Her path converges with Bob (Bill Murray), a famous actor from America who is stuck in filming commercials because the money is just too darn good to turn down. Both are experiencing an estrangement from their spouses and get caught in reflection of where they are headed, leading to a powerful camaraderie that seeks enjoyment and solace.

Beneath the soul-searching of the central duo is a sense of humor at life’s little troubles. They laugh at themselves, they laugh at others, and because they can do both, their roles are easy to relate to, whether or not you’ve been through a similar situation. Charlotte learns to appreciate the openness her youth can offer, while Bob is able to find that he wouldn’t return to those previous stages of his life if given the chance. Their dialogue remains surprisingly natural despite the philosophical principles that are being wrestled with.

Though it’s a credit to Coppola (who also penned the script) that she can effortlessly combine struggle with laughter, it is often too bent on making fun of how stupid Americans act overseas. The language barrier Bob experiences on set constantly feels fresh and funny, but the continual blonde actress joke (Anna Faris) gets old fast, slowing the emotional progression of Lost considerably. This may also have more to do with the talents of Bill Murray far exceeding those of Faris (big shock there), who can work any quirk with the right facial expression.

There is other fat besides the inclusion of Faris that could have been trimmed without losing the effervescent feeling of the story. The wonderfully energetic camera is not quite matched by the seemingly haphazard editing. The pacing of information of the key characters is organically well-structured, but scenes either extend further than needed, or cut away too quickly at a particularly engaging moment.

While Lost in Translation is flawed, it’s still a joy to watch. The friendly chemistry between Johansson and Murray builds with a rare subtlety and their adventures, both physical and mental, are truly moving without ending up heavy-handed. It’s also a great diversion, in the current realm of special effects blockbusters and the slew of horror films being released, to sit through a simple tale of two very different people having such a positive effect on one another.

http://reviews.imdb.com/Reviews/354/35437

"Lost in Translation" is a delightfully nuanced look at a connection that's more than just friendship, a romance that falls short of consummation. As a bonus, photographer Lance Acord shows us a Tokyo (with a brief look at Kyoto for contrast) that, like the relationship between the two principal characters, has apparently left a strong memory on the film's director, Sofia Coppola ("The Virgin Suicides"). The ideal audience for "Lost in Translation" must be those tired of car chases and explosions while at the same time overly satiated with romances that always lead to hot sex and adolescent buddy movies accompanied by vulgarity.

You don't have to be a world traveler that is, one who has been to places abroad other than Cancun to know that being in a profoundly foreign culture can affect you in two disparate ways. On the one hand, away from your routine job and grocery shopping, you get a chance to think about how your life is going so far, make resolutions that you're bound to break, and return home the same person you've always been albeit with a few nice memories. On the other hand, immersed in a land where you find communicating with the locals so difficult that you can't order a decent meal in a restaurant or find your way back to the hotel, you may feel frustrated to the point of wanting to yell,"Get me out of here!" Whatever anxieties you've experienced at home will be more pronounced, yet at the same time the temporary rootlessness will open you to relationships that would probably never bloom in your own back yard.

Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) are frequently on their own during their days in Tokyo, experiencing a loneliness encourages them to open up to each other. Though each has a support group Bob, an American movie star who is in Japan to film a whiskey commercial, is sometimes surrounded by company hosts, while Charlotte, accompanying her frequently on-call photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), has some Japanese contacts the two find trouble sleeping. Their chance meeting would not have amounted to anything back home. He, perhaps in his early fifties, is undergoing a mid-life crisis despite the big bucks he is accustomed to getting; she, in her twenties, has just graduated from a university with a degree in philosophy and has no idea what to do with her life. They meet and part--in the hotel's New York lounge, in restaurants, on the street--and meet and part again. When they return home to their separate lives, we feel sure they will have what travel agents promise but rarely deliver: memories to last a lifetime.

Thankfully using high speed film rather than digital video, lenser Lance Acord portrays the commercial areas of Tokyo as though a modern, clean Times Square. Neon is everywhere, people are wall to wall, virtually no Japanese speak English nor do tourists speak Japanese presenting a vacuum into which a pair of American strangers could get to know each other at broadband speed. With a few instances of probable improvisation by the immensely talented Bill Murray, "Lost in Translation," utilizing a script by the director with rapid editing by Sarah Flack, takes Charlotte and Bob on the rounds of this exotic, frenzied capital where they run into expected culture shock. Choosing from a restaurant with photographs of the dishes all of which look alike Bob and Charlotte consume one of the worst meals of their lives. On a talk show, a host on speed speaking rapidly and subverting an American stereotype that the Japanese are restrained with strangers, stuns Bob with clowning around that he can scarcely comprehend. Charlotte joins Bob at a strip club that could easily be the set of Paul Verhoeven's "Showgirls."

Bill Murray is as different from Bernie Mac as comics can get. He keeps his audience smiling if not roaring with laughter by his expressions rolling his eyes exquisitely, smoking a cigar while drinking whiskey and keeping his head down, talking to his California wife on a cell phone while soaking in the tub as though recuperating from a twelve-hour flight. By simply looking at the camera he can elicit broad grins from his fans in their theater seats. Scarlett Johansson is adept at offering at once a vulnerability and a wisdom beyond her years, making her ever- seeking character a splendid match for a Murray-in-crisis. By the conclusion of the story, you'll think of the strange and sometimes amazing relationships you've had during your life: The friendships that were superficial, the meaningful connections you've had that did not work out and left you heartbroken, the ties you've enjoyed which, like those of the principals in Coppola's movie were more than friendship, less than sexual. If that's not what mature movies are for, then what else?

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=772

Lost in Translation, the follow-up to Sofia Coppola’s successful screen rendition of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, is equally drunk on ethereal passages in time. Here it’s not the difficult rift between adolescence and adulthood her characters must reconcile, but a more expansive one between two cultures whose hang-ups are encoded in their respective pop landscapes. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a has-been Hollywood actor who arrives in Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial for a $2 million paycheck. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a recent Yale graduate trying to figure out what to make of her seemingly useless philosophy degree and her perpetually absent husband, a high-profile fashion photographer played by Giovanni Ribisi. The film’s characters, not unlike the emotionally disconnected characters of Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There?, see their every disaffection reflected (literally and figuratively) onto the sounds and landscapes of the city they inhabit.

What separates superficial Hollywood actress Kelly (Anna Faris) from Charlotte is that Kelly sees Japan as a mere smorgasbord of fetishes while Charlotte struggles, even weeps, to see the meaning buried beneath all the kimonos, local religious ceremonies, Karoke bars and strip joints. Together, Bob and Charlotte deal and sort through the confusion and stasis of their respective lives. Theirs isn’t a romantic entanglement in the classic sense (at least not in the way Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg’s was in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which plays on a hotel television in one scene), though plenty is exchanged between the two. Coppola sees plenty of humor in the film’s culture clash (Murray’s encounter with a masseuse is every bit as hysterical as the whiskey commercial shoot that may or may not deliberately engage Chuck Jones’s “Waikiki Wabbit”), but there’s not a shred of contempt to any of the film’s jokes because we, the out-of-towners, are the fools.

Bob and Charlotte are two souls in transition who, while confused and sometimes tickled by exotic rituals and language barriers, realize that they’ve allowed their cultural baggage to obscure their sense of self. In many ways, the film is a revolt against self-absorption and a celebration of personal evolvement. When Charlotte takes the time to hang a paper crane from a tree, she’s allowed herself to lay roots in a foreign land despite the country’s elusive language and customs. The film could have taken place anywhere (Japan, New York, Los Angeles) and the message would still be the same. Part of Lost in Translation’s alluring mystique then is Coppola’s own fascination with the culture she photographs. This transfixion is appropriately naïve at first, perhaps because Coppola doesn’t pretend to know Japan any better than her characters do. All the while, Coppola lovingly evokes the film’s many spiritual awakenings via a mod palette that increasingly color-codes her characters to their surroundings as the film moves slowly toward its sad but enlightening final moments.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1966939

Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" is a funny, bittersweet movie that uses cultural dislocation as a metaphor for people who have gotten lost in their own lives. The movie contains priceless slapstick from Bill Murray, finely tuned performances by Murray and the beautiful Scarlett Johansson and a visual and aural design that cultivates a romantic though melancholy mood. In only her second feature, Coppola has made a poised, intelligent film that nicely balances laughs with a poignancy rarely seen in American movies. If Focus Features markets "Lost in Translation" carefully, this most original comedy could win audiences well beyond art houses.

The story takes place in Tokyo, much of it in the Park Hyatt Tokyo, which becomes a cool, comforting cocoon for two Americans cut off from the city by their cultural and linguistic ignorance. They hang out at the hotel's bar, restaurant, pool and bedrooms, gazing out occasionally from high-rise windows at a city that intrigues but bewilders them.

Bob Harris (Murray) is a grumpy movie star in town to shoot a whiskey commercial. He is not only plagued by jet lag and gloom over a deteriorating marriage of many years
he is also in the midst of a midlife crisis that dampens his spirits but not his wit.

Charlotte (Johansson), the neglected wife of a photographer (Giovanni Ribisi), experiences a similar air-conditioned nightmare. Married two years, she already feels lost in the relationship, unable to participate in her husband's career or pinpoint what she wants out of life. When she ventures into the city, she is confronted by a distorted version of Western modernity. When she reaches out to Buddhism, all she gets is a temple full of priests chanting an incomprehensible Japanese.

That language leads to many of the jokes promised by the film's title. When Murray receives lengthy instructions from his Japanese director, his overwhelmed translator boils them down to: "Turn to camera, please." (Coppola wisely uses no subtitles, placing the viewer in the same bewilderment as her protagonists.)

These two people discover each other late at night at the bar. Neither one can sleep. A friendship evolves in their mutual isolation. When her husband leaves on assignment, Charlotte invites Bob out with her Japanese friends. The two make the rounds of clubs, karaoke joints, strip bars, private homes and video-game arcades.

Coppola sees in Tokyo's crowded, neon-lit urban landscape a society estranged from its own culture. The night is filled with pleasure-seekers obsessed by games, toys and American pop culture. Only when Charlotte takes a train to Kyoto is she able to experience the old Japan of ancient temples and gardens, tea houses and kimono-clad figures.

The movie flirts with a sexual relationship between these two, but Coppola holds back, aware not only of the characters' age differences but a realization that what ails the couple cannot be resolved with sexual healing.

This role fits Murray like his own skin. A middle-aged burnout who sees no challenges on his horizon gradually changes into a man revitalized by another alienated soul. His comic touch enriches the character with a self-deprecating wit and, in a few sequences, a rubbery physicality that earns sustained laughs. Johansson makes Charlotte's loneliness and disillusionment palpable as the woman is cut off from life in ways she never imagined.

In his brief sequences, Ribisi leaves the impression of a man for whom a moment of reflection represents lost time. Anna Faris absolutely nails the satiric role of a shallow young actress at a press junket who adores the very cultural wackiness that so alienates Bob and Charlotte.

Using high-speed film stock, cinematographer Lance Acord gives the glaring neon and numbingly sleek interiors a kind of romantic sheen. The score produced by Brian Reitzell created out of Japanese musical themes and "Tokyo dream-pop" adds to the sense of an Eastern city that has succumbed in large measure to Western culture.

http://variagate.com/lostintr.htm?RT

The story behind this story is almost as significant as the film itself and it might shed light on how a romance between an older man and younger woman came to be set in Tokyo, Japan. Whose sensibility is this? Hollywood has had its eye on this person.

That's because she's Sofia Coppola, daughter of "Godfather" legend, Francis. Would that connection provide the clout to get films of like kind made by his little girl? Apparently not, judging by Ms. Coppola's limited output to date. Her "Virgin Suicides" has met with some critical success with particular praise being heard for the work of Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett. On the other hand, the criticism has mostly been about its plaintive formlessness -- not the stamp of Coppola senior.

Now, with "Lost In Translation" on the record, we get a clearer picture of what motivates Ms. Coppola's in her choice of subject and tendencies in story telling. As star Bill Murray put it in a Q&A in Hollywood following a screening of the film, what started out as a 4-page outline was later developed into a 65 page script. 65 pages? Where ideal script length is generally around 110 pages, this allows for much on-the-set improvisation in acting and writing.

Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a famous actor on a career decline who has been paid two million dollars for endorsing a whiskey brand in advertising spots for the Japanese market. In a strained marriage of 10 years, it's almost a needed escape when he comes to Tokyo and emotes for the camera, whiskey glass in hand. Work done for the day, he retreats to his hotel where his circadian rhythms disrupted by a punishing flight time deny him the sleep he craves. Temporary insomnia sends him to the bar. In the elevator, he gets his first glance at Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), an appealing young woman.

Charlotte is a post-graduate still searching for a career direction and accompanying her husband of two years (Giovanni Ribisi) to his still photography assignment in Tokyo. The job occupies his time and interest, leaving Charlotte to her own devices. That alone time is spent aimlessly staring out on the vibrant city from her hotel window, in the company of friends in town, and at the hotel bar. And, after briefly encountering Harris in a variety of situations, both of them begin to discover a mutual interest as well as a special understanding.

With nothing but time on their hands and the complementary yearning for communication with a cultural comrade, they buddy up for some Japanese night life, a hilarious bit of Karaoke and increased knowledge of each other, always at arm's length. But, though physical contact between them is maintained as off bounds, the emotional bond deepens, even as the grip of it is unverbalized.

In the hands of these two capable actors, the vacuum of verbal expression and physical consummation actually heightens the exposure of what they're wrestling with inside, holding the viewer locked into the drama of a forbidden romance. But will the barriers to temptation collapse? You'll have to go see this movie to get the answer to that one.

As though to answer the charge of her prior film being too weepy and loosely structured, writer-director Coppola keeps the camera on her two players with effective focus on the emergence of a taboo situation. If this is a clue to the Coppola psyche and the film subjects to expect of her in the future, we recommend she puts it together with as accomplished a crew, before and behind the camera.

Bill Murray has tackled something here for the first time. He's the romantic lead while bringing to the part the humor of the stoic funny man that's his stock in trade. The subtler dimension of the man was sensed by Coppola in her patterning of the character for him from the inception, as she has stated. What he accomplishes here is the expression of gut feeling through the defensive strategy of masking it with the ready quip. He's an understated crackup, and a man taking stock of his life while entering an unfamiliar zone of emotion.

Scarlett Johansson ("The Horse Whisperer") brings an effective balance between vulnerability and a plucky trust in her perceptions. Combined with her considerable sensuality she's convincing as an object of affection despite being taken for granted by a self-absorbed husband. She plays all the chords of a woman with an emotional hole to fill, being forced to become aware of it by a connection with someone unexpected who would probably not be noticed in more familiar territory.

Under the musical supervision of Kevin Shields (of My Bloody Valentine), the wall-to-wall soundtrack features exclusive music from him and Air -- plus classic tracks from the Jesus & Mary Chain, Death In Vegas, My Bloody Valentine and Squarepusher. Lance Acord's naturally lighted cinematography is an accurate portrait of a tourist's Tokyo, accomplished intrepidly under constraining circumstances. He wisely opted for the superior imaging presence of high speed film over digital video, the more common choice for the low budgeteer.

With the right kind of talent, improvisation can become spontaneity, but it's a technique frought with risk. The challenge for the filmmaker is to cover enough of the unscripted moments to mold a coherent story without erratic shifts, clips that go nowhere, and gaps in continuity. While "Lost In Translation" is not guiltless in this regard, the basic story's delicate threads are woven with aptly measured progression and an atmosphere conducive to the chemistry.

It's not stuff for the video game set, and will likely be panned for its irresolution, but its content should resonate for those who have "been there." These may identify with the emotional dilemma the drama examines from this Coppola's creative perspective. Her technique of trusting the actors to find and deliver their moments scores big in telling her story and overcoming its deficiencies.

http://www.crankycritic.com/archive03/lostintranslation.html

IN SHORT: Forty fabulous Murray minutes does not a film make.

Bill Murray has the remarkable ability to make "nothing" funny. Hysterically funny. He does the best deadpan since Buster Keaton's silent era heyday in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, which will mean nothing to most people. Perhaps the mention of Keaton will get anyone who plotzes over this film to seek out the masterworks of the silent film star, just collected on DVD. Murray's improvisations are legendary. All his work in Tootsie, for example, was unscripted. In Lost in Translation, unfortunately, there is little he can do with a to-be-developed relationship between his character and a left-behind-in-the-hotel-newlywed character to hold our attention.

For thirty or forty minutes, Murray's portrayal of an over the hill movie star bewildered in Japan is a hysterical stranger in a strange land story. At forty minutes, Lost in Translation would be a killer short film. Something one of the cable movie channels could play the hell out of. The problem is that there's another hour of motion picture to fill and it's filled with a co-star whose character has got all the personality of a dead fish.

It's hard enough to build up any kind of relationship when that relationship is about a pair of jet lagged out of their skulls characters on either end of the biological spectrum -- yeah, this one is platonic but that can work, too, -- something in the mix has got to click to justify the ten bucks. Very little does in a movie that feels more improvised than formally scripted.

Murray plays Bob Harris, a big time movie star who peaked back in the 1970's. His wife of many years, Lydia, stays at home with the kids. Needing cash like many other Hollywood stars, he's come to Japan to shoot an ad for a brand of Japaese whiskey ("It's Santori Time!") for use in Japan only. Two days work will net him two million dollars. Aside from the fact that downtown Tokyo is a neon firestorm of symbols that he cannot read and language that he cannot understand, Harris is jet-lagged to the max and cannot sleep. He spends a lot of those should-be-in-bed hours in the hotel bar, with a lot of similarly lagged travelers.

Usually in the bar is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), whose rock star photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) is out shooting rock stars. Harris' marriage is well worn. Charlotte's is supposed to be relatively new and fresh, which is evident from Ribisi's side, but Charlotte is jet lagged as well and that means dead fish. Harris finds himself stuck in Tokyo for many more days than he wants as he has to wait around to do a teevee spot for the "Japanese Johnny Carson" and, seeing Charlotte's face in the bar every night, they eventually strike up an acquaintance. They fight Tokyo traffic. They party with her friends. They navigate pachinko parlors and see some of the seamier side of Nippon nightlife. Sorry, folks. It's all post card stuff: "Temples of Kyoto are lovely w/o tourists. Tokyo is an insane blast of color. Met a movie star. Wish you were here"

As the sleepless days and nights drag on the pair find themselves more and more in each others company. At least Ms. Coppola doesn't go the "starry eyed fan falls for the world weary star" route (big thanks all around) but what remains is uninteresting. Lost in Translation carries its bags around like the guys in LA who sell maps to stars' houses. There are some legendary personages in Tokyo and at least one is seen here -- "Charlie Brown," for example, is famed for his karaoke rendition of the Sex pistols' God Save the Queen. There's another (fictional) bit of a rising actress (Anna Farris) doing a press junket for a movie she's made "with Keanu" and a Japanese talk show host (we don't know if he's real or fiction but suspect the former) who has got to be seen to be believed.

Japan is a very strange place. Coppola's movie has all the feel of a guerrilla special ops team who go in to film all the color possible and then drop Bill Murray into the mix to come up with something to make it all fit together. Johannson doesn't seem to have the improv chops to match Murray and her scripted action doesn't give her much to play with other than acting jet lagged.

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Ten Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to Lost in Translation, he would have paid . . .

$4.00

http://www.moviemartyr.com/2003/lostintranslation.htm

Sofia Coppola delivers her eagerly anticipated second feature with Lost in Translation, a well observed but slight mood piece that follows up her excellent adaptation of The Virgin Suicides. Without much of a script, and with a slightly improvisational feel, the Japan-set film observes Bob (Bill Murray), an aging actor who’s in town while filming a commercial, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young Yale graduate who is accompanying her photographer husband, as they strike up a relationship to find comfort from their jet-lag fueled malaise. There exists a thin line between simplicity and subtlety in filmmaking, and to these eyes Lost in Translation brushes closer to the former than the latter. It is admirable because it does clearly invest itself in the lead characters’ emotional lives and it does a good job of showing us what it is that they see when they look at the world around them, but it doesn’t know what to make of it, so it finally falls back on trite melodrama, exploding and stretching the moment where they realize they’ll have to part to an unfortunate extent. Although it’s the sort of smart, deeply felt American film that I wish were made more often, I can’t ignore that it’s not as deep as it seems to think it is. For all of the existential concern that is mustered, a character’s frustrated gripe of “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be!” is as in-depth as it ever gets. Attractive and pleasant as it is, there’s no escaping the impression that it feels like an overly hip exercise in soul-searching for those who thought American Beauty really did “look closer” at life.

Most of the grief that Bob feels during his sojourn in Japan is expressed through his frustration and bemusement at the Engrish he hears the natives speaking. Though watching Japanese people stumble over phrases like “rip my stockings” and “Rat Pack” might sound uncomfortably close to racism, I don’t think the film itself is offensive because the scenes in question are really only showing us Bob’s jaundiced point of view. It’s this same point of view that makes him feel the idea of making small talk in a bar is utterly ridiculous and it’s the presentation of this same point of view that explains why the camera looks at a female movie star and a lounge singer with disdain. While it may be questionable whether or not an approximation of Bob’s state of mind is worth having to sit through a seemingly unlimited series of scenes in which everyone who’s not Bob or Charlotte feels like a loser, it’s tough to be offended by the mere presentation of this character’s (and not the movie’s) worldview. When he finally starts spending time with Charlotte, Bob fills the uncomfortable silences between them by laughing at language quirks with her. It serves as common ground for them because it passive aggressively expresses their unspoken disdain for an environment that they perceive as hostile.

Coppola’s other attempts to articulate this feeling aren’t as successful, however. During one scene, when Charlotte places a long-distance call to a friend, she gets put on hold, and if it weren’t such a nice acting moment it would be an unbearably strained metaphor for her feelings of loneliness. Unfortunately, the same scenario is later repeated when a cell phone cuts out in a scene that’s much more glib. In a similarly clumsy manner, her husband (Giovanni Ribisi) repeatedly says “love you” to her and demonstrates his general inattention by not really listening to her when she speaks. Worse still, the first half hour of the film, which mostly follows Bill, feels like an extended version of About Schmidt’s awful waterbed scenes in the ways it combines the disdain he feels toward people’s regional quirks with the hell that he faces in the hotel’s gadgetry. Thankfully, the scenes that detail Charlotte’s point of view dominate the second half hour and then when the two finally begin talking, the movie suitably adopts a third tone. It’s interesting, but one wonders if all of this is enough to sustain interest in a feature film. The movie’s prime revelation seems to be that if you spend time in a foreign country all alone you’ll be lonely, and as such it’s an experiential movie that doesn’t aspire to show us something that we haven’t previously experienced. The main characters seem interesting primarily because the camera focuses its attention on them, though that kind of plainness might be a virtue. Nonetheless, the script seems caught in between being smart enough to realize that the main characters aren’t exactly profound and being too dumb to make a profound statement about what they lack. As much as it calls them on their plainness, it still invests itself fully in their point of view, as if it had nothing more to say about them than what the characters themselves realize about themselves.

It’s unfortunate that I found Murray’s performance in Lost in Translation problematic, because embracing the film seems completely dependent on enjoying it. He plays a character who remains above it all in his own mind, and we’re supposed to be touched when Charlotte finally breaks through his glibly ironic exterior. Murray’s typical comedic persona often depends on this unlikable, self-imposed isolation from the rest of the film that he appears in (e.g. Charlie’s Angels), so it’s unfortunate to see him in a film that accepts that persona unquestionably, even if it does eventually try to break it down with warm fuzzies. His work in Rushmore seemed to probe that comic resignation. Here it’s a given. When he tries to stretch for a big scene, such as in the one in which he gives a karaoke rendition of “More Than This”, he doesn’t really inhabit the character. Johansson fares a bit better. In that same karaoke scene, her rendition of “Brass in Pocket” is made all the more affecting by the tiny squeaks in her voice. She’s not quite convincing, however, as a student who recently graduated from Yale Philosophy (perhaps because the movie attempts to show her process of questioning by doing shallow stuff like listening to self-help CDs and attempting to connect with Japanese culture by arranging flowers and visiting temples).

The supporting cast is a mixed bag, since the extreme reliance on the points of view of the two leads cripples the audience’s opportunity to get a good look at them. A famous Hollywood actress played by Anna Faris has the most noticeable pulse of the cast members, but is given precious little to do and deemed worthy of our scorn mostly because she’s not one of the two leads. Faris still demonstrates a fair amount of comic wit in what’s essentially a caricature, and it’s unfortunate her character isn’t better developed. At one point, it seems to be implied through body language that Charlotte’s husband, played by Ribisi, has slept with her, but because of the intense focus on the two central characters, we don’t get a solid read on the situation. Ribisi establishes that his character is a workaholic, suggests that he might not be sophisticated enough for his wife’s tastes, and then basically disappears from the screen. Bob’s wife is never shown on screen, and we only overhear her phone calls to him, but the spiteful delivery of her dialogue is effective (if a bit arch) in making us understand why he doesn’t want to return home. Every one of her line readings sounds like an accusation. The only moment in their conversations that feels forced occurs when she hangs up as he finally says, “I love you.” The rest of the characters, perhaps necessarily, float into and out of Charlotte and Bob’s lives without making much impact.

There are lovely moments of tenderness throughout Lost in Translation that should make the film something to treasure, but they aren’t enough. The final private moment in a crowded space is thankfully left private, but it loses some impact because of the niggling feeling that the awkward adieu that came before would have made for a better ending. The film recalls Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Friday Night, but focuses more intently on friendship than romantic entanglement. It becomes apparent that Charlotte and Bob share the realization that those closest to them just want affirmations of what they say when they talk, and they bond because they want an affirmation of that fact from each other.

These moments of revelation are few and far between, however, and Lost in Translation only shakes its sense of fashionable dislocation and becomes truly successful for about a stretch of film that takes place during their first date. The Chemical Brothers and Squarepusher are used well on the soundtrack during this extended nightclub and after-party sequence that lasts about fifteen minutes and actually works to the degree that you wish the rest of the film did. There even is a random run through the streets of Tokyo that seems to be placed there so the unadventurous members of the audience can experience the pop excitement of a Wong Kar-Wai film. During that karaoke scene, there’s the realization that pop songs they sing and hear seem to say what the characters want to, but if that was all the characters wanted to say to each other, they’d be able to say it, and the moment wouldn’t feel so sublime. Throughout this section of the film, which approaches magnificence in its own small way, the precious moments between Charlotte and Bob seem to be dissolving as they happen and there’s a real mixture of transient discovery and loss. Unfortunately, this feeling doesn’t really permeate throughout the film that surrounds these scenes. Lost in Translation is by no means a bad film, but it frustrates because of its inability to be better at doing what it’s trying to do. I might be underrating it, but it feels almost appropriate that my response to a movie so predicated on conveying a subjective feeling of mood feels moody and subjective itself.

http://www.killermoviereviews.com/main.php?nextlink=display&dId=319

With LOST IN TRANSLATION, writer/director Sofia Coppola lives up to the promise of the potential she exhibited in GODFATHER III. This tedious vanity piece is enlivened only by the charm of its leading man, Bill Murray, and by the astonishingly haphazard way in which the film as a whole appears to have been slapped together.

Murray plays Bob Harris, an all but washed-up movie star who hit his peak in the 70s and pays the bills these days by making commercials in Japan. This is where the film is at its best, during those all too short interludes when Coppola is just letting the camera roll, allowing Murray as the bedraggled ex-star to interact with the Japanese and their culture, to riff freely with a sushi chef who speaks no English or a photographer who wants him to evoke Roger Moore's James Bond, not Sean Connery's. There is a palpable sense to Murray's Harris that he knows the joke is on him and that the best thing to do is go along with it, with all the dignity and grace the situation permits. There is to him a sad-eyed cynicism paired with a hard-boiled civility that is at once witty and tragic. He is a man who has given up goals in favor of the path of least resistance and not just professionally. His marriage has breathed its last, yet neither party has the energy to throw in the towel, each going their separate ways together with only the kids and carpet samples to keep them chatting.

Marriage woes are also the problem with Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the brainy wife of photographer Giovanni Ribisi. He's in Japan to shoot a rock group, she's there to be unhappy. And in Johansson's performance, we see the extent of Coppola's talent as a director. Under her supervision, Johansson's grit has been worn to a bland smoothness and burnished to the sort of dull sheen that absorbs any energy reflected onto it. Even Murray's. Part of the problem, too, is how underwritten the part is. There is little for Johansson to do but look gloomy, sometimes while sitting by the window of her hotel room, sometimes while wandering tourist attractions, her steps as aimless as the direction the film takes whenever it thusly follows her. There is just nothing for Johansson to sink her talented teeth into. Even a night on the town with Murray singing karaoke turns into an Asian pub crawl where things happen for no good reason, the story is not advanced, and Johansson inexplicably dons a pink wig and then, just as inexplicably, sheds it.

By the time Bob and Charlotte have the requisite deep discussion about marriage and happiness, even they seem bored to narcolepsy by the proceedings. There's nothing left but for one of them to leave and when that finally happens, it's a farewell that drags on forever becoming more irksome with each passing moment that plods by with aching slowness.

LOST IN TRANSLATION would have been a terrific short featuring Murray as the detritus of the film industry. I say short because there's not enough else going on in this film to merit its 109-minute running time and because it's never too late to go back into the editing room and come up with a winner.

http://www.empiremovies.com/reviews/liam/lost_in_translation.shtml

In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray stars as Bob Harris, a movie star visiting Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial and to get away from his wife and forget his son's birthday. Scarlett Johansson plays Charlotte, the wife of a photographer who is in Tokyo for a photo shoot - incidentally, she is also a recent college graduate and philosophy major. She tags along with her husband to Tokyo looking for a deeper meaning to life - something that, well, she just can't seem to find.

The movie begins with Bill Murray arriving in Tokyo, awed by what surrounds him. And the soundtrack that coincided with this scene - I don't know what it was about it, but it set the tone perfectly. And then, there's Bill Murray. This guy is a comic God. I read in the newspaper the other day about how anything Bill Murray does is funny. The simplest things are laugh-out-loud funny, simply because it's Bill Murray. When I read it, I thought it sounded ridiculous, but watching the movie, it's just so true. The audience was in hysterics just watching him. Particularly his Roger Moore impression. Classic.

In the movie, his character Bob is lost. He's an actor in Tokyo wondering what happened to his life. He wonders why he's making $2 million for doing a whiskey commercial when he could be doing a play instead. It made me think of Murray's earlier career when he seemed on top of everything, and, according to some, he threw it all away to make "The Razor's Edge" - his stab at being thought of as a serious actor. And some think his career has never been the same. Instead, ever since, he's taken fewer 'comedic' roles and has instead ventured into a number of different roles, challenging himself in the process. In the movie, it seems like his character wishes he had done the same.

Scarlett Johannson's Charlotte is lost too, but in a different way. While Bob wonders how his life ended up where it is, Charlotte seems like she doesn't know where her life should begin. Her husband is a successful photographer, and she just seems to be along for the ride, wondering why? She visits a few Buddhist temples, but feels nothing, and wonders why she feels this way.

Then Bob and Charlotte find each other in the lounge of the hotel where they are both staying. You know going into the movie that the characters are going to meet. Knowing this, I felt at times that the build-up to their meeting was a bit prolonged. And even after they met, it seemed a bit as though the movie stalled. In retrospect, this seems almost intentional - as if we too are meant to feel lost. The movie went into a few different directions, similar to Bob and Charlotte's lives. They share a few days around Tokyo, visiting bars, arcades, strip clubs, singing karaoke - and ultimately, through being lost together, the characters (and we as the viewers) discover more about themselves.

I've gotta tip my hat to Sofia Coppola. Admittedly, I haven't been her biggest fan. It all started out with Godfather III. To an extent, I still haven't forgiven her. What? You haven't seen Godfather III? She's probably the reason why. Without a doubt one of the single worst performances I've seen in my life. Leaving the acting to the other side of the family, she's instead gone behind the scenes, where it seems she's found her true calling. Kudos.

Lost In Translation is one of those movies that aspires to be something - more than just another movie. And it does so successfully without going overboard - without seeming like it's trying too hard to be something else. It is well written, well directed and it has a solid cast to boot. Together, this ultimately results in an entertaining and thought-provoking movie - a complete package. It aspires to be more and turns out to be something more movies should aspire to be.

To me, this is the only review that matters. So, it looks like I'll probably still wait and see but this review could temot me into seeing it despite Giovanni Ribisi.

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=15853

With LOST IN TRANSLATION, Sofia Coppola has grown in leaps and bounds from her debut feature film as director. Don’t get me wrong, I love THE VIRGIN SUICIDES… That film holds what I consider to be Kirsten Dunst’s best work to date as well as Josh Hartnett’s best work. It was a very very accomplished film and one that I wish I had seen on screen.

This time, I was taking no chances. The second the rep for the film emailed me the press release on LOST IN TRANSLATION, I began work setting up a screening for me. It was important for me to see this film early, before it began its scheduled platform releasing schedule, because I prefer to get the word out there to all of you on quality films way before they pass you by.

LOST IN TRANSLATION is absolutely and completely satisfying on every possible level. I’m gaga in love with this film. This is the best BILL MURRAY movie period in my opinion. Bill owns this film. Well, co-owns it with Scarlett Johansson. Let me start at the beginning…
It begins with the most wonderful opening shot of a film I’ve seen in years. It’s impossible to describe the beauty of this shot or the resonance it brought out of me, butt it definitely took my breath away. You’ll just have to see it for yourself, I won’t spoil it.

The film centers around two characters stuck at a Tokyo Hotel on business. Bill Murray is an aging actor from Hollywood… in an odd way he reminded me of Burt Reynolds throughout the film… that is at that point in his life where the marriage is loveless and the travel and exotic things in life are just dead. He does his work at the set, dashingly dressed in a Tuxedo while huckstering a Whisky product. He loathes it all. When he returns to the hotel from set, he’s alone. He isn’t really tired, the work isn’t exhausting, but he’s just bored. Bored not just with the situation, but with life itself.

Meanwhile, we’re also introduced to Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte, a young intelligent beautiful blooming flower of a lady married to a self-absorbed and busy young photographer played by Giovanni Ribisi. Charlotte tries to take in the sites of Tokyo, goes to a Buddhist monastery to listen to the chanting and feel something, but instead felt distant from it all. Her lonely wanderings are leaving no impressions, no resonance and this is scaring her. She’s mortified by how aware she is at how annoyed she is with things and how unaware her young husband is.

These early sequences of the film are wonderfully put together with a great deal of “fish out of water” humor of an American in Tokyo trying to figure out what anything means. The scene of Charlotte in the Tokyo arcade was surreal. Watching some guy beat a drum as noodles with arms, legs and eyes danced in the corner of his screen as bright lights flashed all over the screen was just… bizarre. This other guy that seeming was doing dance moves while playing a game that had no rhyme or reason to these Western eyes… and the Electric Guitar game… bizarre.

In fact, the third main star of the film is Tokyo and Japan as a culture. Japanese culture has always been fascinating to me and the more extreme weird stuff is just touched on here. More than even the culture, it is a film showing what it is like to be apart from that culture. That “stranger in a strange land” scenario. Traveling alone. There’s a strange thing that happens to you in the lap of luxury alone… you become bored out of your skull. The room service, massage, swimming pool, hotel bar, the lounge act and even the porn and free cable… it’s amazing how boring that gets. So you head out into the world, but are only constantly reminded that you can’t read the signs, you don’t understand the games, the food looks bizarre and you feel stupid, out of place and like the dumb American you may be.

That’s when Charlotte and Bill’s Bob Harris meet. It isn’t instant, and there isn’t an instant chemistry. They continually bump into each other… bored and seeking something or someone to connect with. As odd as it may seem, this 53 year old aging actor and 19 year old Philosophy graduate, well… at this hotel, for these 10 days… they’re entwined lost souls both needing a shoulder to lean on and an ear to bend.

I miss these characters. The second the film ended it was like being separated from those great people you met at a party, but forgot to exchange numbers… I knew I’d never have a new conversation with them again. That I wouldn’t get to know what happened next or where they went in their lives. I really didn’t want the movie to end, even though it ended perfectly. A friend of mine that I took to the screening, about 5 days later said to me, in regards to Murray and Johansson’s characters… “I really miss those guys.” EXACTLY. That is EXACTLY correct. I really miss these guys.

They play characters that I personally would love to chat endlessly with. People I’d love to have their phone numbers to add to the friends I already have. These are great characters, people and souls captured in Sofia’s script, camera and film.
As much as I love Bill Murray’s performance, I share with equal enthusiasm the love for Scarlett’s work. TWO AMAZING ACTORS that are just knocking it all out of the park.

This is why I didn’t miss Bill Murray in CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE, this is the exact sort of work that he’s capable of when given the material. He does so much with little gestures, tiny things with his eyes, the shrugs and the glib delivery wry with irony. This is most like his work in RUSHMORE, only… this time the absurdist whimsy of Max Fischer isn’t constantly ripping us away from his character. Here, he is center stage with the amazing young lady and he dazzles.

Scarlett Johansson has now been in 3 great films. GHOST WORLD, THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE and LOST IN TRANSLATION. She is absolutely one of the most exciting and talented actresses working. In this film, you so want to take care of her, see that she’s given the attention she is so panging for. What an amazing strong young woman to see on screen.

However, both of these performances were guided with amazing patience and guile by Sofia Coppola. The long takes where she lets the characters find each other, trusting the actors to breath life into the stillness and quiet moments that we all have in our lives. Sofia is a tremendous talent. She isn’t just breathing full life into her women characters, but also texturing the men in this film with such honesty… that you wish to just join the characters on screen and spend more time with them.

To create a film with characters so alive, so filled with what it is to be human… it is something to celebrate. This is a great film, do not let it pass you by.

http://www.tollbooth.org/2003/movies/lostint.html

These must be satisfying days for actor Bill Murray. Murray started off as a Chicago comedian, getting his break with the Second City troupe. From there, he made the now-common leap to Saturday Night Live and then to feature films. Many of his early movies--Meatballs, Caddyshack, and Stripes--were comic blockbusters, and Murray's deadpan sarcasm and defiance of authority made him the hero of many teenage boys like myself. He felt constrained by that stereotype, however, and yearned to do something different, something serious. So in 1984, fresh off the triumph of Ghostbusters, he tried his hand at a drama called The Razor's Edge. I wasn't a huge movie fan back then, but I distinctly remember the media's reaction to Murray's attempted transition: savage ridicule. How could a comic try to play a straight man? Who does Bill Murray think he is? Why doesn't he just do what we want him to do? Beaten down by the pre-release anti-hype and a series of mean-spirited reviews, The Razor's Edge was an enormous bomb. Back to comedy hell for you, Mr. Murray.

But Bill Murray didn't quite return to where he had been. Sure, he made movies like Scrooged and Ghostbusters II, but he also started searching out roles that were a little more intelligent or required a little more depth: Bob Wiley, the friendly neurotic in What About Bob?, or Phil Connors, the acerbic weatherman in the brilliant Groundhog Day. Even when he showed up in dumber fare (Kingpin, for instance), Murray brought a sharper edge to his performance, and his marvelous comic touch was used brilliantly in the entertainingly raunchy Wild Things.

Then along came Wes Anderson, the wunderkind director of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson saw what Murray had been doing and realized here was an actor who could mine both the comic absurdity and the melancholy poignancy of life. Cast as Herman Blume, a middle-aged man competing with a teenager for a woman's affections, Murray was fantastic as someone who couldn't quite let his mean-spiritedness get away from him. He beautifully balanced the dramatic with the comedic, garnering numerous awards from various critics groups. All of that was just preparation, though, for Murray's finest hour till now--his role as Bob Harris in the new movie Lost in Translation.

Bob is a middle-aged actor, a man who's done too many bad movies and too few good ones but who still commands a large audience. He's in Tokyo where he's getting paid $2 million to endorse a brand of whiskey. There his familiar face and strange resemblance to the Rat Pack make him a natural pitch person. Of course, he's miserable. He's stuck in a luxury hotel, where he doesn't know anybody and can barely communicate with the people he meets. During the day, he does photo shoots and commercials. At night, he gets drunk ("at least the whiskey works," he remarks) and listens to bad lounge acts. Every once in a while he calls his self-absorbed wife who resents everything about him.

Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) isn't having any more fun than Bob is. Sure, she's young and beautiful. But her photographer-husband (Giovanni Ribisi) is off shooting models and rock stars, while she's stuck in the same hotel, where she doesn't know anyone, including herself. At least Bob knows who he is, but that's hardly comforting.

Drawn by their shared sense of loneliness and lostness, Bob and Charlotte start hanging out together. At first, it's just the relief of being able to speak the same language. But their relationship slowly starts to build. Director Sofia Coppola moves the story along at a languid pace, introducing new developments only when necessary. Long conversations between Bob and Charlotte hint at subdued emotions, but what they see in each other simmers long before it boils. My friend Garth asked with a mixture of fear and disgust whether they end up sleeping together, and I told him I wouldn't say. Part of the movie's effectiveness is that we wonder not only if it'll happen but how bad the consequences would be if it did.

If Lost in Translation sounds like standard middle-aged male fantasy, I apologize for my description, as the movie is much, much more than that. The difference in ages is crucial. Bob sees an opportunity to share what little wisdom he has as well as try to vicariously re-capture his youth. Charlotte finds someone who's a little more stable, a man, unlike her husband, who might be able to help her navigate her way back to shore. It's the sort of friendship we don't see often in movies, and it's both refreshing and challenging.

Coppola, who made such a splash with The Virgin Suicides, knows how to capture an image. Some of Translation's visuals are simply stunning. A nighttime car ride through the neon of Tokyo is incredibly gorgeous, and her way of capturing Murray's weathered face is profound. There are scenes of Murray just sitting in a car that I could've watched for an hour. I wish Coppola's editing style had let those images linger a little more; the mad-cap pace of Tokyo life seems to have invaded her editing room.

Johansson has made a name for herself with movies like Ghost World and The Man Who Wasn't There. She gives another strong performance here. She's not just a pretty face, though she certainly has that quality, too. The supporting performances aren't as good, though the fault lies more with Coppola's script, which takes great delight in denigrating easy targets. A vapid, blonde actress (played by Anna Faris) is routinely trotted out for our ridicule, and the same extends to various Japanese personalities as
well as Bob's wife. These cheap shots undermine the film's quiet tone and invite the audience to smugly condescend rather than thoughtfully reflect.

Fortunately, this is Bill Murray's movie, and he rises above all of that. His way with a glance or a simple gesture is pure poetry. He has some wonderfully comic moments (his interactions with a commercial director are hilarious), but it's his more frequently serious persona that's truly compelling. We believe this is a man struggling with his place in the world, wondering if being young again is worth the hassle but knowing full well that old age isn't what he expected. Murray's performance reminds us of our own mortality and confronts us with our own choices. Are we sliding through life, lost in the neon glitter, or are we breaking down the barriers that separate us from true communication, true communion? Murray brings all of this together in one glorious scene of exquisite, exhilarating beauty, one that will stick with me for a long time. Twenty years ago, critics mocked the idea of Bill Murray as a serious actor. Lost
in Translation is his extraordinary response.

4 stars

http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_09.04.03/film/lostintranslation.html

Talking about Lost in Translation isn't easy. Sofia Coppola's lovely, thoughtful follow-up to The Virgin Suicides is very much about what goes unsaid. As two lonely travellers try to find some solace in each other's company, their silences become as telling as their conversations.

So here are the highlights from two appropriately odd conversations with writer-director Coppola and actor Scarlett Johansson about Lost in Translation, which makes its North American debut at the Toronto International Film Festival before going into wider release Sept. 19. Johansson, who stars in it alongside Bill Murray, calls while driving to the airport in New York. "I'm a little wiped out but I'm trying to zest up," she says. She just wrapped a five-week shoot in New Orleans and is now heading out to film festivals here and in Venice. She describes the festival experience in these terms: "They give you free dinner but then you have to sell your blood." Nevertheless, she's cheerful as she rattles on about everything from Coldplay to the greatness of the defunct sitcom Family Matters. "Why is it that everybody in the generation above me hates Steve Urkel?" she asks rhetorically. "I can never understand that."

A few days before, the writer and director of Lost in Translationcalls from an office in New York. Coppola apologizes for feeling spacey and she's as quiet as Johansson is ebullient. Our conversation is tentative enough to resemble the exchanges in the movie's early scenes, which detail a bittersweet series of communication breakdowns. "I just wanted to show that no one's connecting," says Coppola in a sleepy, faraway voice.

Johansson -- whose sharp performance here confirms that she is the very coolest of 18-year-old movie stars -- plays Charlotte, who's visiting Tokyo with her rock music photographer husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi). She's just finished a philosophy degree and is unsure where her life is heading. Also staying at the same hotel is Bob Harris (Murray), a Hollywood actor in Japan to do some commercials. He too feels aimless. Unable to speak Japanese, they are estranged from the culture around them, but they are also unable to talk to their spouses -- John's too busy to notice Charlotte's moodiness and Bob's phone conversations with his wife are all about home decor.

In a beguiling, dreamy fashion -- perfectly complemented by a soundtrack that includes the first new recordings by My Bloody Valentine noise-pop maestro Kevin Shields in 12 years -- Lost in Translation shows how Bob and Charlotte make the connections they need, not only to each other but to the city. The story grew out of Coppola's own experiences visiting Tokyo. She felt inspired by "the visuals and what it feels like to be there and how strange it is to be in a foreign place -- that whole experience. I wanted to show the way the neon looks at night. I just had some enchanting days there and wanted to have those in a movie."

Coppola captures the violent neon blur of Tokyo's nightlife as well as its more serene side. Inspired by the '60s cinema of Antonioni and Fellini, Coppola sought to make a movie that was very much about "wandering around and observing things" and the film is an often startling visual tour. Tellingly, it's only when Bob and Charlotte escape the antiseptic comforts of their hotel and venture into its streets and karaoke bars that their relationship intensifies.

"I wanted to do a romantic story," says Coppola. "It kind of started with the Bill Murray character. I was just really drawn to the idea of him having a mid-life crisis. I just related to that and felt there was a similarity between that midlife crisis and the kind of early-twenties crisis Charlotte experiences. They're reflecting on similar things but from opposite ends of it. I thought they could offer something to each other."

She developed the script with both of her leads in mind and it's difficult to imagine a better showcase for either actor's talents. As the haunted, caustic Bob, Murray delivers the performance he's been heading toward since Rushmore. "I always liked Bill Murray and was thinking about him in Bob's situation," says Coppola. "And he is so funny and smart that if the story became sappy, it wouldn't be with him in it. I also thought Bill in a kimono would be funny."

Coppola had been a fan of Johansson since seeing her in the indie hit Manny & Lo. "I remember being struck by this 10-year-old kid and her little husky voice," she says. "I met with her for this and to see if she was old enough and had the right demeanour. There's just this quality of her that's very calm in this place where everything's so crazy. She can convey emotion without doing much."

Johansson successfully conveys that stillness despite the haste and chaos of the shoot. "It was like guerrilla warfare filmmaking in Tokyo," she says. "The whole crew would be draped in black sheets, huddled in the corner of all of our hotel rooms. Lance ran around with the camera, shooting everything from me clipping my toenails to whatever else you could get on celluloid. It was all very strange but we did it."

When Johansson saw the finished film, she found it easy to see the director's personality in it. "Sofia was very close to the story, obviously," she says. "It's very personal for her and I definitely think she wrote about a feeling and a place that was familiar."

Indeed, the magic of the film is in how well it captures a particular kind of relationship, one that is so special largely because it is so ephemeral. Coppola's voice loses its vague tone when she expresses the surprise she feels when people tell her they can relate to the movie.

"I didn't think it was so universal," she says. "I was just making the movie that I wanted to make and I didn't know anyone else would be into it. It's nice to know there are some universal elements in it."

Another reason Lost in Translation is inspiring such affection is that Bob and Charlotte's relationship is not the typical stuff of movie romances. Instead, it's bound up with all sorts of other feelings -- at times, Bob's interest in Charlotte is more paternal than carnal. Fraught with confusion and sadness, their connection feels real.

"It's a very multi-layered friendship/relationship they have," says Johansson before launching into a freeform monologue that involves last week's MTV Video Awards show, her directorial ambitions and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. "And it's interesting, too. You leave the theatre and you're still talking about the characters. I haven't done that since Finding Nemo."

http://www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10005179

Lost in Translation's sublime and important first image: a shapely female ass, cloaked in see-through beige stockings. Regardless of changing times and tastes, nudity still has the power to shock, but the better artist takes a viewer past involuntary responses toward deeper, complicated meanings, as writer/director Sofia Coppola does here. In a single sequence, Coppola shows the expressive power of the static shot. Movement occurs only within the frame, the female backside shifts ever so slightly and subtly, repositioning itself from one expressive pose to another. It's at this point, probably thirty seconds into the sequence and counting, that the multiple meanings become clear. Feelings of shock, arousal, intellectual stimulation all blend into a concrete, holy act of witnessing unique to the best art. What we are privy to recalls a landscape painting (perhaps Bierstadt's epic vistas), though in this case Coppola paints natural settings with a human's physicality. Laid bare before us, this image promises untold riches, a daring assurance, which Coppola's second directorial effort delivers on in spades.

Best to describe Lost in Translation as a mood movie, like a favorite and enthralling CD soundtrack that takes you places magical. Sitting with ourselves in a theater's liberating darkness, Coppola's film acts as an absorptive object. Cinema here is the great equalizer – viewer and film become one organism out of time, moving past stratified boundaries as do Lost in Translation's characters Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). The elder Mr. Harris is an American movie star, come to this film's Tokyo setting to act in a series of whiskey commercials. Younger Charlotte is a twenty-something newlywed whose professional-photographer husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi), is often away on shoots, leaving the young lady to her own soul-searching devices.

Both checked into the same hotel, Bob and Charlotte, going about their dissimilar business, slowly begin to notice each other – two lonely Westerners trapped in an unfamiliar East. Coppola and her cinematographer Lance Acord work in tandem through the whole of Lost in Translation, letting the characters' relationship develop naturally from casual glances to profound friendship. Bob and Charlotte first spot each other in an elevator, a wonderful composition isolating the former frame left and the latter frame right. Our eyes naturally settle on Bob (in physical height and actorly iconography he inevitably stands out) and we follow his gaze until it finds Charlotte. The beauty of the shot is that Charlotte appears to materialize from ether. We only see her when Bob does. Another director might have cut at that moment of recognition, but Coppola holds for a few seconds longer, allowing Charlotte her chance to react as well, thus giving equal importance to each character's viewpoint.

This sequence alone shows that Coppola understands Lost in Translation's central relationship, and it helps to carry us over some of the film's initial rough spots, exemplified by Ribisi as John and by Anna Faris as Kelly, a spoiled American starlet. Based on this film and Coppola's first, great effort, The Virgin Suicides, Ribisi is an actor best used outside of three-dimensions. As the disembodied narrator of The Virgin Suicides his distinctive drawl adds a properly ethereal layer of masculinity – his is the longing, internal voice of all that film's male characters. In Lost in Translation Ribisi's best scene is as a silent subject in a Polaroid photograph, an image that expresses the confused love and longing between John & Charlotte more deeply than any of the couple's real-world, overly farcical interactions.

The nadir is reached in Anna Faris' one-note characterization of Kelly. This may be more the material's fault than the actress', though Faris' near-religious devotion to starring in every Scary Movie atrocity probably biases me against her. It's clear Kelly is a construct, a stressor meant to further clarify Charlotte's emptiness. But the two scenes Faris and Johansson have together fall flat, and adding Ribisi's John into the mix here doesn't help matters. These two one-dimensional black holes threaten to overwhelm the luminous Johansson, casting her and the film proper into a bottomless void. For a few moments Lost in Translation teeters on the edge of disaster, a frustrating outcome it happily avoids.

To Coppola's credit I think she realizes these failings, and so gives her two constructs the proper sendoffs. John disappears from the film about a third of the way through, relegated to a suitable off-screen presence both in the aforementioned Polaroid and through comically oblivious faxes of love to Charlotte. Kelly, meanwhile, becomes the punchline of a delicious joke: singing Karaoke in the hotel lobby mid-movie, she is observed from afar by Bob and Charlotte, who sneak past her while holding in eruptive giggles. And the audience heaves a collective Sayonara of relief!

In the long run of the film these missteps are minor. All told, they take up less than ten minutes of screen time and I only harp on them here as a critical equalizer (no film is perfect, nor should it be). Anyway, I will gladly take these flaws because what they ultimately lead us to is the complex, adult relationship between Bob and Charlotte that is Lost in Translation's inarguable success.

From their first, charged gaze in the elevator, the natural assumption is that Bob and Charlotte will become sexually involved. Coppola wisely leaves this tangent within the realm of intimation. In this way, there's a pervasive tension between the characters that is never wholly resolved. A touch of a hand to skin, then (as in one of this film's playful bedroom scenes), becomes a more deepened and profoundly erotic gesture than any number of thrashing bodies could communicate. Visualizing physical intimacy is always a tricky proposition, and to do so here, in any explicit way, would cheapen the relationship. As Lost in Translation's opening shot suggests, through its never-identified subject's clothed nakedness, there's more to these characters than just a weeklong romp between the sheets.

As comparison, I'd direct the reader to French filmmaker Claire Denis' movie Friday Night, a good though not great film that, by visualizing its male/female one-night stand, ends up trapping itself emotionally. "Why would anyone want to watch that?" asked a colleague. And aside from recommending Denis' technique in and of itself, I'd have to agree. Ephemeral pleasures rarely make for great cinema, and there's no sense of character change beyond the superficial in Friday Night. It's a technical exercise that, ultimately, goes nowhere.

Like Friday Night, Lost in Translation concerns a short-term male/female relationship and also relies heavily on its setting as a non-human counterpoint. Yet Coppola's Tokyo is alive in ways that Denis' Paris is not. I suspect some of this has to do with the former's youthful outsider view of the city – with each sequence Coppola captures Tokyo in ways I've never seen on film. I think 'alive' is the best term to describe the tone achieved. That word implies multiplicity, hinting at a light side, a dark side, and numerous shades of gray. A transitional scene in a strip club is both comical and frightening, finding its mirror image in a later hospital scene where the impersonal and joyous co-exist. The combined elements of cinematic technique – visualization, sound, performance – feed off of each other in these sequences, resulting in a heady, life-affirming chaos that is intoxicating to all. This is far from Denis' often suffocating sense of whimsy, which attempts to pass off one-sided methodology as a full-bodied experience. Suffice it to say, then, that Coppola's Tokyo is a full-bodied character: a living playground, created through juxtaposed images, in which Lost in Translation's disparate characters explore myriad sides of themselves.

Coppola's intentions would all be for naught without her two lead actors. Initially I feared casting Murray as a film star, through whom Coppola pokes at the entertainment world's self-centeredness, to be too much of a broad concept. Likewise, Johansson's early dialogue treads too heavily on earnest female soul-searching, threatening an unintentional turn into Lifetime movie parody or, worse, homage. These concerns are quickly rendered moot. In retrospect, Lost in Translation's early scenes necessarily play uncertain. Put on discordant edge, a viewer finds resolution the instant Bob spots Charlotte in the elevator, a musical moment in which two human essences harmonize. It's easy to sense when actors click like this. I feel it as a silent internal sigh – souls respond to each other onscreen and mine replies in affirmation.

Scarlett Johansson is a sigh made flesh. There's an ethereal beauty to this actress, grounded in humanity by that unique whisper of a voice. Lilting and musical on that one hand – she'd make an ever-so-tempting Greek siren – Johansson holds her character's silences equally well. There's a touch of Katharine Hepburn in Summertime during the film's Kyoto sequences, where Charlotte wanders temple gardens and observes local ceremonies. Fish out of water, Charlotte seems to question if she truly belongs anywhere, a natural youthful remove that the actress effortlessly embodies. Charlotte is the perfect leading role expansion on Johansson's smaller, though still eye-catching, characterizations in The Man Who Wasn't There and Ghost World. Through Charlotte, Johansson updates those characters' childlike and adolescent concerns into young womanhood, finding a sense of both inevitable entrapment and occasional liberation. With the actress as audience medium, to witness Charlotte's plight in Lost in Translation is to be moved by an all too recognizable human struggle.

Bill Murray here proves himself one of our great actors. And please notice that I leave out his usual qualifier, "comic." I don't sense Murray's been given due for his eclectic choices: doing superb supporting work in Wes Anderson's Rushmore and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, and being the best thing about the original Charlie's Angels. Migrating between film industry extremes, Murray shows a rare integrity to his profession. How wrong it would be for the actor to try and recapture the youthful superficiality of his 80s Ivan Reitman comedies (kind of like a certain gubernatorial candidate attempting to convince a fading audience he's still the last action hero).

Lost in Translation gives Murray a deserved leading role that makes use of his comic gifts while also revealing his dramatic range. Feeling emanates from the actor's unique face, a mug that melds the ancient Greek comedy/tragedy masks, casting the results into three dimensions. Inherent in the best comedy is an undercurrent of pain, and in Bob Harris, Murray finds the clown's pathos. All we know of Harris' career is implied; he seems to be a Schwarzenegger-like action star in a tax accountant's body. There's a hint of confused bemusement in his gaze, as if the character can't believe his luck and wonders what all the fuss is about. There's a scene where Harris catches one of his earlier works on Japanese television (actually an episode from Murray's stint on Saturday Night Live) and the sense of disassociation is both agonizing and hilarious. "Who is that guy?" character and actor seem to be saying. This role gives Murray the chance to address himself both outside and inside the filmic text – a consideration of the past, present, and future of an entire career.

Certainly there's an autobiographical connect between Lost in Translation's writer and these characters. Of the two leads Charlotte seems to express Sofia Coppola's interior feelings, while Bob Harris is a more external personification. The fact that Charlotte is single-named implies her metaphysical, tenuous connection to the filmed reality. In the writer's conception Charlotte seems more of a two-dimensional construct, a representation of the anonymity Coppola herself has been denied and, perhaps, secretly longs for. There's no getting around that last name, nor the up-and-down legacy associated with it.

As a result one of Lost in Translation's most potent subtexts is celebrity vs. human identity, an age-old yin/yang struggle that thematically haunts the film. Watching Bob go through on-the-set rigmarole or gazing in silent, thinly veiled horror at a larger-than-life advertisement of himself (Dr. Jekyll meets his Mr. Hyde) is at the one extreme, with the contrasting pole being Charlotte's more internal struggle of self. The characters' problems don't resolve necessarily, but it is through Bob and Charlotte's interaction that something beautiful is achieved, a balancing of scales both cosmic and intimate. It's tough to be both these people, Coppola says, so let's bring them down to the level, to a place where human beings shed their problematic skins and, for a few wondrous moments, lose themselves in a place where boundaries no longer matter. To be lost, the film surmises, is finally to be found.

link is not work safe (banner)
http://www.filmup.com/lostintranslation.htm

L'amore tradotto
Mai titolo fu più profetico, il Lost in translation della Coppola (Il giardino delle vergini suicide) diventa L'amore tradotto, significato lontano anni luce dal film che giustamente si è perso nella traduzione di un "arguto" interprete.

Sicuramente una delle pellicole più interessanti viste finora al Lido con una prima parte decisamente maiuscola a cui segue una leggera caduta di tono nel segmento centrale; una cosa rimane comunque inamovibile: la grandezza di un Bill Murray ritrovato. Esilarante nei momenti di commedia e terribilmente coinvolgente quando i discorsi si fanno più seri.

Bob Harris (il grande Bill) è una star Hollywoodiana, il cui astro ha iniziato la parabola discendente, che si trova in Giappone per girare uno spot pubblicitario per la "modica somma" di due milioni di dollari. L'insonnia, la mancanza di comunicazione ed una cultura agli antipodi relegano di fatto il povero Bob ad una sorta di prigione dorata nel suo lussuosissimo albergo. Non lo aiutano nemmeno le telefonate a casa che, a parte gli orari, non fanno che aumentare il suo senso di distacco con dei figli che pensano solo agli affari loro ed una moglie che, dopo venticinque anni di matrimonio, è quasi felice di non averlo tra i piedi per un po'.

Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson / Ghost world) vive una situazione simile seppur da un'angolazione completamente diversa. Venti anni, fresca di matrimonio e con le idee ancora confuse sul suo futuro. Un marito fotografo ed intere giornate fatte di attese solitarie.

Due persone così non possono che trovarsi e condividere il tempo che gli resta insieme, almeno per non sentirsi come due isole nell'oceano.

Le pellicole con storie che nascono casualmente tra persone che non si conoscono sono decisamente molte, ma sono comunque tante anche quelle che passano via senza lasciare un briciolo di ricordo. Per questa di Sofia Coppola ci sarà sicuramente un destino migliore. Se la storia tra i due protagonisti è la parte filmica che soffre maggiormente di scontatezza ed eccesso di patinatismo, rimane imperdibile tutto ciò che è collegato allo spot pubblicitario ed ai tentativi di comunicazione tra Bob e i giapponesi. A volte una sola espressione è meglio di mille parole.

La chicca:
memorabile l'incontro stampa dell'attricetta Kelly a cui Bob assiste casualmente. Chissà perché ho avuto una sensazione di deja-vù.

Curiosità:
per i pochi che non lo avessero riconosciuto, il film italiano con tanto di frase: "Marcello, come here", è La dolce vita di Fellini.

Indicazioni:
per ridere di gran gusto e sognare per qualche momento.

http://www.moviehole.net/reviews.php?reviewid=924

4/5 stars

This is the story of two Americans, an aging movie star (Bill Murray) in town for a TV whiskey commercial shoot, and the young wife (Scarlett Johansson) of a photographer, who meet in Tokyo, Japan and end up spending a weekend hanging out there together on a "soul-searching mission."

In the land of Hollywood, it is very easy to become consistently cynical. Movies are mass produced like fast food, and the results are often similar: Stale, dull and forgettable. Sometimes the need for pure escapism on the most simplistic level is a necessity, during these uncertain times, but then it is refreshing when an American filmmaker emerges with a unique and distinctly personal vision. Sofia Coppola made an impressive feature debut with her hauntingly lyrical adaptation of The Virgin Suicides. Three years on and her second feature, based on her first original screenplay, is a mature and richly evocative work, one of mood, humour and a detailed sense of character and humanity. Shot entirely on location in Japan, and mainly the bustling Tokyo, Lost in Translation explores the true nature of friendship between two unlikely characters. Bill Murray’s movie star Bob Harris was a star twenty plus years ago, but these days, he remains awash in a sea of his own self-pity. Leaving behind his wife and children, he is lured to Tokyo for a whiskey commercial. As he later confesses, “I’m being paid $2 million to do a whiskey commercial, instead of a play.” Unable to sleep, Harris spends his evenings drowning his sorrows, until he meets the beautiful Charlotte, gracefully and poignantly played by Johansson. A Yale graduate in Philosophy, she came to Tokyo to accompany her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) who lives in his own world of rock stars and celebrities, a world that Charlotte has come to despise. Both are lost souls trying to find themselves amidst the comic awkwardness of Japanese language and culture.

Both characters are in a desperate need to rediscover their own individuality, and by exploring the pair’s growing friendship, they reach an understanding of themselves and what it is they want in life. Lost in Translation, is a poetic, lyrical and also dryly comic look at friendship, and features two astonishing performances in the process. Murray is at his best at his most understated, and he has moments where his face says it all. It’s a remarkable and very real performance by an actor of rare genius. Johansson, in her first truly adult role, is breathtaking, alluring and delivers a sensitive and beautiful performance.

Cinematographer Lance Acord captures the visual essence of Tokyo on all its diversity, but it’s Coppola’s script, authentic, funny and moving, that takes centre stage, coupled with her meticulous direction. Lost in Translation is an unforgettable film, full of humour, pathos and an unquestionable honesty. In a competitive movie season, this film deserves to be discovered; it’s truly wonderful.

http://www.movienavigator.org/lostintranslation.htm

In the leisurely-paced Lost In Translation, two lonely Americans bond during their stay in Tokyo. Their bond isn’t based on anything romantic or sexual, and yet it was strong enough to have captivated me for 102-minutes.

Lost In Translation is the second film written and directed by Sofia Coppola, the moody filmmaker whose features manage to evoke the dreaminess of David Lynch. Ms. Coppola has a knack for creating sedated atmospheres for her characters to float through. This was obvious in her arty debut, The Virgin Suicides. While her two films deal with different issues, the somber vibe so easily sustained in Virgin Suicides is very much present throughout Lost In Translation.

Considering the original screenplay was conceived of by its director, as opposed to her debut which was an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, Lost In Translation is obviously a film based on personal experiences. Scarlett Johansson stars as Charlotte, the 20-year old American who tags along with her workaholic photographer husband (played by Giovanni Ribisi) to Tokyo. While her energetic hubby is away snapping pictures, Charlotte aimlessly wanders around the city.

Staying in the same hotel as Charlotte is Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an American actor in town to shoot a whiskey commercial. Both characters are lonely and have difficulty adjusting to their foreign environment, especially the advance gadgets in their hotel rooms. After the two spark a late-night chat at the hotel bar, Charlotte and Bob become inseparable. They eat sushi, play videogames, attend karaoke parties and engage in meaningful conversations about adulthood and marriage.

Lost In Translation exudes a hypnotic atmosphere. So much so that arthouse crowds should find much difficulty resisting its sway. I know I did.

http://www.bluntreview.com/reviews/translation.html

Lost in Translation is a witty laugh out-loud tale of friendship. Of course that's what usually happens when you get a coupla Coppolas together; you get a film that's not unlike a fine wine…

Sure, Lost in Translation is Sofia Coppola's baby, but her brother Roman was first AD and dad Francis executive produced. Fine film making appears to be in the Coppola DNA…okay, that horrific Zeotrope/F.F.Coppola produced No Such Thing aside (what was that all about???). Whatever the nepotistic value of Lost in Translation's production, I assure you this is a fantabulous film. Bravo Bella!

Written and directed by Sofia, and starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, with electric bits by ah-dorable Giovanni Ribisi and Anna Faris, the film manages to play as real as life itself and yet be other-plainly at the very same time. Sofia takes no stereotypical punches; the arc doesn't include copulation and fantastical inappropriate age matchings - like oh-so-many older leading man films - and the end is not telegraphed. And she cast the furiously underrated Bill Murray in the leading dramatic role. Though fear not, Billy's given plenty of time to "Murray" up the scenes.

Story goes…American movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is checked into a swanky hotel in Toyko, Japan. He is there to get paid a ridiculous amount of money to promote Suntory scotch. He also happens to be on the brink of his mid-life crisis.

Meanwhile fellow hotel guest, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is there with her hip hot photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi). Her mate is affectionate but preoccupied. She's drifting into the wading pool of self-doubt towards the deep end by the "where-is-my-life-going" zone.

She and the movie star meet and strike up one of those foreign land friendships. And Tokyo is a foreign land to be sure. The city is bursting with colors, stripes, Day-Glo splashes and logos. Willy Wonka could get wheezy here! It's consumerism in a frenzy and makes say, Times Square, look like a cozy hamlet in comparison.

As the two grow closer and share special moments of friendship commingled with desire, they must stop and think about the reality of the situation and life outside of this Candy Land-like world.

Lost in Translation is a mature and sweetly honest tale of life. And thanks to the multi-level abilities of Bill Murray to effortlessly deliver subtle comedy, in some otherwise seriously tense moments within life's moments, the film rises far above the crowd of dramatic slices of what is. Of course there's plenty of hilarity scripted as hilarity too. Sofia manages to let the serious actor in Murray out-shine the comic actor in Bill Murray - what a feat. Her direction is always just right. Whether it's holding the beat or snapping an edit, her "eye" is clearly sharp for the medium.

Scarlett Johansson is so comfortable in the role you forget your watching a film at times. This young actor has only just begun to show her talents! Rent Ghostworld please.

Lost in Translation tells a story without judging, or whacking you over the head with its "message" which, to me, is life and its various paths is hard to explain and if we tried? It would just get lost in the translation.

can't wait

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http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/287/6/c/the_wire_lineup__huge_download_by_dennisculver-d30s7vl.jpg
The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

with good eye contact and a visual aid

16:great reviews
3:bad reviews
1:so-so

that was basically the opposite of the gigli reviews, so i assume good things

Check metacritic.com. overall, it gets an outstanding critic's average of 93

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Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.-George Orwell

but I do like Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanssen. And Sofia Coppola showed at least some skills on The Virgin Suicides. I'm gonna take and wait and see attitude on this one.

but i still expect really good things just because of the cast and the director

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http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/287/6/c/the_wire_lineup__huge_download_by_dennisculver-d30s7vl.jpg
The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

http://www.oneguysopinion.com/review.asp?ID=1064

Nothing in Sofia Coppola’s first film, the arch and pretentious “The Virgin Suicides,” could prepare you for the dreamy, loose-limbed joy of “Lost in Translation,” a lovely, loopy modern-day “Brief Encounter” that has the wisdom not to push too hard or linger too long. Bill Murray has his best role in years--perhaps his best starring part ever--as Bob Harris, a dour, middle-aged American movie star who finds himself in Tokyo to do a series of lucrative whisky commercials. A basically amiable, though condescending fellow who’s a bit depressed about his life--his occasional contacts with his wife by fax and phone exhibit some obvious tension--Bob tries his best to get by in an environment he doesn’t understand, though it’s not always easy (a sequence in which he shoots a TV commercial, communicating with the demanding director through an interpreter, is a droll delight). Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young American woman staying in the same luxury hotel, catches his eye. She’s there with her husband John (Giovanni Ribisi), a celebrity photographer whose job often leaves her alone, and it becomes clear that she’s a semi-lost soul of a different sort--a young wife whose marriage isn’t quite what she expected and who doesn’t know how to put her abilities to good use. The two don’t connect for quite a while, but eventually they strike up an acquaintance and spend more and more time together. It’s hardly a romance, however--they merely enjoy one another’s company as an escape from the solitude they find themselves in, and even when they share a bed, it’s merely to watch television comfortably. The suspenseful aspect of the relationship, in fact, is whether it will progress beyond the platonic and slip into something like an affair. Most of the incidental touches in “Lost in Translation” are right on. Coppola and cinematographer Lance Accord give the picture a slightly off-kilter, almost hallucinatory quality that suggests the characters, who have trouble sleeping, are caught in a perpetual case of jet lag. (For Murray, of course, it requires the same sort of dazed, only vaguely comprehending quality he brought to another of his best parts, in “Groundhog Day.”) The Tokyo locations are used to excellent effect, especially in the outside nighttime sequences. And while Ribisi can’t do much with the underwritten husband, Anna Faris is strong and funny as a one of his clients, a blissfully ignorant actress. But it’s the interplay between Murray and Johansson that makes the film a treat. The actor, who’s employed his peculiarly droopy persona mostly in supporting roles in recent years, here has the opportunity to take center stage again, and makes a triumphant return. In his hands Harris is at once marvelously complex yet transparent, a perfect realization of the star beginning a downward slide into has-been status. (The only flaw is the script’s suggestion that Bob had been a big action-movie type, which hardly seems plausible.) He’s matched beautifully by Johansson; though Charlotte is a more opaque, unrealized character than Bob, the actress makes her at once sexy and sympathetic--it’s easily her subtlest work on screen to date. Both benefit from Coppola’s precise but unrushed approach, which affords them ample space to blossom while maintaining clear boundaries--a tightrope act she accomplishes with a rare maturity for a still-beginning filmmaker. “Lost in Translation” will disappoint those who go to it looking for a knee-slapping laugh-fest in the old Murray mold. But in its understated, unforced fashion the film showcases his slyness and deadpan comic style as well as any of his previous efforts and far better than most. It’s great to be able to welcome him back to the top echelon of screen clowns again, especially in a film that, with its subdued yet skillfully amusing tone, calls on his ability to convey poignant regret as well as humorous dishevelment with equal success. This is a charming and touching picture, and a very nice surprise.

shes the new thinking mans eye candy.

_
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4TztqYaemt0
http://preptimeposse.blogspot.com/

really deep and manly, but i'd touch her

still give me christina ricci and thora birch from the under the radar young white girl realm

bulimia is a motherfucker

Thora's totally taken her place

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http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/287/6/c/the_wire_lineup__huge_download_by_dennisculver-d30s7vl.jpg
The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

link?

didn't you see her on the last season of Ally MacBeal?

the girl is all skinny with a big moonshaped head and shaved eyebrows... she looks like one of those saucer-headed aliens.

and to make things worse, she's gone all Hollywood glamourpuss, too. i guess she folded under the pressure.
i'll try to find some pics.

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http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/287/6/c/the_wire_lineup__huge_download_by_dennisculver-d30s7vl.jpg
The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

and i dont get the thora birch thing at all.

_
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4TztqYaemt0
http://preptimeposse.blogspot.com/

always a winning combination among the semi-nerdboy set

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http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/287/6/c/the_wire_lineup__huge_download_by_dennisculver-d30s7vl.jpg
The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

to me.

_
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4TztqYaemt0
http://preptimeposse.blogspot.com/

that's okay. perfect symmetry gets boring.

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http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/287/6/c/the_wire_lineup__huge_download_by_dennisculver-d30s7vl.jpg
The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

I'm lost...Who's got asymmetrical titties (er, "tiddies"--what is this, 6th grade?)? Scarlett, Christina or Thora?

Hurry up and answer so I'll be able to sleep tonight! ks

P.S. One straight chick's opinion: Thora is cute, Christina is not (her eating disorder just amplifies the size of her forehead) and the jury is still out on Scarlett--I have to see Lost in Translation first.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

>I'm lost...Who's got asymmetrical titties (er,
>"tiddies"--what is this, 6th grade?)? Scarlett, Christina or
>Thora?

she got them lopsided tiddies (it sounds more appropriate than titties, i guess.)

Not as weird as you might think. Or maybe I've just hooked up w/ 2 many weird chicks.

*Ducks head & dashes out*

At least according to the health advice columns in the teen magazines I read growing up! :-P ks

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

But to me tiddies = tiddlywinks = grade school.

I say if you're going to use breast slang, just come out with it and say titties--much preferable to boobs or boobies or *cough* jigga *cough* "funbags". :-P ks

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

>But to me tiddies = tiddlywinks = grade school.
>
>I say if you're going to use breast slang, just come out
>with it and say titties--much preferable to boobs or boobies
>or *cough* jigga *cough* "funbags". :-P ks

funbags is what carla from cheers always called 'em. that scarred me for many years. that's why i say "tiddies."

i also say "no diggity" from time to time, so don't listen to me.

Your tendency toward self-deprecation is a continuous source of amusement for me, Ricky! :-D ks

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

>funbags is what carla from cheers always called 'em. that
>scarred me for many years. that's why i say "tiddies."

Swear 2 God I never saw (or better yet remember) any episode of Cheers where Carla used the "funbags" term. If so I prolly would've stayed away from it as well:) But 2 me it's just the perfect term 4 some big ole bresases. I mean I dont need 2 break it down 4 ya do I?

>i also say "no diggity" from time to time, so don't listen
>to me.

Hmmmm? Yeah track record might be runined after that statement. But then again fa shizzle is played out as well so I can see you tryin 2 bring that back instead.

P.S. What movie were we talkin about again

>Swear 2 God I never saw (or better yet remember) any episode
>of Cheers where Carla used the "funbags" term.

I don't either...I'll just take Ricky's word for it. :-P

> But 2 me it's
>just the perfect term 4 some big ole bresases. I mean I dont
>need 2 break it down 4 ya do I?

No, please don't.

>P.S. What movie were we talkin about again

LOL! I know, right? This post has quickly gone South! :-P

ks

~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*~^~*
"You know jelly-wrestling?... OK, well, think about this: Afterwards, after the wrestling, what happens to the jelly? Because you could sell that. That is a missed opportunity. You could bottle it and sell it... You take the women out first, obviously...Do you realize what I've just invented? 'Porn Jelly!' The human race's two most favorite things meet at last in dessert form. There's a lot of lonely people out there, and what do lonely people enjoy? Puddings and porn! It's a girlfriend in a jar, except its jelly!" --Jeff, "Coupling" (on BBC America)

"What can I say, I just want to sit and be around you, undivide my attention and play in your hair..." --Martin Luther, "Breath Taker"

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

>>Swear 2 God I never saw (or better yet remember) any episode
>>of Cheers where Carla used the "funbags" term.
>
>I don't either...I'll just take Ricky's word for it. :-P

every episode. trust me. she says it. they wouldn't call them breasts or boobs or titties, thats all too racy for 80s television. she might have called them "gazoonga"s or some shit too. but i swear.

>LOL! I know, right? This post has quickly gone South! :-P

movie? the one about thora birch's tiddies being lopsided while across town carla is getting the funbags dusty. sofia coppola directed it. entertainment weekly gave it an "a" grade. billy murray is funny in the role of funbag number 2.

>them breasts or boobs or titties, thats all too racy for 80s
>television. she might have called them "gazoonga"s or some
>shit too. but i swear.

Yeah, mainstream America still has issues with the word "tits". Case in point: There's a show on BBC America called "What Not to Wear." (TLC has the American version but it pales in comparison.) The two stylists, Susannah and Trinny, recently published a book offering style advice based on different body issues. In the UK edition, the chapters included "Big Tits" and "No Tits" and the title page for each included a black and white picture of big titties and flat titties, respectively. Well, in the American edition of the book, the chapters were changed to "Big Boobs" and "No Boobs" and the pictures were darkened so you can't see the nipples! Ah, we Americans are a repressed lot! :-P

>movie? the one about thora birch's tiddies being lopsided
>while across town carla is getting the funbags dusty.

Getting the funbags dusty, lol? Is this a diss on Rhea Perlman's age or her being vertically challenged?

ks

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

>>movie? the one about thora birch's tiddies being lopsided
>>while across town carla is getting the funbags dusty.
>
>Getting the funbags dusty, lol? Is this a diss on Rhea
>Perlman's age or her being vertically challenged?

they have to be dusty. they aren't even seeing danny devito anymore i bet . . . or vice versa . . .

>>>movie? the one about thora birch's tiddies being lopsided
>>>while across town carla is getting the funbags dusty.
>>
>>Getting the funbags dusty, lol? Is this a diss on Rhea
>>Perlman's age or her being vertically challenged?
>
>they have to be dusty. they aren't even seeing danny devito
>anymore i bet . . . or vice versa . . .

Never in my life did I imagine that this post would turn into Rhea Perlman dustbags discussion. I'm stayin away from this one. But hopefully I'll be back Monday w/ my review of the flick.

>>>Swear 2 God I never saw (or better yet remember) any episode
>>>of Cheers where Carla used the "funbags" term.
>>
>>I don't either...I'll just take Ricky's word for it. :-P
>
>every episode. trust me. she says it. they wouldn't call
>them breasts or boobs or titties, thats all too racy for 80s
>television. she might have called them "gazoonga"s or some
>shit too. but i swear.

Now "gazoongas" or som'n like that sounds familiar.

>>LOL! I know, right? This post has quickly gone South! :-P
>
>movie? the one about thora birch's tiddies being lopsided
>while across town carla is getting the funbags dusty. sofia
>coppola directed it. entertainment weekly gave it an "a"
>grade. billy murray is funny in the role of funbag number
>2.

Yeah but Colin Farrell was even better as the funbag duster offer. When does the unrated special edition DVD get released?

It seems she's gonna be playin the same kinda role as she did in Ghost World & The Man Who Wasnt There. This man here wasnt impressed w/ either role. I want her 2 show me some range & not bore me 2 death.

Lost in Translation (2003, directed by Sofia Coppola)
Influenced by, without being a slave to, the French New Wave, Lost in Translation is an exquisite film about two souls adrift in emotional limbo who only need an anchor to save them - even if that anchor is each other.

Bob is an American movie star staying in Tokyo to shoot some whiskey ads, ostensibly for the money. Charlotte is the young wife of a photographer who's discovering that the man she married bears little resemblance to the man behind the camera. Both fighting insomnia and staying in the same hotel, the two emotional exiles strike up an unlikely friendship as their respective orbits come repeatedly in contact.

No description of the plot can really do justice to the movie, depending as it does on its two leads. For one thing, Bill Murray is so damn good as Bob it's criminal. He's hilarious of course, but Bob's humor is a shield, keeping all sharp prickly things away from his fragile heart. Think about the performances Murray has turned in over the last few years - Rushmore, the Royal Tenenbaums, even back to Ed Wood... and he's still not taken seriously as an actor. (OK, maybe that thing with the elephant has something to do with it, but forgive and forget already!) Kim Basinger has a freakin' Oscar, and Bill Murray is still working in the critical shadows. It's ridiculous.

The revelation here is Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte though. Great as she was in Ghost World and the Man Who Wasn't There, this is a quantum leap forward for her. She not only holds her own in verbal jousting sessions with Murray, but she gives Charlotte a maturity and resolve way beyond anything we've seen before. This is not a teacher and pupil relationship by any means; Bob and Charlotte are equals in just about every sense.

Unless, that is, the revelation is Coppola. The Virgin Suicides was a great debut, but this film is something else again. Coppola plays with some very interesting ideas here, not least of which is the audience's expectation that any relationship between an older man and a younger woman can resolve itself in any way other than sexually. I said it a couple of days ago but I'll say it again here - in a few years we could be saying "Sofia's dad, Francis Ford Coppola" instead of "Francis' daughter, Sofia Coppola". The film is that confident.

Lost in Translation is an extraordinarily wonderful movie, one that I loved when I walked out of the theater. It's filmmaking at its finest.

_
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4TztqYaemt0
http://preptimeposse.blogspot.com/

i reeeeally wanna go see this now

http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/lost_in_translation.html

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0337/hoberman.php

Lost in Translation opens with a wistful consideration of Scarlett Johansson's derriere, but this odalisque notwithstanding, it's Bill Murray's movie. That may even be a generic description—I can't imagine another actor bringing the same wry wounded dignity to his role. In her impressive second feature, Sofia Coppola—who wrote as well as directed—gives Murray room to stretch and is rewarded with some remarkably melancholy clowning.

Murray plays American movie star Bob Harris, a version of himself. As movie stars do, he's in Tokyo picking up a quick few million by shooting a Suntory whiskey commercial. Alone and adrift in a sterile Hyatt, he strikes up a friendship with another guest, Johansson's Charlotte. She's in Tokyo with her husband (Giovanni Ribisi), a celebrity photographer on assignment; left to her own devices, she's even lonelier than Bob. (His wife, present through phone calls and faxes, is an acerbic reality principle.)

Lost in Translation is a comedy of dislocation set in a metropolis that is itself spectacularly decentered. Bob more than once confronts his own disembodied image in the semiotic jungle of Japanese pop culture. He's a stranger in a strange land—bemused by the ceremonial business meetings, the hotel room's automatic curtains, the unfathomable craziness of the local TV, the pure sensory overload of Shibuya, the capacity for endless misunderstanding. Coppola gets as much mileage from Japanese otherness as any cine gaijin since Chris Marker made Sans Soleil.

Towering over an elevator full of salary men, Bob is a one-man alienation effect. There are a few too many yahoo jokes based on Japanese English, but the scenes in which Bob makes his commercial or promotes it with an appearance on a lunatic talk show are near hilarious—thanks largely to the star's stoical resignation. Murray must have written his own material. Bob is always wearily cracking wise—if only for his amusement. Meanwhile, like a surrealist heroine, Charlotte wanders the city. Coppola cuts between Bob's adventures and hers—the droll parallel action suggesting a sort of soft Jarmusch comedy. Their paths cross at the hotel bar where their eyes meet (and roll) over the ridiculous chanteuse.

Despite a plethora of sight gags, Lost in Translation never turns cute. Bob and Charlotte are both jet-lagged and sleep-deprived, and Tokyo is their dream. They are both essentially observational, and once they connect, their riffs have the excitement of a shared language. The movie is lyrical, touching, and gently discombobulated. Coppola has a good eye, a confident knowledge of celebrity folkways, and a definite feel for nightlife. In the movie's major set piece, Bob joins Charlotte and her few Japanese acquaintances for a round of clubbing. In his karaoke moment, Bob sings "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding?" and then—to somewhat different effect and around the time that Charlotte has adopted a fetching pink wig-hat—the Roxy Music heart-clutcher "More Than This."

Bob and Charlotte embark upon a friendship in which they are both themselves and, to Coppola's credit, the unacknowledged personification of foreclosed opportunities. (The delicacy of the movie's unexpressed feelings might be a tribute to the most subtle of Japanese directors, Mikio Naruse.) The affectingly natural Johansson is playing a few years older than her age; the sultry innocence of her character's raw, unfinished features is reflected in the yearning one gleans behind Bob's practiced mask of privacy. Sexual tension builds: Bob is available and Charlotte is curious and, as Coppola makes sure, in a frequent state of dishabille. But sex is displaced onto something else. The pair wander the hotel, they watch TV and drink sake, they talk and suffer their own misunderstanding, then wonder how they'll say goodbye.

Lost in Translation is as bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic Before Sunrise. But Lost in Translation is the more poignant reverie. Coppola evokes the emotional intensity of a one-night stand far from home—but what she really gets is the magic of movies. The stars do shine at night. By the cold light of day it's difficult to believe that, as individuated as the performances are, this sad middle-aged man and that restless young wife could ever feel so deeply for each other but it's shivery to think so.

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http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/287/6/c/the_wire_lineup__huge_download_by_dennisculver-d30s7vl.jpg
The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali

hope it hits rohnert park soon or sac in a couple weeks

one of my favorite roxy songs!!!!

but first i'm gonna go see UNDEAD

>but first i'm gonna go see UNDEAD

a couple quickies

http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_09.04.03/film/tiff.html

3/4
A meteor shower turns most of the folks in a remote Australian fishing village into the walking dead. A bloodbath ensues before six survivors make it into an underground bunker, unaware that the events on the surface are about to get wackier. Undead's copious gore, goofball schtick and Antipodean accents all recall Peter Jackson's classic Dead Alive. But the Spierig brothers' horror comedy has some twists of its own and a fine pair of heroes in beauty-queen Rene (Felicity Mason) and stoic action-man Marion (Mungo McKay), whose guns and ammo may not protect them from the zombie plague's real cause.

http://www.moviemarshal.com/rs-undead.html

7.5/10

When the words ‘Australian’, ‘low-budget’ and ‘genre pic’ are put into the same sentence, they are rarely, if ever, followed by the word ‘quality’. However if the Spierig brothers have any say in it, that could all be about to change. The talented young filmmakers have for under a $1 million dollars created Undead, a feature film that has generated incredible buzz around the globe and has gone into profit even before it’s theatrical release, a highly unusual occurrence.

Undead is set in a quiet fishing town where a meteor shower leaves an array of zombies looking for their next meal. Despite it’s homage to the likes of Evil Dead and influences from Peter Jackson to Robert Rodriguez, the most promising thing about this film is its originality. Central to the plot is Marion, an unlikely saviour with a mean triple-barreled shot gun and an even meaner Ned Kelly-like beard. Although he resembles Bruce Doull more than Bruce Willis, his action-star moves are unquestionable. Leading the band of fortunate (or is that unfortunate) survivors, Marion attempts to fend off the undead onslaught with the help of a feisty beauty pageant winner and two local cops, one mentally unbalanced and the other overly sympathetic. Having been aware for sometime that something bad was about to happen, Marion has prepared for the worst and holds the keys as to what the hell is going on.

While the film is more laughs than scares, the make-up and special effects are top-shelf and belie the miniscule monetary amount it took to produce them. With over 300 special effects (all completed on a laptop by the way), Undead is one of the first fully homegrown films to embrace films technological advances. This creativity and ingenuity however has not gone unnoticed. Undead has been sold to over 21 territories and the Spierigs have been signed to the prestigious William Morris creative agency, unheard of for first-time directors with little more than short films and commercials to their name. Their future plans include continuing to dabble in the sci-fi/horror/thriller genres but wish to expand to drama and comedy or as they say ‘any film that doesn’t involve us investing our own money’.

I was fortunate to be one of the few people who caught Undead at its sold-out screenings during the Melbourne International Film Festival. The atmosphere was electric in the theatre as the packed audience laughed and skwirmed throughout. If this is any indication of what Undead can expect when it is put out on limited release on Sept. 4th, then Australia may have it’s first horror hit in sometime. Hopefully this potential success will make film funding bodies look differently at the merits of genre pics than they have in the past and we can finally produce films that aren’t local comedies or high-art.

Ultimately Undead is a fun, inventive and enjoyable film that is world-class in nearly every aspect. While its humour is ultimately stronger than its horror, you should still get along and support some local talents that look to have big futures not only here, but on the world stage.

i guess Braindead was retitled for the States

http://www.cinemaspeak.com/Reviews/lostintranslation.html

Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides was a promising, if not fully realized, debut feature film. The atmospheric touches and director's control of mood and pacing definitely pointed toward much more interesting work to come. I certainly had quite a bit of optimism heading into Coppola's sophomore effort, but was in no way prepared for the wondrous, sense-enveloping beauty that is Lost In Translation.

Set in a surreal, almost otherworldly Tokyo, Bill Murray plays soon-to-be washed up American actor, Bob Harris, who's in the city to shoot a whiskey commercial for Japanese television. Staying at the same hotel as Harris is a young American couple, John (Giovanni Ribisi) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). A celebrity photographer in Tokyo on assignment, John is constantly on the go, perhaps more in love with his work than he is with his wife. John's absentee status is having obvious effects on Yale-graduate Charlotte, who is battling with the familiar questions that all recent college graduates face, and now must also wonder about the condition of her marriage.

Plagued by insomnia, Charlotte and Bob meet at their hotel's bar -- a chance encounter that gradually blossoms into a friendship, which increases in intensity when John is called away to another Japanese city. Charlotte takes Bob out with her Japanese friends to experience various aspects of Tokyo's nightlife, from Karaoke bars to rather respectable looking strip clubs. A blissful escape from their respective problems -- Bob is also in a marriage that's expiration date appears long since passed -- the friendship eventually becomes tested due to its ambiguity; it's a strong bond that dances around inevitable feelings of romance.

Coppola crafts John and Charlotte's relationship perfectly. We are introduced to both characters as individuals before their friendship takes flight, allowing us to invest our feelings in them as a unit and as separate entities. Coppola's script is engagingly economical -- body language and facial expressions often speak a thousand words, shared moments of silence are able to communicate so much, and in one scene, the lyrics to songs both characters sing while performing Karaoke serve as a more comfortable mode of expression than a direct exchange of words.

Coppola wrote the role of Bob Harris specifically for Murray, and the actor absolutely shines. Even in the beginning scenes, which have a playful comic touch, there's something distinctly melancholy about his appearance and behavior -- almost as if flashes of humor are the man's only respite from a life quickly spiraling downward. In a way, Bob Harris is Murray's character from Wes Anderson's Rushmore explored on a more serious level. Scarlett Johansson completely imbues Charlotte with a palpable confusion and alienation -- her estrangement in the foreign land a microcosm of much larger personal issues. Both of these performances are magnificent.

The director's mastery of tone and atmosphere is astounding. Working with D.P. Lance Accord, Coppola's vision of Tokyo appears right out of a hazy dream -- people milling about all over, neon lights illuminating dark interiors and exteriors; a stark contrast to traditional visions of Japan, which, as the film seems to suggest, may be on their way to relic status. Coppola also brilliantly uses music (Kevin Shields of My Blood Valentine composed the score) to enhance the airy mood. The final scene, which created a lump in my throat the size of a boulder, plays out gorgeously to The Jesus and Mary Chain's haunting "Just Like Honey," a song that I've been a fan of for over 15 years, and never has it sounded so good.

Lost in Translation will require some patience for viewers who are more enamored of films that move with quick tempos, but each scene has a resonance that would be, at least partially, compromised if the movie proceeded at a faster clip. I'll also admit to being thrown off a bit by the mixing of divergent tones in the film's first half, but this ambitiousness proves to be one of its greatest assets. Lost in Translation is one of the best movies I've seen so far this year and a quantum artistic leap forward for Sofia Coppola. In the span of two unique films, she has, incredibly, worked herself out from under the imposing shadow that is cast when you're the daughter of one of the most accomplished filmmakers the world has ever known.

i want to see this movie.

peace
mike

http://theonlyblogthatmatters.wordpress.com
http://www.last.fm/user/mdrohan/

at least to Bethesda Row. Probably Dupont and Georgetown too.

-----------------------

peace
mike

http://theonlyblogthatmatters.wordpress.com
http://www.last.fm/user/mdrohan/

And as a bonus, it's playing at my favorite single-screen theater! ks

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

>And as a bonus, it's playing at my favorite single-screen
>theater! ks

Which one?

Now, I'm thinking I want to do a double feature of Lost in Translation and Dirty Pretty Things this weekend, and both are playing at the Meridian. So, it's deciding between the convenience of the big cineplex and going out of my way to the artsy cinema with lots of character. Hmm... ks

>>And as a bonus, it's playing at my favorite single-screen
>>theater! ks
>
>Which one?

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"You know jelly-wrestling?... OK, well, think about this: Afterwards, after the wrestling, what happens to the jelly? Because you could sell that. That is a missed opportunity. You could bottle it and sell it... You take the women out first, obviously...Do you realize what I've just invented? 'Porn Jelly!' The human race's two most favorite things meet at last in dessert form. There's a lot of lonely people out there, and what do lonely people enjoy? Puddings and porn! It's a girlfriend in a jar, except its jelly!" --Jeff, "Coupling" (on BBC America)

"What can I say, I just want to sit and be around you, undivide my attention and play in your hair..." --Martin Luther, "Breath Taker"

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"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

>Now, I'm thinking I want to do a double feature of Lost in
>Translation and Dirty Pretty Things this weekend, and both
>are playing at the Meridian. So, it's deciding between the
>convenience of the big cineplex and going out of my way to
>the artsy cinema with lots of character. Hmm... ks

Well my dilemma is whether or not 2 check out this flick out or Matchstick Men on Friday. Where did u find out that it was gonna be opening up here in Seattle already?

ks

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"I predict...................Nadal will embarrass dudes" - Deebot

http://www.facebook.com/kurlyswirl

I be Scrobblin': http://www.last.fm/user/TasteeTreat/

http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/n_9178/

Sleepless in Tokyo
In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray plays a man stranded in a posh, all-inclusive hotel that serves as a metaphor for his numbed existence.

I hope it will not be taken as a backhanded compliment if I say that Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is the best movie about jet lag ever made. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, an over-the-hill movie star who is in Tokyo to pick up some easy money filming commercials for Suntory whiskey. Entombed in the ultrasleek Park Hyatt, unable to sleep, he frequents the hotel’s low-lit bars and listens numbly to the lounge acts. He has no use for the Tokyo hubbub and ventures outside only at his peril. He looks like the undead.

The real world keeps intruding, though. Bob’s wife repeatedly faxes him from L.A. with needling queries about home redecoration. Another hotel guest, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), who is accompanying her frenetically busy fashion-photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), strikes up a tentative friendship with him based on their shared grogginess. She brings Bob into the clubs and pachinko parlors and karaoke bars, and gradually this deeply unhappy man begins to unwind. He and Charlotte aren’t lovers in any physical sense, but they enjoy the novelty of each other’s company. They know that this is one of those far-flung friendships that will last only for the length of their stay, and it’s sweeter (and more unsettling) for being so.

Coppola both wrote and directed, and there’s a pleasing shapelessness to her scenes. She accomplishes the difficult feat of showing people being bored out of their skulls in such a way that we are never bored watching them. She does this by creating such empathy for Bob and Charlotte that our identification with them is almost total. Coppola has hit on a metaphor for modern alienation that is so mundane it’s funny: She transforms the dark night of the soul into one big cryptlike luxury hotel. It’s no wonder that when Bob decides to make a run for it, he acts as if he’s planning a prison break.

Bill Murray has become an actor of extraordinary range over the years. It would have been easy for him to play Bob as a gaga jerk, but he never once succumbs to revue-sketch antics—not even when he belts out an Elvis Costello song in a karaoke bar. Murray conveys Bob’s tiredness at what he has become, which surely predates his arrival in Tokyo. He takes no pleasure in being recognized by American tourists, or in seeing himself in movies or commercials on Japanese TV. He’s settled into the kind of career where fame is essentially an annuity—and an annoyance. When, in a hilarious but also unexpectedly touching scene, he poses for his Suntory spot and feigns Sinatra-like insouciance, we can see how far from cool he has become.

When Bob is with Charlotte, he doesn’t act younger than his years. He is exactly who is he supposed to be: a jaded man momentarily brought out of himself. He has no illusions that this is anything but a spree. He has a scene in which he talks to Charlotte about the difficulties of his marriage and his sustaining love for his children that has tremendous resonance for her; he is letting her know that one doesn’t really get wiser as one gets older, just more temperate. Charlotte’s own marriage is a disappointment to her, and she spends part of her time in Tokyo frequenting Buddhist temples, or taking part in flower ceremonies, trying to fill a void. None of this really works for her, but Bob’s honesty, which is keyed to his weariness, does the trick. In the movies these days, it seems as if as soon as an actress hits her twenties, she becomes a snuggle-bunny. It’s a pleasure to see a performer who plays a young woman with smarts and substance.

Coppola allows for the strangeness in these people’s lives. She doesn’t try to “understand” them in any conventional sense. Nor does she try to fit herself into the Tokyo landscape; the movie, which was shot by Lance Acord in lustrous nocturnal tones, presents Japan as an outsider might see it, without apology. The night-worlds both within the hotel and without are equally odd and forbidding. Everything seems hushed—suspended in time—and yet there is always the sense of violence about to break loose. In Japan, the most extreme delicacy goes hand in hand with garishness, and Coppola offers up both for our delectation. It’s a heady, hallucinatory combo. Bob and Charlotte would be dazed even if they got as much sleep as Rip Van Winkle.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/962293.asp

Scarlett Fever

‘Lost in Translation’ is so funny and melancholy that it’s hard to pick just one person to praise. OK, it’s not really that hard. Meet Ms. Johansson, an 18-year-old who doesn’t act her age

ASKED WHAT SHE THOUGHT of Coppola’s first film, “The Virgin Suicides,” the 18-year-old Johansson pauses. “Um.” Another pause. “Well, it’s hard to do an adaptation of a book, especially that one. I wasn’t crazy about ‘Virgin Suicides.’ I think ‘Lost in Translation’ is a much more mature film for Sofia.” Finally, an actress who saves her acting for the movies.
Johansson’s unvarnished answer makes sense: she’s always radiated a throaty gravity and projected a blunt honesty on screen. She was preternaturally wise as an 11-year-old in “Manny & Lo”; poignant as the withdrawn, badly injured girl in “The Horse Whisperer” (The Hoarse Whisperer could describe her distinctive voice) and memorably contemptuous as an outsider in “Ghost World,” alongside Thora Birch. Though the native New Yorker has been performing since her off-Broadway debut at the age of 8, the camera never catches her Acting. She gives the impression of having arrived fully formed. She just is—like a noun that doesn’t need an adjective.

If you’ve missed Johansson so far, it’s because she’s never slummed in the typical roles: “You mean a girl with some social handicap who becomes a cheerleader and marries the prom king? The thing is, I have no obligation to be in movies I don’t want to be in. And playing somebody who’s completely vapid is not interesting to me. After ‘The Horse Whisperer’ came out, there was this huge craze for snuff movies about kids killing each other. I thought, ‘I’m in high school, I don’t need to support myself, I’m gonna wait until something better comes along’.”

Something did. In Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” Johansson finally takes center stage and becomes an adult. Holding her own with Bill Murray at his most inspired, she plays Charlotte, a smart but lost young woman who has accompanied her hip photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) to Tokyo. When her workaholic husband leaves her behind for an out-of-town shoot, she’s a stranger adrift in an alien land. In the lounge of a coolly modern luxury hotel, she crosses paths with another jet-lagged, deracinated American, the famous actor Bob Harris (Murray), who’s come to Japan to shoot a whisky commercial for a cool $2 million. Their brief, wondrous encounter is the soul of this subtle, funny, melancholy film.
There’s a big age difference between Charlotte and Bob, but both find themselves stuck in their lives, at loose ends and drawn to each other for solace. He’s in mid-life crisis, his marriage in a rut, his career slipping. His ironic flippancy can barely conceal his embarrassment at finding him—self an overpaid hawker of hard liquor. Charlotte, who studied philosophy at Yale, doesn’t know what to do with her life; she’s beginning to feel like an appendage to her husband’s career. Both discombobulated by a foreign culture, they begin their sweet, ambiguous dance. Is it a paternal relationship or an erotic one? Is this a love story, or something just to the left of it? Part of what makes this movie so special is its delicate blurring of conventional boundaries.

And Johansson is right about her director. With this film it becomes clear that Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker with eyes all her own. You could see her lyrical potential in the ambitious but diffuse “Suicides,” based on Jeffrey Eugenides’s deliberately centerless novel. Here, working from her own original script, her focus is unwavering, her touch light but precise. The beauty of “Lost in Translation” is in its exquisitely captured details. Coppola is a warm, meticulous observer, with an intimate style that’s the polar opposite of her famous father, Francis Ford. He’s grand opera. This is chamber music.
Fans of great Bill Murray moments, meanwhile, will count the filming of the whisky commercial among his classic comic scenes. His mortifying appearance on a Japanese talk show with “Japan’s Johnny Carson” runs a close second. But the laughs Murray gets always serve the character. This role—which Coppola wrote with him in mind—shows us aspects of the actor we haven’t seen before, even in “Rushmore”: moments when he emerges from his shell of irony emotionally naked. He’s never been better, and part of the credit goes to Johansson. They’re oddly but perfectly matched. Her directness opens him up, pierces his solitude, softens him. Their connection is what this small, unforgettable movie is about: a transient, magical, restorative meeting of souls.

The chemistry between them had to ignite in filming as it does in the story: on the spot. “We didn’t have time to work on it, really,” Johansson says. “We met and literally started filming the next day. But it wasn’t really important to establish anything, because the characters meet in Tokyo just like we did. They have their awkward moment and go from there. I remember the first time I met him, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s Bill Murray. He looks like Bill Murray. He talks like Bill Murray. It is Bill Murray!’ It was like meeting Cal Ripken or something.”

For Johansson, “Lost in Translation”—and speaking of lost in translation, Cal Ripken?—is the beginning of what looks to be a breakthrough year. She’s already winning raves at film festivals for her next, “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” in which she plays Vermeer’s intoxicating maid—and muse. Her husky voice and no-nonsense style are well on their way to becoming indelible.

http://www.theavclub.com/3935/cinema.html#review1

Lost In Translation
In Lost In Translation's most memorable scene, Bill Murray sings a karaoke version of Roxy Music's "More Than This." As a cast member of Saturday Night Live, Murray perfected the wacky-lounge-singer shtick, but there's not a trace of condescension in his rendition of a song that has become a modern standard. On the contrary, the scene derives much of its power from Murray's implicit understanding that beneath its celebratory surface, "More Than This" is achingly sad, an acknowledgement that transcendent moments fade away, while mundane ones linger on and on. That truism informs all of Lost In Translation, an audacious dramatic comedy—the second effort of The Virgin Suicides writer-director Sofia Coppola—suffused with the bittersweet melancholy that gave the similarly themed Rushmore its enduring resonance. In a role that draws equally on Murray's remarkable turn as a depressed millionaire in Rushmore and his iconic career as one of America's most beloved comic actors, Murray stars as a Bill Murray-like superstar who travels to Japan to make a quick two million bucks endorsing a brand of whiskey. Alone in a luxury hotel, he finds a kindred spirit in Scarlett Johansson, a winsome, fiercely intelligent newlywed whose husband (Giovanni Ribisi) leaves for a business trip. United in their ennui, Murray and Johansson find solace in a relationship that defies easy categorization, hovering giddily and uneasily between friendship and romance. The disorienting culture of Tokyo plays a major role in Lost In Translation: It doesn't cause the leads' alienation, but its foreignness heightens it, giving those feelings a surreal quality as it tightens Murray and Johansson's ephemeral but strong connection to each other. Like Rushmore, Lost In Translation revolves around the complicated bond between a frustrated middle-aged man, whose material riches do little to salve his emotional wounds, and a young upstart who breaks through his brittle exterior. Coppola doesn't share Wes Anderson's gift for crafting richly developed supporting characters, who tend to be as broadly drawn as her leads are exquisitely crafted. That would be a problem if Translation's leads didn't have such electric chemistry, and if Coppola didn't have such a strong mastery of tone. Gorgeously shot by Lance Acord, who makes Toyko a gaudy dreamscape that's both seductive and frightening, Lost In Translation washes away memories of Godfather III, establishing Coppola as a major filmmaker in her own right, and reconfirming Johansson and Murray as actors of startling depth and power. —Nathan Rabin

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030915-483290,00.html

In the neon nightscape of Tokyo, Bob Harris' face sort of smiles from an electronic billboard. Bob (Bill Murray) is an American actor in town to shoot a Santori commercial — as he puts it, "getting $2 million endorsing a whiskey when I should be doing a play or something." After 25 years of marriage and a stagnant career, Bob has eased himself into the warm bath of depression. The cunning jokes he emits are the fart bubbles that keep others amused and himself awake. During the Santori shoot he agreeably mimics Rat Packers Dean Martin and Joey Bishop and, because the photographer asks, James Bond — not Sean Connery but Roger Moore. Bob obliges with killer impressions.

Bob makes people laugh because he's good at it. But that shrugging sense of humor can't give his life purpose or propulsion. His first night in town, as he sits on the edge of his bed in a hotel bathrobe and floppy slippers, he looks like a sad samurai in forced retirement. The next morning, he is startled out of sleep by the bedroom drapes briskly, noisily, automatically opening to reveal slashes of sunlight — that's his wake-up call. Tokyo has another alarm clock in store for Bob. He needs the jolt of friendship, and he finds it in Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young wife who is as restless as Bob is. When she asks how long he's staying in Tokyo, he replies like a lounge singer at the end of his act, "I'll be in the bar for the rest of the week."

Lost in Translation revels in contradictions. It's a comedy about melancholy, a romance without consummation, a travelogue that rarely hits the road. Sofia Coppola has a witty touch with dialogue that sounds improvised yet reveals, glancingly, her characters' dislocation. She's a real mood weaver, with a gift for goosing placid actors (like Johansson, who looks eerily like the young James Spader) and mining a comic's deadpan depths. Watch Murray's eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status quo. You won't find a subtler, funnier or more poignant performance this year than this quietly astonishing turn.

As a two-character film, Lost isn't quite fair to Bob's wife — a hectoring, transpacific phone voice — or to Charlotte's photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), who's easily beguiled by blond starlets. The movie also makes too much easy fun of the Japanese: that they are a short people who speak in very long sentences and mix up their ls and rs. (A prostitute invades Bob's room and orders him to "lip my stockings.") But that's just America's cultural myopia at work abroad. We go there and wonder, Why don't these people speak English? What are they doing here?

In this alien land, in this tiny, lovely film, Bob and Charlotte briefly create a home out of their kinship. They come to realize they're not locked in stasis; they are souls in transition, grazing each other and striking sweet sparks.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030915-483314,00.html

Sofia's Choice
Once a dilettante, Sofia Coppola has become a director with a distinct vision

Francis Ford Coppola knew his only daughter would become a director by the time she was 3. "My wife and I were driving in the car with Sofia," he says, "and we were having a typical silly marital argument that was going on a little too long. All of a sudden this little voice in the back seat said, 'Cut!' She knew how to use that word at a very early age."

Later, when Sofia was about 6, on the set of her dad's film Apocalypse Now she would draw elaborate pictures of palm trees and helicopters and tell stories connecting the pictures. "She was a very imaginative child," says her mother Eleanor Coppola, a documentary-film maker. "But when she played with her friends, she always wanted them to play her way — her story, her costumes. And I would have to say, 'Sofia, not everyone wants to play your way.'" But the kids, inevitably, did want to play Sofia's way. Says Eleanor: "She had that pattern of somehow gathering everyone's enthusiasms, which is very much like a director."

As almost everyone in Coppola's family is a director — from her father to her husband Spike Jonze, who directed the indie hits Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, to her brother Roman Coppola, who directed CQ — it would have been weird if she had become an accountant or a cardiologist. But it's almost as surprising that Coppola became not just a director but one with a poignantly romantic visual style so distinctively her own.

Coppola's new movie, Lost in Translation, was the most buzzed-about entry at the Venice Film Festival, where it snagged two prizes last week. Granted, it's easy to generate buzz when you've got family connections like hers. But waiflike Sofia, 32, with her soft, spacey California surfer-chick talk (expressions like "Yeah, right?" and "Oh, cool" punctuate every sentence), hardly plays the part of the Hollywood brat.

"People think it's easy for me," she says, "but I stalked Bill Murray for eight months!" After sending him letters, leaving messages on his voice mail and soliciting the help of mutual friends like The Royal Tenenbaums director Wes Anderson, Coppola finally persuaded Murray to star in her film. "If someone says no, I like to keep working to find a way to do it," she says, referring to the fact that she had no alternative choices for Murray, nor did she have a backup for Tokyo's Park Hyatt hotel, which provides the main location in Lost in Translation.

In the movie, a dreamy meditation on midlife crises and the nature of transient connections, Murray plays Bob Harris, a disillusioned movie star in Tokyo to shoot a Japanese whiskey commercial. Scarlett Johansson is Charlotte, a newlywed accompanying her workaholic husband (Giovanni Ribisi) on a job. Coppola shot the film in 27 days and stuck to a relatively minuscule $4 million budget. For some of the scenes, she recorded with no sound and rolled the cameras just to capture a mood. And she purposely used high-speed film to give the movie a homemade intimacy. "She waited for us to have a moment instead of cutting to it," says Johansson. "She knows what she wants, and she's not going to move on until she gets it. You're in the hands of someone who has a vision."

Coppola definitely draws on input from the men in her life: her father ("He was always talking about screenwriting when we were little kids," she says), her husband (Lost's cinematographer, Lance Acord, also shot Jonze's Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) and her brother (he went to Tokyo to shoot some scenes for her when she was running out of time). But much of Sofia's visual style — from costume design to art direction — has evolved out of what she calls her dilettante years. Though she was baptized into the family business, literally, as an infant, playing Vito Corleone's newborn grandson in the final scene of The Godfather, Coppola decided to check out other career opportunities after being excoriated, at age 18, for her portrayal of Michael Corleone's young daughter Mary in The Godfather Part III (audiences cheered when her character was killed). She got a job answering Karl Lagerfeld's phone at Chanel. She enrolled at Cal Arts and dabbled in painting. In her early 20s she enlisted a photo agent and started taking pictures for magazines like Paris Vogue and Allure. Eventually she wandered into fashion design when an old friend from California's Napa Valley, where Coppola grew up, suggested they start a line of T shirts and dresses. The line, called Milk Fed, still exists as a lucrative Japanese franchise that supports Coppola, allowing her to make creative decisions independently of financial ones ("something I also learned from my dad"). There was also a foray into cable TV with a Comedy Central talk show, Hi-Octane, which she hosted with her good friend Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of director John Cassavetes. "I felt like I wasn't really good at one thing, but I had all these interests," says Coppola. "That's what I like about directing. You have all these experts around you, and you can explore many interests."

The film breakthrough came several years ago when Coppola read Jeffrey Eugenides' novel The Virgin Suicides and was so taken with it that she set about writing a screen adaptation Sofia-style — which is to say under the radar — without telling anyone and with no clue as to who owned the film rights to the book. With a bit of help from someone at American Zoetrope, her father's production company, she ended up writing and directing it as her first feature film. The critical success of 2000's The Virgin Suicides — a poignant look at adolescent longing through the eyes of suburban teenage boys — gave her the confidence to write an original script.

Tokyo had been lingering in the back of Coppola's mind after several trips there to work on her clothing line and shoot for a fashion magazine called Dune. "I remember having these weeks there that were sort of enchanting and weird," says Coppola. "Tokyo is so disorienting, and there's a loneliness and isolation. Everything is so crazy, and the jet lag is torture. I liked the idea of juxtaposing a midlife crisis with that time in your early 20s when you're, like, What should I do with my life?"

Coppola's small conceit is refreshingly personal. Many of the scenes and much of the dialogue were culled from conversations she overheard, her experiences and those of people she knows. "I feel like anything you write is autobiographical," she says. "Even The Virgin Suicides was, and I didn't write ." Her visual cues are taken from photography: the Playboy photos of Sam Haskins inspired the soft-focus, fleshy look of Suicides; the idea of running around Tokyo taking snapshots gives Lost in Translation its look of spontaneity. She tweaks every costume herself. From the fashion to the photography, Coppola has corralled all of her visual experience and channeled it into a very personal vision.

Work has kept her and her husband apart in recent months, so for the moment, Coppola plans to take a break. But she's keeping an eye out for her new film project. After living under the long shadow of her famous name, the dilettante is working hard to live up to it.

http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/review.asp?mid=2047360

Don't stall about seeing Sofia Coppola's altogether remarkable Lost in Translation. It's a class-act liftoff for the fall movie season. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson give performances that will be talked about for years. And Coppola, in her second feature (The Virgin Suicides came first, in 2000), shows the ardent assurance of a born filmmaker. One problem: The fragile plot defies blunt description. How to pin down a moonbeam that tickles you with laughs, teases you with romantic possibility and then melts into heartbreak? Just go with the flow. The Tokyo dream-pop score, produced by Brian Reitzell, helps.

Bob Harris, played for something way deeper than ha-ha by Murray, floats in a limo bubble through the neon glitter of nighttime Tokyo. Bob's a Hollywood movie star with maybe one too many brainless blockbusters under his belt. He's in Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial for an easy $2 million and to nurse a midlife crisis stemming from an aimless career and marriage.

Charlotte (Johansson) is three decades younger than Bob, but she shares his sense of drift. A Yale philosophy grad, she's in Tokyo with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), a slick careerist who leaves her alone to find herself while he's off shooting rock stars.

Charlotte and Bob don't know each other. But for a moment they're in different suites in the same impossibly posh Tokyo hotel. Coppola has no fear of being undramatic in showing these two characters alone: Bob in his kimono, Charlotte in her underwear, each gazing through huge windows at the city below. Coppola catches the disconnect that comes from being a stranger in a strange land. And gifted cinematographer Lance Acord (Being John Malkovich, Buffalo 66) -- shooting on high-speed film instead of the digital video fast becoming an indie cliche -- gives that disconnect the seductive sheen of something exotic just out of reach.

Murray is flat-out hilarious as Bob shoots the commercial, dependent on a translator who maddeningly condenses tirades from the Japanese director into such banalities as "Look at the camera like a friend." But it's his skill at uncovering the emotional bruises in Bob that makes this a career triumph for Murray, one that should earn him a salute from Oscar, who idiotically ignored his understated brilliance in Wes Anderson's Rushmore.

Johansson, 18, and striking in films as diverse as The Horse Whisperer, Ghost World and The Man Who Wasn't There, has matured into an actress of smashing loveliness and subtle grace. It's clear that Coppola, a visitor to Japan since childhood, understands Charlotte from the inside. The movie isn't girly in the way The Virgin Suicides sometimes was. Coppola has found her voice with this artfully evanescent original screenplay. When she brings Bob and Charlotte together, the tone seems exactly right.

They meet in the hotel lounge. Later, they share confidences, go to a strip club, a video arcade and a karaoke bar (Murray's version of Roxy Music's "More Than This" is one for the time capsule). OK, maybe a few of the culture-clash jokes are facile. But suddenly Tokyo comes alive, and so do Bob and Charlotte. She is stung when Bob sleeps with a jazz singer, played by Catherine Lambert ("I guess you had a lot to talk about, like growing up in the Fifties"). But sexual jealousy is not the issue here. Bob and Charlotte's brief encounter is built to last, if only in their memories. Before saying goodbye, they whisper something to each other that the audience can't hear. Coppola keeps her film as hushed and intimate as that whisper. Lost in Translation is found gold. Funny how a wisp of a movie from a wisp of a girl can wipe you out.

Sofia Coppola Directs
She gives the name and the talent a new twist

Her dad, Godfather-trilogy director Francis Ford Coppola, is a film legend. Her husband, Adaptation director Spike Jonze, is a legend in the making. So where does Sofia Coppola even get the guts to step up to the plate? From somewhere deep inside, which is where it counts. It also helps that this thirty-two-year-old director and screenwriter has a style all her own. Her first two features -- The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation -- are smartly nuanced and tone-perfect. But don't write them off as chick flicks. There's a core of toughness and emotional risk in Sofia's art and in her life. She survived a brutal hammering from critics when her father cast her (she was nineteen) in The Godfather III. But her mother, documentarian Eleanor Coppola, survived the frenzied, marriage-shaking filming of Apocalypse Now -- she shot film on it and wrote about it. There's steel in these Coppola women, and it's industrial grade. Much like Charlotte in Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola is sizing up the world to find her place in it. Right now, she's the hottest director around.

http://www.reelingreviews.com/lostintranslation.htm

Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a movie star making easy money for a Japanese whiskey commercial. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson, "Eight Legged Freaks") is alone in Tokyo, a grass widow to her workaholic photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi, "Heaven"). Late night insomnia in a strange landscape causes these two ships to pass in the night, forming a strange but beautiful bond that will never be "Lost in Translation."


Laura:
Writer/director Sofia Coppola has crafted a mood poem about isolation in a strange environment and the temporary relationships that linger in memory that can be born there. Bill Murray puts a wry twist on his "Rushmore" persona to make Bob Harris an alienated middle aged crisis. Scarlett Johansson is his opposite, a just forming personality full of intelligence and curiosity, but unsure of her direction in life and a new marriage. Bob and Charlotte fully understand each other from their differing perspectives and a nonsexual romance blooms between the two.

Coppola based her original screenplay on her own experiences, including stays at the Park Hyatt Tokyo prominently featured in the film and evenings out with local buddy Charlie Brown (Sofia's real friend Fumihiro Hayashi), a fashion magazine owner.

Bob wants to get out of Tokyo as soon as he arrives. Lines of Japanese hotel workers and Suntori executives attend to his needs - when he can make them understood. He is a true fish out of water, his experience made more surreal by the lack of sleep compounded by faxes which arrive at 4:20 a.m. During his Suntori whiskey commercial shoot, the director (Yutaka Tadokoro) rambles strings of instructions which are translated to Harris as 'look at camera,' then makes suggestions such as 'Lat Pack' and '007' which Harris reacts to sardonically. The hilarity escalates when Bob opens his hotel door to be greeted by a 'premium fantasy' (Nao Asuka) sent by Suntori who commands him to 'Lip my stockings!' Bob's twenty year marriage is represented by abbreviated phone calls to consult over carpet samples his wife has Fedexed to his hotel room and a hesitant 'I love you' spoken to a dial tone.

Meanwhile Charlotte is the picture of calm contemplation amidst her husband John's hectic comings and goings. Her inquisitive nature is exemplified when she wanders into a flower arranging class in the hotel, appreciating the beauty of the Japanese art. John is greeted rapturously by a young starlet Kelly (Anna Faris, "Scary Movie") and the division between his circles and his wife's is sorely evident. Wanting to get away from the shallow chattering of Kelly in the Hyatt's cocktail lounge, Charlotte approaches Bob. The two continue to run into each other with the awkwardness of those who have no history, but when John leaves Tokyo and Charlotte for several days, she briefly cries over the strangeness of her relationship, then takes the opportunity to invite Bob to go out with her local friends.

"Lost in Translation" captures that bittersweet feeling of lonely anonymity one can experience in the midst of a friendly crowd. Coppola paces her film with long stretches where nothing seems to be happening, yet all the while she's building a strong mood which floats the comedy and quiet romance. Cinematographer Lance Acord ("Buffalo '66") used high speed film and no artificial lighting which casts the film in a a shadowy, twilight dream state. He finds that peculiar light so endemic to hotel rooms, where dust particles always punctuate the sunlight to create an interior gloom, as well as the crisp gray of a city freshened by a rainshower. Sound ranges from the staccato of tens of arcade machines being played to the vacuum of the carpeted hallway Bob finds himself alone in after shutting Charlotte's door. Music producer Brian Reitzell of My Bloody Valentine ("The Virgin Suicides") is particularly adept at matching characters to their karaoke selections. Murray is moving with two very different performances - Elvis Costello's "(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding" has a hint of his old SNL lounge lizard while his flat arrangement of Roxy Music's "More Than This" bleeds melancholy. Anna Faris gamely massacres “Nobody Does It Better” in the cocktail lounge after house band Sausolito's singer (Catherine Lambert) takes a break from overdramatizing standards like "Scarborough Fair."

"Lost in Translation" epitomizes the cultural clash of East and West, but the May/September romance of the outsiders at its core is clearly spoken and Coppola leaves us with one of the most romantic partings in movie memory.

B+

Robin:
Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a formerly famous movie star who is now relegated to endorsing the Japanese whiskey, Suntori. He is in Japan to make TV commercials and photo shoots for the product and he is suffering from a severe, jet lag-induced case of insomnia. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a young woman tagging along with her photographer husband on assignment in Tokyo. Both Bob and Charlotte spend their sleepless evenings in the hotel’s bar and they eventually cross paths, forming a gentle and kind friendship in “Lost in Translation.”

Sofia Coppola made a critically acclaimed debut with her teen angst film “Virgin Suicides.” For her sophomore effort, which she also wrote, she takes us to Japan and focuses on the two main characters, Bob and Charlotte. Bob, a cynical actor who is on the climb down the mountain of fame, is in the country earning $2 million for the commercial venture but should be, in his own mind, performing in a play somewhere. Instead, he spends all of the time in the hotel, not sleeping and drinking too much. Charlotte thought it would be a good idea to come along with her husband John (Giovanni Rabisi) on his photo assignment but he leaves her, most of the time, alone. Neither the actor nor the left-alone wife is sleeping and both spend their late eves in the bar. Of course, they meet, two lonely ships in the night, and they begin to spend their many waking hours in each other’s company. A warm, often funny friendship blooms.

I was not a fan of “Virgin Suicides” but, with Bill Murray as the lead, I anticipated “Lost in Translation,” at least to see the wonderfully droll comic actor perform – I always believed that his terrific performance in “Rushmore” was one of that year’s most overlooked. Bob Harris is almost a blank cipher as we see him arrive after a long, sleepless flight from the States. An international celebrity, he is greeted by a phalanx of representatives from his sponsor and he is ushered to his room where he, in vain, tries to get some shuteye. Bob shuns the foreign culture before him and moves like an automaton from commercial set to photo shoot and onto a TV show with “the Johnny Carson of Japan.” His only concessions to taking in the foreign culture are to watch Japanese television to shoot a solo round of golf, at dawn, with Mt. Suribachi as the backdrop. Murray’s deadpan, bland acceptance of everything is perfectly suited to the character of Bob Harris.

Charlotte awakens a spark of life in Bob as they use their mutual insomnia as a bond and she gets the grumpy actor to enjoy the foreign culture. Each is experiencing marital problems as Bob carries on his long-distance marriage with his increasingly uncaring wife who tells him, at one point, that his kids are getting used to his being away. Charlotte, on the other hand, feels abandoned by her workaholic photographer husband who leaves her alone for days at a time. These common bonds of loneliness and insomnia draw Bob and Charlotte together and her youthful vigor and wonder wear down his entrenched cynicism. The chemistry between these unlikely friends makes you want to see their relationship to continue when, in the end, they finally part.

Sofia Coppola does a solid job with her minimalist cast and exotic backdrop of Japan. The sweet and chaste romance between the middle-aged actor and the photographer’s young wife has a natural feel and does not strain credibility. That these two very different people would draw together, as lonely strangers in a strange land, is believable. Murray, especially, makes this plausible and Johansson does her share to convince us, too.

The inherent satire of these two fish out of water could have been explored more deftly in an experienced directors hands but Coppola does well enough immersing us into the Japanese culture. Although there is much Japanese spoken – in one scene, during the commercial shoot, the director rambles on in his native language on how he wants Bob to react to the camera with the translator boiling the lengthy instruction down to “be more intense” to the incredulous and tired Harris – there are no subtitles. You, the viewer, are as confused as to what is going on as the exhausted movie star.

“Lost in Translation” is a slighter film than I expected but Bill Murray keeps it entertaining and does a fine job of emoting the exhaustion and frustration of being so far from home and helpless in what seems to be a failing marriage. Scarlett Johansson plays well off of the veteran comedy star and the resulting friendship does not feel false. I give it a B.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/review/movie/0,6115,479937~1~0~lostintranslation,00.html

She calls her exquisite study in emotional and geographical dislocation Lost in Translation. But much of what's astonishing about Sofia Coppola's enthralling new movie is the precision, maturity, and originality with which the confident young writer-director communicates so clearly in a cinematic language all her own, conveying how it feels to find oneself temporarily unmoored from familiar surroundings and relationships. This is a movie about how bewilderingly, profoundly alive a traveler can feel far from home. It's a movie that anchors Coppola (''The Virgin Suicides'') as an original artist. It's also a movie that inspires Bill Murray's greatest work yet. And coming from this devotee of ''Rushmore,'' ''Groundhog Day,'' and ''Caddyshack,'' that's saying a lot.

Mainstream-junk American movie star Bob Harris (Murray) meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the young wife of a hepped-up celebrity photographer (Giovanni Ribisi), in the elaborately luxurious Park Hyatt Hotel in Tokyo. Bob, stuck in a stagnant, long-term marriage back home, is in Japan to make a quick, big paycheck by shooting a Japanese whiskey commercial; Charlotte, depressed in a new marriage to someone she already senses is wrong for her, is left to decorate the hotel room while her groovy climber husband hustles and flirts with fame and girls. (Anna Faris from the ''Scary Movie'' factory nails it as a tin-pot Hollywood starlet in town.) Sleepless in a society of elaborate courtesies and a city of dizzying sensory stimulation, Bob and Charlotte, jetlagged and wired, bump up against each other in hallways and lounges. They make a connection. And, for a while, the middle-aged man unnerved by sadness and the young woman paralyzed by possibility venture out together to explore the lunar exoticism of a visitor's Japan -- temporarily, intimately found, not lost, in each other's company.

Melancholy and longing have rarely looked so attractive -- even desirable -- nor has a movie with opportunities for ''Lolita''-hood been turned into so subtle, wise, and often funny a study of chance encounter. Coppola has an eye for this stuff -- she gets exactly what's crazy-appealing about the cocooned freedom of karaoke bars, or about the ridiculousness of striking movie-star poses to hawk booze. (She's also got a sensibility that attracts simpatico production talent, including the exciting ''Adaptation'' cinematographer Lance Acord, who shoots a photographic love letter to Tokyo.)

Most crucial of all, Coppola had the determination and good taste to pursue Murray until her famously hard-to-pin-down choice for leading man said yes to the role that is, perhaps to his surprise, the most vulnerable and unmannered he has ever felt comfortable enough to be. Murray handles both absurdity and sincerity lightly -- in some scenes he improvises on a hot streak any comedian would kill to ride. But working opposite the embracing, restful serenity of Johansson, Murray reveals something more commanding in his repose than we have ever seen before. Trimmed to a newly muscular, rangy handsomeness and in complete rapport with his character's hard-earned acceptance of life's limitations, Murray turns in a great performance that, once again, gets admirers hoping for an Oscar nomination. Maybe this time, the credit due won't get lost in translation.

nice vino too