losttrans

Sometimes I get the impression that people claim to like certain movies because it makes them feel
more cultured and intelligent than everyone else. “Lost In Translation” is definitely one of those
films.

Sofia Coppola, daughter of overrated filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, apparently went to Japan
for a few weeks and it changed her life, or some stupid pretentious thing like that. Well, anyway,
like so many underexposed celebrities and Hollywood types, she had a creative epiphany and
decided that she had to make a film about Japanese culture so everyone else in America could see
all the fun stuff she learned.

The result shows the extent of her learning. People, this movie is as much about Japanese culture
as “Dances With Wolves” is about Native Americans. In actuality, “Dances With Wolves,” if you
watch closely, is about how a white guy becomes a friend of Native Americans and eventually the
greatest Tonto ever, which is a sickening message. But I digress.

“Lost In Translation” suffers the same problem. It isn’t about Japanese culture. It’s quite literally
about two white Americans hanging out in a Japanese hotel in Tokyo. Think about that for two
seconds, and you quickly realize that vegetating in a high-class hotel is most likely the extent of
Sofia Coppola’s Japanese “experience.” See, if anyone on the planet knows about hiding in hotels,
it’s Hollywood celebrities.

The result is a boring movie that consists of endless shots of empty hotel lobbies and hallways. Bill
Murray is a has-been American celebrity who is staying at the hotel while shooting some Japanese
whiskey commercials, while Scarlett Johansson is the new bride of a guy who’s more interested in
his band than her, and they’re staying at the hotel for some gig he's got lined up.

Anyway, Johansson and Murray keep running into one another and form a kind of stilted
friendship. They spend all their time isolated at the hotel after hours because neither of them can
sleep, or speak Japanese and eventually they start going out on the town. They want to be more
than friends, but can’t. He’s married, she’s married, he sleeps with a visiting lounge singer, she
gets ticked at him for it, they hang out some more…Yeah, sounds really interesting right?

The whole movie feels like a high budget student film. There simply isn’t much here. Murray and Johansson’s performances are fine given what they have to
work with, but the conversations are often run-of-the-mill with pretentious dashes here and there. I do not understand what it was about this movie that
captivated critics. The entire message of the movie is literally an unintelligible whisper, which is a narrative cop out if you ask me.

I adore and appreciate intelligent filmmaking and I love stories about characters more than explosions, so I was excited about this one. Unfortunately, Coppola’s
intentions with this pet project got lost in the translation along with the rest of it. Way overrated.