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Discuss the fabulous movie Lost In Translation!

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LIT mentions on the web

#1 Post by jm » Sat Feb 11, 2006 5:12 pm

""Even though the film does require some patience in the beginning, in no way is it a bore to behold. Several key scenes will surely stay with you for weeks, including the conversation observed through the reflection of the windowpane, the comforting pillow talk, and the perfectly-executed and poignant climax. All of these sequences, along with the overall fantastical and warming aura that the picture emits, combine to create a masterpiece that should be a part of every movie buff's DVD collection."
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/02/06/161719.php

"And while some of the films are dreadful, she has by dint of sheer energy and talent managed to work with an eclectic range of very different great directors. Three years after working for Redford in 1998 she had a crucial role in the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, opposite Frances McDormand and Billy Bob Thornton. Two years after that, she starred in Lost In Translation, the film that won director Sofia Coppola two Oscars and, alongside Girl With the Pearl Earring, turned Johansson into the thinking man's crumpet."
http://tinyurl.com/k42mg"
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#2 Post by jml2 » Sat Feb 18, 2006 7:50 pm

LIT is a study of emerging emotional intimacy between two introverts. That is my summary of its essence.

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#3 Post by jml2 » Sat Feb 18, 2006 7:53 pm

I have Woohoo Guy status, yeaah! :D

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#4 Post by jm » Sat Feb 18, 2006 8:16 pm

"[quote:3f42827a5a="jml2"]LIT is a study of emerging emotional intimacy between two introverts. That is my summary of its essence.[/quote:3f42827a5a]
I like that.

I'm still looking for a list of statuses."
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#5 Post by jm » Sat Feb 18, 2006 9:20 pm

"Lost In Translation

By: Robert J. Layton

The premise of Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation" is simple enough: Bob Harris, played by Bill Murray, is a famous Hollywood actor who is in Japan to shoot promotions for a Japanese whiskey, much to his own shame. Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a young woman in Japan with her busy photographer husband. Both are strangers in a foreign country, are unable to sleep and are unhappy with their lives, and this is what brings them together.

The basic synopsis of the film is just about the only thing that is easily communicated about "Lost In Translation." Furthermore, the plot itself doesn't sound all that intriguing. However, if there is one thing you come away from this review with, it is that you should not pass this movie up. You need to see it. This is truly a film that must be seen to be understood and appreciated.

The performance given by Murray is incredible. When people think of Bill Murray, they often think of his various comedic roles, whether it be from his run on Saturday Night Live, or the classic comedies he's starred in, such as "What About Bob?" and "Groundhog Day." This isn't to say that Bill Murray doesn't deliver some hilarious lines in the film, because he does. But with these lines comes a real depth that only serves to make the jokes funnier. In fact, Murray's performance is so deep that he doesn't have to speak to make you laugh. A simple raise of the eyebrow, a quick smile at the camera, and you're in hysterics. However, outside of "Rushmore," audiences haven't truly been exposed to the range and depth he has in a dramatic role. "Lost In Translation" is about to change all that.

Murray's character Bob Harris is definitely lost, and Murray brings this to life effortlessly. He's in Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial simply for the paycheck, and he's obviously ashamed of it; as he tells Charlotte in the film, he's making a quick buck when he "could be doing a play somewhere" instead. Furthermore, Bob's marriage is on shaky ground. Phone calls to his wife are riddled with passive-aggressive undertones, and Bob is either too tired or too in love to fight back. When Bob is alone, you can see how emotionally tired and worn out he is. However, when Bob is with Charlotte, happiness exudes from him, and you can see new life radiating from him. This is most certainly Bill Murray at his best, and his best is definitely Oscar-worthy.

Scarlett Johansson's portrayal of Charlotte, while not as much of a stand-out as Murray's performance, definitely doesn't fall into its shadow either. Charlotte, like Bob, is feeling lost and she is unsure of what to make of her life. Out of Yale with a degree in philosophy, she feels disconnected from her photographer husband, and is unsure how she feels about her two year long marriage to him. Johansson deftly plays the part of a young girl, outwardly confident and looking for life but not sure where to find it. Previously, Johansson was relatively unknown to those outside the indie film circle, but her performance is going to leave a lasting impression on anybody who sees the film.

It is the relationship that Bob and Charlotte have that is going to leave a mark on viewers, and furthermore, will have them questioning their own thoughts and values. Bob and Charlotte's relationship will mean something different to each individual. Was it romantic? Only friendship? Was it a completely non-sexual love, or was it a love stifled by their own hesitation? The end of the film pushes this even further, as Bob says something to Charlotte that the audience is not permitted to hear. Each viewer draws their own conclusion as to what was said, the true nature of the relationship, and what it meant to each character. What's more, many viewers, such as myself, will relate to the characters, and will question what it would mean to themselves if they were in such a position. Few films truly feel as open-ended as this film does, and that's part of why it's such a wonderful experience.

All rambling and praise aside, you must go see "Lost In Translation." Every section of the movie, from beginning to end, is brilliant and entertaining to watch. It is the best movie so far this year, and it deserves your attention. I've seen it three times already, and have no intention of stopping now.

http://www.jivemagazine.com/review.php?rid=349"
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#6 Post by jm » Sat Feb 18, 2006 9:22 pm

"Lonely Souls in a Strange Land: Lost in Translation Maps the Way

by Andrew Sarris

Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, from her own screenplay, has been universally acclaimed as a triple triumph -- for her two inspired leads, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, and for Ms. Coppola herself. Following her debut effort, The Virgin Suicides (1999), Ms. Coppola has not only conquered the sophomore jinx for auteurs, but has transcended it with a sure-fire Oscar contender. She has also successfully erased the bitter memories of the abuse she suffered as an actress when she uttered the one word -- "Dad?" -- in the violent climax of her father's The Godfather: Part III (1990), just before dying from a bullet meant for Michael Corleone. I've always wondered how Winona Ryder (originally cast for the part) would have delivered that accursed word. Or Vanessa Redgrave -- or, for that matter, the legendary Italian actress Duse herself. At least they would have escaped the calumny that was heaped on poor Sofia by the critics, mostly for being the famed director's daughter. Maybe the problem was with the C-word itself -- we'll never know.

In compensation, Ms. Coppola can now claim credit for the exquisitely nuanced portrayals of her two leads: Mr. Murray as the fading Hollywood action-movie star, Bob Harris, in Tokyo to film a Japanese whiskey commercial; and Ms. Johansson as Charlotte, the young, neglected wife of a shallow, narcissistic celebrity photographer, distractedly played by Giovanni Ribisi.

Mr. Murray's seemingly effortless projection of inner turmoil comes as no surprise to me after his remarkably undervalued performances in Tootsie (1982) and Groundhog Day (1993). I try to schedule Tootsie every year for my students at Columbia -- it's a great example of a comedy that works without trying too hard -- and when I do, Mr. Murray gets the biggest laughs with the fewest lines. In Groundhog Day, another deeply funny American comedy of recent decades, Mr. Murray's character displays an uncommonly anachronistic courtliness and vulnerability in his love for a woman.

Mr. Murray brings some of that same reticence to his character in Lost in Translation. The result is that rarity of rarities, a grown-up romance based on the deliberate repression of sexual gratification -- as if the old Production Code were still in force. It's worth noting that at a time when independent films are exploding with erotic images edging ever closer to outright pornography, Ms. Coppola and her colleagues have replaced sexual facility with emotional longing, without being too coy or self-congratulatory in the process.

One of the stylistic coups of the film is its long, fruitful silences. The characters' feelings are given room to develop, and hence are free from the need to exchange meaningless snappy dialogue of the makeout variety. Charlotte visits a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, but she never becomes immersed in Japanese civilization: She's simply trying to ease the effects of her loneliness and ongoing insomnia. Bob is similarly afflicted by an uneasy restlessness, though his presence in a strange land with a strange language is superficially more purposive than Charlotte. (After graduating with a philosophy degree from Yale, she's tagging along with her workaholic husband, not knowing what to do next -- except maybe writing.) When he's getting to know her, Bob jests only semi-facetiously that there are big bucks in philosophy, but that she should stick to writing.

Of course, Mr. Murray gets all the laughs with his exquisite timing and wry delivery, but Ms. Johansson makes an eloquent and charismatic listener; it's in her alert and intelligent responses to Bob's malaise that his passions toward her are ignited. In one scene, Bob carries her to bed, less Rhett clutching Scarlett than a father putting a beloved daughter to bed. Some reviewers have assumed that Bob's wife back home must be an aggravating shrew whom he longs to escape, mainly on the basis of some maddeningly trivial long-distance calls. But Bob waxes eloquent with Charlotte about his children, and both intuitively understand they have no future together, other than their moments in this dream-like "other place."

If you see Lost in Translation based on the critical hyperbole it's received, you may be surprised at how leisurely and low- key it seems. But its apparent lethargy is deceptive, and by the end of the movie, the accumulated emotions tower over Tokyo's skyline as a majestic metaphor.

http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/story.asp?ID=7942"
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#7 Post by jm » Sat Feb 18, 2006 9:23 pm

"Lost in Translation In 'Lost,' dislocated, lonely lives merge in a lovely limbo

By Ty Burr, Boston Globe, 09/12/2003

The paradox of modern business travel is that it can make you feel brutally anonymous while scraping you down to your truest self. The airport lobbies and hotel bars, the rooms pregnant with waiting: They replace the details of our regular lives with uniform dislocation. This is limbo, or what the Buddhists call bardo, and it can be a terrifying form of grace.

Sofia Coppola's lovely, lapidary "Lost in Translation" is about this stateless state of being, and about two lost souls who find themselves waltzing together in the void. It's not a love story, or, at any rate, the sort we expect from movies. It's something deeper and simpler, and it allows Scarlett Johansson to arrive as an actress at the same time it finally gives Bill Murray the great role that has always eluded him.

Murray plays Bob Harris, a Hollywood megastar whose prime is a decade or so behind him. He's in Japan to shoot a television ad for Suntory scotch, a project that will enrich his bank account with little effort on his part and no damage to his career back home. What Bob isn't prepared for is the sensory assault that is 21st century Tokyo and the plain fact that he can't sleep.

Neither can Charlotte (Johansson), the young, intelligent, barely formed wife of an antic rock 'n' roll photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) in town on assignment. Since her husband is forever running off to a shoot or gossiping with a bubbleheaded movie star (Anna Faris of "Scary Movie," turning in a lethal dissection of a specific Hollywood type), Charlotte finds herself wandering into flower- arranging classes, taking long midday naps, and spontaneously weeping. She's vestigial and she knows it.

Bob's only human contact, meanwhile, comes in the form of a double-talking Japanese director (sample instruction: "I need mysterious face") and FedExed carpet samples from his wife in LA. He catches Charlotte's attention one night in the hotel: The two share a raised eyebrow over the terrible things the lounge singer is doing to "Scarborough Fair," and soon they've formed a mutual support group and are scampering around Tokyo in an exhausted, elated daze that gathers profundity as it goes. The movie shares with Richard Linklater's 1995 "Before Sunrise" a sense of the way a man and a woman can feel as if they're the only two people on the planet.

"Lost in Translation" is longer on atmosphere and observation than on story, but you don't mind: Coppola maintains her quietly charged tone with a certainty that would be unbelievable in a second film if you didn't suspect genetics had a hand. Her eye for detail is precise and often extremely funny, taking in the sight gag of Murray wrestling with a Tokyo hotel showerhead or marveling at the potted surrealism that is Japanese TV. At the same time, Coppola's knack for putting just the right French retro-rock tune on the soundtrack or casually framing a shot that you'd want to hang on your wall is the mark of a complete director. There's been a lot of hype lately about Francis's baby girl. On the basis of this movie, it's earned.

What may be most remarkable is the way Coppola and her actors sidestep the whole older man/younger woman thing in favor of a punchy, tender humanism. Bob and Charlotte need to be different ages -- she hasn't yet begun her life while he's on the other side of the curve -- but sex never really gets put on the table, even if you sometimes see Bob's eyes droop with longing. Neither of them wants to wreck the mood. They're also just too tired. Maybe if "Lost in Translation" had been directed by a man, these two would have found some way to get busy. Maybe not. Certainly only a woman director would allow Johansson, with her real-girl body and sardonic eyes, to bloom with such compassion. The actress is also starring this fall in the film adaptation of the bestseller "Girl With a Pearl Earring," and she's as reserved and intense there as she's emotionally sprawling here. There really isn't anyone else like her in movies at the moment.

This is Murray's homecoming, though. There have been hints before, in "Groundhog Day" and "Rushmore," of the melancholy that lies behind his lazy mockery, but "Translation" marks the first time he has explored it. It's a performance of high comedy -- Murray can't not make you laugh -- but one that's rooted in Bob's panicky regret over everything that has slipped through his fingers.

At one point, he and Charlotte find themselves singing karaoke with a group of Japanese party kids, and after they've wobbled through "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" (him) and "Brass in Pocket" (her), Bob lays into the old Roxy Music chestnut "More Than This." It's below Murray's natural register: He sings it softly and, you realize with a jolt, seriously. "More than this," croons the master ironist in his most naked moment on film, "there is nothing."

"Lost in Translation" gets more out of nothing than most movies even try.

http://www.boston.com/movies/display?di ... ie&id=2795"
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#8 Post by jm » Mon Feb 20, 2006 8:15 pm

""Interview/Sofia Coppola" from the September 05, 2003 edition

Strangers in the night -- but without the clichés

By Liza Bear | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

NEW YORK -- On a Sunday in a mid- Manhattan hotel, reporters squeeze elbow to elbow around a large table that fills a windowless room.

Almost imperceptibly, director Sofia Coppola slips into the only empty chair. As she fields questions, her voice trails off at the ends of sentences as if preoccupied -- yet she's highly attentive. When one of the recording devices clicks off, she thoughtfully pauses so that its owner can flip the tape.

She may seem like the most low-key of directors, but Coppola has been able to do what director Terry Zwigoff couldn't: get comedian Bill Murray to act in her new film. "Lost in Translation," which has been entered at the Venice, Toronto, and Telluride film festivals and debuts next Friday, is a delicate, moody romantic comedy set in Tokyo.

"I wrote the movie with Bill Murray in mind," says Coppola, who is the daughter of director Francis Ford Coppola. "He's a great improviser and added a lot to the role. He approaches everything with 'how can we make this more fun?' "

The impetus for "Lost in Translation," came primarily from Coppola's strong visual impressions of Tokyo and her experiences working there in the '90s as a fashion designer and photographer.

In 1994, she launched her teen fashion line, Milk Fed, which was marketed in Daikanyama, Tokyo's hip neighborhood, as California Cool with a pink-and-cream logo. She later did photo shoots there for a Japanese fashion magazine and met Fumihiro Hayashi, a man nicknamed "Charlie Brown" who introduced her to the city. She cast him as Charlotte's friend Charlie in "Translation."

The simple story, about a chance meeting of two lost souls who strike up a friendship, is set in Tokyo's fortress-like Park Hyatt Hotel. There are echoes of Jacques Tati's classic "Playtime" in the contrast between the hotel's ultramodern architecture, which isolates human beings, and the exaggerated, almost anthropomorphic quality of devices like loud faxes piercing the silence.

Murray plays a cranky, washed-up TV actor, Bob Harris, who's there ostensibly to shoot a very well-paid Suntory whiskey commercial. His height and casual deadpan manner make him stand out even in Tokyo's most frenzied situations, as does the contrast between his insouciance and Japanese formality -- generating much humor.

His potential soulmate is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), married for two years to a workaholic photographer. Charlotte combines the dreaminess of a philosophy major with the social assurance (and superciliousness) of a recent Yale graduate.

"What I love about Tokyo is this weird mix of Western influences," says Coppola. "Like suddenly finding a New York bar with a jazz singer singing 'Scarborough Fair' on the 10th floor of a Japanese office building."

Recent Suntory commercials have starred Sean Connery, but Coppola says that the idea for that scene came from a Suntory commercial her father did with Japanese maestro director Akira Kurosawa in the '70s. "They were both on camera," she says. "It was at a point in Kurosawa's career when he didn't have any money."

Unlike her successful 1999 debut feature, "Virgin Suicides," which she adapted from a Jeffrey Eugenides novel, Coppola wrote the original 75-page screenplay of "Translation" herself. "It was scarier, because you don't have anything to fall back on like the novel," Coppola says. "But I knew the material so well I didn't have to learn a lot about the environment."

For the mood and pacing of the film, Coppola says she was affected by Italian films such as Antonioni's "L'Avventura" and Fellini's "la Dolce Vita," which her characters watch on TV with Japanese subtitles in a hotel room. This is the only dialogue in "Translation" that's subtitled, leaving non-Japanese audience members to share the characters' linguistic and cultural estrangement.

"I don't speak any Japanese," Coppola says. "It's really difficult [to learn]. I was in the Park Hyatt during a promotion for 'Virgin Suicides,' doing interviews with a translator. I would answer in a brief sentence, but her translation would take five minutes."

In the film, Bob gets dragged into an increasingly surreal media circus of photo shoots and TV shows. An insomniac, he spends his few off hours at the hotel bar or having desultory, disjointed long-distance phone conversations with his wife about practical matters such as choosing the rug for his study.

With a shooting schedule of only 27 days, Coppola says the most challenging aspect of making the film was physical. "The hardest part ... was running around shooting all night and then shooting day scenes in the morning," she says.

Unlike most films, the scenes were shot in chronological order, so the actors would get to know each other as their characters did. "Scarlett and Bill had just met a few days before shooting -- I was hoping they'd hit it off," Coppola says.

Bob and Charlotte do noticeably warm to each other, but the film never loses its sense of humor or propriety. (The 50-plus actor gives the 20-plus philosopher a stuffed owl as a present.)

"They go their separate ways and are affected by each other, but they're going to go on with their lives," Coppola says. "The whole idea was that you can have a valuable exchange with someone who doesn't have to become a part of your life. It may be that right now there's a place in the romantic canon for restraint."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0905/p15s ... LeisureNav"
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#9 Post by jm » Mon Feb 20, 2006 8:15 pm

"TOKYO MIRACLE Sofia Coppola Breaks Your Heart

by Bradley Steinbacher

Lost in Translation is a tiny movie, as light as helium and draped upon the thinnest of plots. There is very little conflict, and even fewer twists and turns. It is as close to a miracle as you're likely to get this year.

The film opens en route to Tokyo. Inside a limousine sits Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an actor on the downslope of his career. Exhausted and disheveled, Bob gazes absently out the window, watching as Tokyo's strange neon decadence blurs past. His expression is cold and cynical, and as he passes a massive billboard tattooed with his own brooding mug, his cynicism only swells; he is a man who obviously hates himself in the mirror, let alone towering over an intersection.

Bob has been lured to Japan for the tidy sum of $2 million. His sponsor: Suntory pure malt whiskey (43% alc./vol.), which is grossly overpaying him for a brief appearance in a commercial. His trip is scheduled to last a week, and Suntory has placed him in the Park Hyatt, one of the city's swankiest hotels. Gigantic and gorgeous, the Park Hyatt is a bit of an aberration in Tokyo, offering ample space and comfort in one of the most cramped and crowded cities in the world. Such extravagance is intended as a testimony to the hotel's poshness, but to Bob it produces an unintended feeling of isolation; in a city where 13 million people -- most of whom do not speak sturdy English -- occupy 844 square miles, Bob finds himself confused and painfully lonely.

It is a loneliness shared by Charlotte, a young, smart woman in Tokyo with her photographer husband. That Charlotte is played by Scarlett Johansson means that the audience is sure to fall in love with her; stunning to look at, yet unconventional in her looks, Johansson -- best known, perhaps, as Rebecca in Ghost World -- is the perfect choice for the role, for every time her eyes slump in sadness your heart plummets. And Charlotte, as it turns out, has much to be sad about, for her husband (Giovanni Ribisi) barely gives her any notice, merely peppering her with "I love you"s on his way out the door to his assignments -- "I love you"s that loudly ring hollow in their large hotel room.

And so it is that Bob and Charlotte eventually find one another out of mutual isolation. And so it also is that while watching Lost in Translation one naturally becomes wary that Sofia Coppola, who also wrote the picture, has unwisely decided to explore a May/December romance. But Coppola smartly has other interests in mind, as Bob and Charlotte flirt, to be sure, but their flirting is built upon an easy camaraderie rather than repressed sexual needs. Suffering from insomnia, saddled with very little to do in a strange city, the two bond like soldiers facing similarly uncomfortable circumstances, and the easy conversation that bounces back and forth between the two helps to inoculate them from both their confusing surroundings and their confusing lives. When together, their failing marriages and general lack of solid direction in life are hidden from view, and all that's left is their natural personalities -- personalities that fit snuggly together.

In less delicate hands, Lost in Translation could easily have been a dull, pretentious disaster, but Coppola (whose Virgin Suicides was a well-made but oddly distant first effort) has two cards tucked up her sleeves. One is the city of Tokyo itself, which has never looked so mysterious and engaging in an American film, and the other is Bill Murray, the bulk of whose part comes across as having been improvised. Why someone has not thought of dropping Murray among the citizens of a strange foreign city before remains a mystery, but without him -- and despite the fine work of Coppola and Johansson -- Lost in Translation would surely fail. At first glance, the casting of Murray, who has never been known for a handsome face, may seem an odd one for the part of a hugely famous actor prostituting himself in Japan (and nearly bedding a beautiful young woman in the process), but while watching Lost in Translation you quickly realize that only he could make it work. The way in which he carries himself in the picture, near always cracking wise, but quite obviously wounded beneath his rumpled frame, is both wonderful and depressing to witness, and it is a performance hard to imagine any other actor being able to muster. It is the performance of Murray's career, and it may, in fact, be the performance of the year.

Simple, sad, and beautiful, Lost in Translation is one of those rare films that affects you not just as you're watching it, but long after you've left the theater as well. It is an exceptionally romantic film without any real romantic gestures, and this, in the end, may be Coppola's best trick; neatly sidestepping our expectations, she winds up making us long for that which we had previously dreaded. At first we scoff at the thought of Bob and Charlotte becoming entangled, but by the end of the film it is all we wish to see. We want a love story, but Coppola gives us a beautiful heartbreak instead.

http://www.thestranger.com/2003-09-11/film.html"
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#10 Post by jm » Mon Feb 20, 2006 8:16 pm

"A tender, sincere Bill Murray In Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation," he finds his role of a lifetime.

BY CARRIE RICKEY, Inquirer Movie Critic

Sleepless in Shinjuku, Tokyo's swarming business district, two jet-lagged Americans first cross paths, then circuits and, finally, their hearts, in Sofia Coppola's dreamy Lost in Translation.

This year's must-see film stars an improbably tender Bill Murray as Bob Harris, a 50ish actor in Japan to endorse Suntory whiskey. In this role of a lifetime Murray strips himself of his habitual helmet and armor of irony. See Bob, unaccustomed to the lightness of being.

Away from his customary routine Bob considers that, yes, armor might protect him from attack, but it also makes him impervious to feelings, even the good ones.

Disarmed, he is suddenly vulnerable to the prickly charms of Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), like Bob an American visitor battling dislocation, existential panic, sleep deprivation and spousal indifference. Despite a 25-year age gap, sarcastic Charlotte is drawn to the droll actor she runs into everywhere in the swanky Park Hyatt, an oasis amid the din of Tokyo's entertainment district.

It's fitting that the man experiencing midlife crisis and the woman experiencing quarter-life crisis help guide each other through this rough patch.

For Charlotte, an Ivy League overachiever paralyzed by the realization that she has accomplished very little, Bob supplies firm encouragement. To Bob, Charlotte provides an infusion of youthful energy and curiosity.

Theirs is a gallant flirtation tinged with laughter and melancholy. Much as they delight in each other's company, the shadows on this sunny sojourn are cast by far-off spouses with whom they cannot connect. Bob knows something about marriage that comparative newlywed Charlotte does not. He knows, as novelist Vicki Baum dryly observed of wedlock, that "[It] demands the finest arts of insincerity possible between two human beings."

The brilliance of Murray's acting, which draws on his patented persona of halfhearted hypocrite, is Bob's rediscovery of sincerity. Murray struck this chord first in Groundhog Day and again in Rushmore. But his sincerity bear hug is ineffably moving.

Coppola's keenly observed film is many things at once: a quasi-romantic comedy, a lyrical travelogue, and a meditation upon how the modern devices meant to connect us - - faxes, cell phones, snapshots -- distance us instead.

Initially it seems that Coppola's panoramic shots of Tokyo (seen through picture windows of luxury hotel rooms) belong to the travelogue and the loving close-ups of her stars belong to the chaste romance.

Soon background and foreground merge with an effortless charm. Seen through their windows, Tokyo is a widescreen movie -- a neon hallucination, spectacular but impenetrable.

But when Bob and Charlotte venture out to experience the city, separately and together, they begin to penetrate the culture. It's so different in the protocols of urban planning, of social deference and gift-giving. But it's so much the same in its arcades (Pachinko instead of video) and its club scene, which speak the Esperanto of global youth culture.

The one awkwardness in this supremely graceful film involves condescending jokes about why, in their attempts to speak English, the Japanese mix up their l's and r's. At least in this film the Japanese try to speak English, where the reverse is not true.

More representative of the movie's tone is a sequence in which Charlotte, wandering through the hotel meeting rooms, exits a shrill news conference for an American action movie and enters a room where women serenely practice the art of ikebana, traditional flower arranging. Coppola makes the contrast between the hyperbole of American commercialism and the harmony of Japanese art as lyrical as a haiku.

Coppola, 32, is a year younger than her father was when he released The Godfather. Although Translation is only her second feature, she already shows signs of being a sensei, as the Japanese call a master.

>> Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/ ... 946252.htm"
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#11 Post by jm » Thu Feb 23, 2006 3:41 am

"INTERVIEW: Scarlett Johnasson of "Lost in Translation"

By Sean Chavel (Cinema Confidential, September 8, 2003)

"Lost in Translation" is a thinking person's movie about a delicate, strongly personal friendship about two fish out of waters lost in the unfamiliar culture of Tokyo. Scarlett Johansson, in one of the year's most intriguing performances, plays an educated Yale graduate who has not found her niche in the world. Her character is married to a brash young photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) who has brought her along on a business trip in Tokyo. Johansson meets a fading movie star played by Bill Murray, generating an unusual and intimate friendship between them. Despite their wide age gap, they both share something in common: They both feel alone in the world. Johansson discussed her film in Los Angeles recently at a press conference table.

>> How did you get involved with this movie?

Um, well, I heard through the grapevine that Sofia was hankering for a meeting. I had met her before and kinda knew each other. We met in New York for lunch and she said, 'I had this idea to make this film with you and Bill Murray in Tokyo. I know this sounds really bizarre…' I don't even remember what she said exactly about the film.

>> You were just surprised to hear Bill Murray -

Yeah, I was like, 'What?!' I was just thinking, 'Me and Bill Murray?' Where did this come from? I wondered if it was a vision that had mysteriously come to Sofia one night.

>> What came next?

A couple of months later, Sofia sent me a rough draft that was seventy-something pages. I thought, 'Wow, this is absolutely just totally satisfying in every way.' There was nothing bizarre about it, or uncomfortable about. It was a film that ready to be shot. We courted Bill and then we made the movie.

>> Do you have any experiences in your life that you could relate to?

One of the great things about the film is that everybody can relate to it, relate to some period of their life with someone where they have that weird feeling that everybody you associate with is unfamiliar.

>> But like your character, have you ever met somebody where there was some magic that existed between you two but couldn't ultimately continue with that relationship enduringly?

I mean, I've had connections with people that we've never consummated before. But it's never been a situation as similar in this film. I wonder a lot about the sexual aspect of the relationship between the two characters. To me it seems kind of silly, but it's not a huge [component]. Sure, they're attracted to each other but it's not like my character sees his character and, 'Whoa, the sparks!'

>> It's realistic?

Yes, it is realistic. It's not like it's a physical thing.

>> But it could have a chance to be a physical thing?

But, it's just not right. My character is in love with her husband [played by Giovanni Ribisi]. It shows that they are in love with each and do have a future together.

>> Maybe part of the interest is that as an audience we're not used to seeing these type of relationships together on film where most of the time we're expecting for them to "get together."

Yes, it's definitely a [film] that's original all its own.

>> What do you look for in a friendship?

I really don't look for friendships. They just sort of fall onto you, wouldn't you say. If I'm friends with somebody it's because we enjoy each others company. We trust each other. There are overused but applicable words: Loyalty, Trust, Open, and Friendly.

>> How do you spend time with friends?

Hmm, I don't know, we do all different sorts of things. I have different friends that I do different things with. Sometimes we travel, sometimes we watch movies, sometimes we play games… Or we just sit and have lunch. Which tends to be my favorite thing to do. There's nothing better than just sitting around, having food and chat.

>> What was unusual about Tokyo?

Yeah, it's foreign. The language, the strangely westernized pop culture, the clothes…

>> They have great clothes, right?

Summer shopping season there every season! I've never seen so much consumption my entire life… I definitely bought another suitcase while I was there before I returned home.

>> Did you spend a lot of time shopping with Bill Murray off the set?

We were so busy shooting there wasn't time for that. We shot for six days a week for four weeks.

>> What is your favorite Bill Murray movie?

"Groundhog's Day" is one of my favorite movies of all time. People are surprised by Bill's performance in this movie. Bill isn't seen as a serious character actor, but in that movie there is something sad about him.

>> Why do you think Bill Murray is underrated as a dramatic actor?

I think a lot of comedians are overlooked as dramatic actors. Jim Carrey is, I think, has the potential to be amazing as a dramatic actor. I saw him in Man on the Moon and I think he's great. Being a comedian is such a 'Make me laugh' [stigma] on their personas, audiences want this instant gratification of showy humor. I guess it's a similar reason people watch soap operas, they want this instant gratification of artificial emotion. People don't want to wait… A lot of comedians though are underused as dramatic actors.

>> What are some of the specific cultural norms about Tokyo?

Tokyo is really a character in its own right. I'll give you this story. In America, if you're making a movie the whole world stops for you. In Tokyo, we will be shooting in a restaurant and at four o'clock, we were in the middle of doing coverage, and somebody had turned all the lights off because we had gone over our time. Sofia had to write a formal apology to the owner of the restaurant because she had disrespected them. The film crew was not seen as special.

"Lost in Translation" opens in limited release this Friday.

http://www.scarlettjohansson.org/litcon.html"
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#12 Post by jm » Thu Feb 23, 2006 3:42 am

"Film Studies: She has her father's eyes... the rise of Ms Coppola

By David Thomson, Independent, 21 September 2003

The first time I ever saw Sofia Coppola was in 1982 -- so she was 10 or 11, and very fierce. She had to be. Her father's film, One From The Heart, had just opened, disastrously. He had been compelled to sell his Los Angeles studio. And on the day I visited him at his house in Rutherford, in the Napa Valley, Sofia was very busy doing her own drawings -- voodoo images, almost -- to post on the driveway to warn off bailiffs who might be coming to take the furniture.

No one could say she was sheltered from her father's life -- but that was no guarantee that she would take to it. She had been on so many shoots: she is the baby baptised at the end of The Godfather; she played on the Philippine locations of Apocalypse Now, hardly aware of what kinds of breakdown were affecting her father; she was a kid actress in Rumble Fish; her brother, Gio, was killed in an accident during the making of Gardens of Stone; and, when Winona Ryder was too exhausted to play Michael Corleone's daughter in The Godfather Part III (1990), she was pushed forward by her father to fill the part. The critics were not kind: she seemed gauche in a demanding and operatic role. But there were larger things wrong with that picture, and maybe her father guessed that she was strong enough to withstand the barrage. That trust is paying off.

In 2000, Sofia Coppola wrote and directed a first film, The Virgin Suicides, from the Jeffrey Eugenides novel. It seemed to me a moderate success, but no more, and it was possible to surmise that she had too much pretension and too little real skill from that picture. But now with her second movie, Lost in Translation, those doubts begin to fall away. This has the assurance to be a very small, gentle film, the off-hand account of two odd people who pass, and bump, in the night but who agree to move on on the assumption that not much has happened.

The setting is Tokyo, or to be precise, a luxury hotel. Two of the guests are Scarlett Johansson (playing the idle, bored, incipiently unhappy wife of a hip fashion photographer) and Bill Murray (cast with lovely irony as a Bogart-like Hollywood star who is getting $2m to film some inane commercials for a Japanese whisky). They meet because they can't sleep. They become friendly. They part. That's it. But they feel a little better about life.

I know, it doesn't sound sensational -- and it's not trying to be. On the other hand, it explores a lovely awed bewilderment with Japan that is half jet-lagged and half surreal. It slips effortlessly into the shyness of two lonely people who are simply too real to settle for some melodramatic affair.

And it performs the subtle conjuring trick of having Johansson (as a near non-entity) seem increasingly star-like, while Bill Murray (pretending to be a star) delivers one of his most tender observations of chronic eccentricity. It was done for $4m in 27 days; and it feels as if it might have been done while waiting for room service to deliver. It has enormous cool charm.

How much more is there to come? Who can say? It's plain that Sofia Coppola gets young, dreamy women on the edge of alienation. I can easily see her doing more notebook-like sketches about such characters, as appealing as this. But can she summon the will or the need to take such a character and make her like... well, like a Corleone? Does she need to? Her father, for good and ill, always made very grand pictures. He often talked about doing a small movie, but he could never tame his own energy enough to seem casual. Sofia grew up in that storminess, and may have learned a lot about being cool.

It's not just welcome, but part of a new trend in American movie-making, a way in which some directors work with the bemused air of novelists. At that point, of course, one needs to observe that Sofia Coppola is married to Spike Jonze (the director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.), she is a good friend to Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), she has always been the cousin of Nic Cage, and she is chums with Zoe Cassavetes, the daughter of John and Gena Rowlands. It sounds like family business, yet it's different. Francis Coppola made family his subject and his way of working. But Sofia Coppola seems capable of noting it as just a pattern -- one among many -- in the vagaries of life.

It makes you realise that some fierce kids may be nurturing an impressive calm within.

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film ... ory=445999"
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#13 Post by jm » Thu Feb 23, 2006 3:42 am

""Lost in Translation"

Sofia Coppola's stealthy romance about two Americans stranded in Tokyo is a work of marvelous delicacy -- and offers the performance of Bill Murray's career.

By Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com, Sept. 12, 2003

Sofia Coppola's magnificent and delicate "Lost in Translation" is a love story but not a romance, a picture that fits into no identifiable genre because there's no category fluid enough to properly cradle it. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, a Hollywood action-movie star who's been flown to Tokyo to make a whiskey commercial, giving him a respite from his kid and his wife of 25 years, with whom he's settled into either a wobbly holding pattern or a businesslike truce that prevents them from killing each other -- it's hard to say which. Scarlett Johansson is a quiet, bookish young woman named Charlotte, who has come to the same city with her hotshot photographer husband (played by Giovanni Ribisi). She clearly cares for him, and yet the two float in parallel spaces that never intersect. They're like strangers who wake up in a rumpled bed together only to realize they've been married for two years.

Charlotte and Bob meet in the bar of the Tokyo Park Hyatt. The two of them have drifted there after spending sleepless hours' worth of channel clicking in their respective rooms, like zombies who can no longer bear the boredom of being undead and need to at least go through the motions of feeling alive.

And after that meeting, everything and nothing happens in "Lost in Translation": The picture's muted intensity isn't just a vague mood -- it's a subtle but very specific type of narrative drive. Coppola (who also wrote the screenplay) is a stealth dramatist: Instead of unfolding in precise pleats, her movies unfurl like bolts of silk. There are no handy place markers between scenes to help us tick off how many minutes are likely to pass between this or that point of conflict and the denouement. Revelations don't click into position; they swoop down, seemingly from nowhere, and settle in quietly, like a bird coming to roost.

To some people, this is a maddeningly diffuse type of filmmaking, but I'd argue that Coppola's precision is simply the sort that's measured in sine waves, not milliseconds. "Lost in Translation" is Coppola's second movie, and it marks her as one of our most gifted filmmakers (of either gender). Her first picture, the elegiac and gorgeously made "The Virgin Suicides," was cautiously praised by some critics, but I remember encountering, in conversation at least, plenty of people who took glee in cutting it down, basing their arguments not on the specifics of the movie itself but on their convenient perception that Coppola was able to make movies only because she has a famous dad, Francis Ford Coppola. Or, more preposterous yet, many refused to acknowledge that she could be a good filmmaker since she had given such a bad performance in "Godfather III."

Strangely enough, or perhaps not so, no one has accused Sofia's husband, Spike Jonze (the director of "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation"), of riding on the Coppola coattails, even though, as Lynn Hirschberg pointed out in a recent New York Times Magazine profile of Sofia, Jonze's movies have also benefited from the Coppola family support network. Jonze is not without talent: He's an occasionally entertaining filmmaker. But it's frustrating that he's received so many more accolades than his wife, who is well on her way to becoming a great one.

"Lost in Translation" is a movie about dislocation and the blessed salve of connection. Both Bob and Charlotte are strangers in a strange land, the strange land not being Japan, but their own skins. The very surface of "Lost in Translation" -- it was shot, beautifully, by relative newcomer Lance Acord -- seems alive with nerve endings, from the lonely waltzing molecules of the hotel bar to Tokyo's blaze of blinking neon, which seems both welcoming and reserved. (New Yorkers will probably be struck by how much parts of Tokyo resemble Times Square; it's as if New York has a mirror complement on the other side of the world.) A strong sense of place is a necessity in a movie about dislocation: The city knows for sure who it is; it's the people moving through it who are riddled with doubt and uncertainty.

Bob is undergoing something of a midlife crisis, but it's not the usual kind, perhaps because in Coppola's view, there's no usual anything when it comes to human emotion. He's obviously frustrated with his marriage, but you get the sense he's bound to his wife by some sort of dutiful calcification, if not love. (She never appears; she's merely a surly, disembodied voice on the phone, ringing Bob at all hours to demand a decision on what type of carpet he'd like for his study at home.) Charlotte, who is in her early 20s and who has been married only two years, is far too young to have a midlife crisis. She's youthful and radiant and possessed of a very fine-grained intelligence that announces itself in whispers. But it's as if her heart has aged too fast inside her. Bob first spots her in an elevator, nodding a courteous but bland "hello" to the only other American in that tiny space. Later, they recollect that first encounter. "Did I scowl at you?" Charlotte asks, as if she believes the aura of her inexplicable unhappiness is the first thing anyone would notice about her.

The closest I can come to dissecting the mechanics of Coppola's talent (since you can't dissect alchemy anyway) is this: She frames a movie around her actors instead of around her own vision. Coppola has said that she wouldn't have made the movie if she hadn't been able to get Murray, for whom she wrote the role. He was reportedly reluctant to take it at first, but, thankfully, he did.

Murray has always been an actor of almost subterranean sensitivity (in pictures like "Scrooged," Michael Almereyda's "Hamlet" and "Rushmore"). But this is his finest performance. Murray is often funny here -- his lines loop around us, their unwitting victims, like licorice whips. But he also shows us a range of feelings that we immediately recognize, among them lovesickness, bewilderment, self-deprecating resignation -- such feelings are, after all, universal. But Murray makes them feel new and raw, as if he has locked onto the most universal and most painful truth of all: that even as our bodies age, we're all teenagers inside, susceptible to intensity of emotion and heartbreak that we all think we left behind long ago.

Murray's Bob Harris is a huge star, and the Japanese in particular adore him, relishing even his deadpan surliness. The photographer who's shooting the whiskey ad instructs him, in clear but impressionistic English, that he's looking for sort of a "Rat Pack" mood, only of course (since Coppola delights in all cultural differences, not just those readily deemed politically correct) it comes out "Lat Pack." Bob, bemused, adjusts himself in his chair accordingly: "Joey Bishop, would you like?" he asks, knowing that the joke will sail over the photographer's head, but unable to resist making it anyway.

Early on, he threatens to explode the picture, and I'm talking physically: Coppola and Acord move the camera in so close to Murray that he almost bursts out of the frame, an ungainly Godzilla plopped down in the middle of a petite, orderly country. Then Coppola shows him in an elevator, a very tall man towering above the bobbing heads of a mini-sea of Asians. It's a stunning visual joke: Both literally and figuratively, Bob Harris is big in Japan.

Charlotte is sized much more to scale. When she sets out from the hotel in her boyish, preppy, no-nonsense clothes, she's like a schoolgirl on holiday; even with her resolutely American features, she hardly looks out of place. And yet Johansson shows us the nameless discontent that's like a rumble of thunder inside Charlotte. Despite the difference in their ages, their circumstances, their everything, Charlotte and Bob connect instantly -- it's as if something deep inside each of them is reaching out, with instinctive recognition and relief, for its counterpart in the other.

They spar and flirt with each other: Charlotte has some friends who live in the city, and she invites Bob to tag along on an outing. They end up, drunk and boisterous, taking turns at karaoke. Charlotte, having donned a pink Louise Brooks wig, chooses the Pretenders' "Brass in Pocket," and mimes it, purely for Bob's benefit, and with mock seductiveness that's a transparent mask for the real thing. Bob responds with Roxy Music's "More Than This," a song of Byronically lush romanticism. Murray, as we all know, can't sing -- the song comes out in a cracked warble. But he pulls it from somewhere deep inside him, a place where every note is steady and true and right on the money.

Charlotte and Bob fall together and pull away; their tentative movements connect smoothly to form the rhythm of the movie, and it's like the rocking of waves. One sleepless night, they lie awake on the same bed, chastely, fully clothed, talking. Charlotte's husband has gone off for a few days to shoot a rock band in a nearby city. They talk of things that are simultaneously ordinary and gargantuan: Marriage, children, making a living. Bob lies on his back, his body a straight line; Charlotte lies alongside, curled up and facing him, her toes just touching his leg, as if that one small connection point meant everything.

It's a visual hint of the picture's quiet but devastating conclusion -- a moment between characters that's so private, we're not even allowed inside it. But we can see their faces, which tell us all we need to know. In that instant, Coppola and her actors redefine the meaning of the word "lover" -- a lover, we realize, is anyone who loves. The connection between Bob and Charlotte, as Coppola shows it to us at the end of "Lost in Translation," is a moment of intimate magnificence. I have never seen anything quite like it, in any movie.

Many critics and faithful filmgoers often mourn that now long-lost golden age of moviemaking, the '70s, when young directors like Robert Altman, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola, were stretching the boundaries of what mainstream movies could be. Those days are over. It's not that terrific movies aren't still being made; it's simply that it takes more digging to find them, and no corner can ever be overlooked. Good movies are scattered here and there. There's no wave of bright young filmmakers, working independently and yet unwittingly in tandem, to forge a body of astonishing pictures that will go down in history.

But there's hope in Sofia Coppola. Her movies may not be exactly mainstream (at least not in today's terms), but they're certainly accessible -- there's art to them, but no artiness. And, even more important, no artifice.

If there were more young filmmakers like Coppola, we'd have a movement. As it is, though, we just have a director whose career will be a thrill and a pleasure to watch, and that in itself is no small thing. "Lost in Translation" is such an intimate movie that it feels strange to call it great; physically speaking, its scale is as epic as the human heart is small.

But then, what is an epic but a map of the unmappable? Sofia Coppola works on a seemingly small surface, and yet the emotional landscapes she surveys are as expansive as the ocean. She's not just the progeny of a great filmmaker, but the heir to a tradition. She's our own mini '70s revolution.

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/ ... print.html"
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#14 Post by jm » Thu Feb 23, 2006 3:43 am

"Lost in Translation

Darla Walters Gary, WireTap, November 3, 2003

Have you ever looked at your own picture and not recognized yourself? Or spent only a few days with someone but knew that they would have an effect on the rest of your life? In the new film by Sofia Coppola, "Lost In Translation," the characters, no matter how seemingly different they may be, go through everyday feelings of longing, confusion and affection.

The viewer will be taken aback by the new, forlorn side of Bill Murray, so drastically different from his early days on Saturday Night Live or my favorite, the Ghostbusters movies, but occasionally his trademark sarcasm makes an appearance. The character of Bob Harris, an actor in the middle of a midlife crisis, is made for him.

Bob is in Japan making whiskey advertisements. Whether talking on the phone with his distant wife, or running along the bright streets of Tokyo, along side Charlotte, ("Ghost World's" Scarlett Johansson), Murray is brilliantly dull and at the same time fascinating. The only thing better then watching Murray is watching co-star Scarlett Johansson.

Johansson is spectacular as Charlotte. As the wife of a photographer who is always busy at work, Charlotte needs something to do. When she and Bob Harris meet, the two make a strange yet perfect pair.

The characters in the movie bring the audience on a trip lit by the neon lights of Tokyo and propelled by the fascination of a new face, a new city and a newfound view of life. Viewers will really care about the characters and get to know them by the end of the movie. Though some people (for example, my dad) may complain that it starts out too slow, I found it perfect. It is realistic yet completely unlike anything you might expect.

One of the most interesting things about Sofia Coppola is her unique way of capturing how eerie and sad life is. The shots of Johansson sitting alone in her hotel room listening to self-help tapes or fading away in the crowded Tokyo streets, and the scenes of Murray drinking alone in the bar, give off a feeling that they don't know themselves any better then you do. As with her last film, The Virgin Suicides, some of the most striking scenes in the movie are stripped bare. No sound, no words, just silent images of the characters' isolated lives.

Even though I spent $10.00 on the ticket, which is a lot of money for someone with my limited bank account, it was completely worth it. As my friend said, it's the second best Bill Murray film ever…"Who you gonna call, Ghostbusters!"

>> Darla Walters Gary is a WireTap staff writer. She lives in Oakland, California and is a senior at Far West High School.

http://www.wiretapmag.org/story.html?StoryID=17099"
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#15 Post by jml2 » Thu Feb 23, 2006 6:38 am

what a great collection of reviews
these should go in the weareawake.org site somewhere

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#16 Post by jm » Fri Feb 24, 2006 1:00 am

"Lost in Translation In 'Lost,' dislocated, lonely lives merge in a lovely limbo

By Ty Burr, Boston Globe, 9/12/2003

The paradox of modern business travel is that it can make you feel brutally anonymous while scraping you down to your truest self. The airport lobbies and hotel bars, the rooms pregnant with waiting: They replace the details of our regular lives with uniform dislocation. This is limbo, or what the Buddhists call bardo, and it can be a terrifying form of grace.

Sofia Coppola's lovely, lapidary "Lost in Translation" is about this stateless state of being, and about two lost souls who find themselves waltzing together in the void. It's not a love story, or, at any rate, the sort we expect from movies. It's something deeper and simpler, and it allows Scarlett Johansson to arrive as an actress at the same time it finally gives Bill Murray the great role that has always eluded him.

Murray plays Bob Harris, a Hollywood megastar whose prime is a decade or so behind him. He's in Japan to shoot a television ad for Suntory scotch, a project that will enrich his bank account with little effort on his part and no damage to his career back home. What Bob isn't prepared for is the sensory assault that is 21st century Tokyo and the plain fact that he can't sleep.

Neither can Charlotte (Johansson), the young, intelligent, barely formed wife of an antic rock 'n' roll photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) in town on assignment. Since her husband is forever running off to a shoot or gossiping with a bubbleheaded movie star (Anna Faris of "Scary Movie," turning in a lethal dissection of a specific Hollywood type), Charlotte finds herself wandering into flower- arranging classes, taking long midday naps, and spontaneously weeping. She's vestigial and she knows it.

Bob's only human contact, meanwhile, comes in the form of a double-talking Japanese director (sample instruction: "I need mysterious face") and FedExed carpet samples from his wife in LA. He catches Charlotte's attention one night in the hotel: The two share a raised eyebrow over the terrible things the lounge singer is doing to "Scarborough Fair," and soon they've formed a mutual support group and are scampering around Tokyo in an exhausted, elated daze that gathers profundity as it goes. The movie shares with Richard Linklater's 1995 "Before Sunrise" a sense of the way a man and a woman can feel as if they're the only two people on the planet.

"Lost in Translation" is longer on atmosphere and observation than on story, but you don't mind: Coppola maintains her quietly charged tone with a certainty that would be unbelievable in a second film if you didn't suspect genetics had a hand. Her eye for detail is precise and often extremely funny, taking in the sight gag of Murray wrestling with a Tokyo hotel showerhead or marveling at the potted surrealism that is Japanese TV. At the same time, Coppola's knack for putting just the right French retro-rock tune on the soundtrack or casually framing a shot that you'd want to hang on your wall is the mark of a complete director. There's been a lot of hype lately about Francis's baby girl. On the basis of this movie, it's earned.

What may be most remarkable is the way Coppola and her actors sidestep the whole older man/younger woman thing in favor of a punchy, tender humanism. Bob and Charlotte need to be different ages -- she hasn't yet begun her life while he's on the other side of the curve -- but sex never really gets put on the table, even if you sometimes see Bob's eyes droop with longing. Neither of them wants to wreck the mood. They're also just too tired. Maybe if "Lost in Translation" had been directed by a man, these two would have found some way to get busy. Maybe not. Certainly only a woman director would allow Johansson, with her real-girl body and sardonic eyes, to bloom with such compassion. The actress is also starring this fall in the film adaptation of the bestseller "Girl With a Pearl Earring," and she's as reserved and intense there as she's emotionally sprawling here. There really isn't anyone else like her in movies at the moment.

This is Murray's homecoming, though. There have been hints before, in "Groundhog Day" and "Rushmore," of the melancholy that lies behind his lazy mockery, but "Translation" marks the first time he has explored it. It's a performance of high comedy -- Murray can't not make you laugh -- but one that's rooted in Bob's panicky regret over everything that has slipped through his fingers.

At one point, he and Charlotte find themselves singing karaoke with a group of Japanese party kids, and after they've wobbled through "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" (him) and "Brass in Pocket" (her), Bob lays into the old Roxy Music chestnut "More Than This." It's below Murray's natural register: He sings it softly and, you realize with a jolt, seriously. "More than this," croons the master ironist in his most naked moment on film, "there is nothing."

"Lost in Translation" gets more out of nothing than most movies even try.

http://www.boston.com/movies/display?di ... ie&id=2795"
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#17 Post by jm » Fri Feb 24, 2006 1:01 am

"Q&A: Scarlett Johansson

Movies.Com, September 19, 2003

>> How closely did working in Tokyo parallel the experience that Charlotte has, being in this culture?

It was so foreign. I'm from Manhattan. I mean, it's not the pace of it that's so different, but it's … everything. The language, the food, this vibration, the way people look. Everybody is Japanese there, and it sounds like a stupid thing to say, but I never had that experience before. Whenever I saw somebody that was not Japanese, I was like, "Oh, wow. You're not Japanese. That's unbelievable." It's like you have something in common, sort of like Charlotte does with Bob, I guess.

>> Charlotte is also interested in experiencing the culture. Do you see that being a brave thing?

Charlotte's been there before; that's why she has friends there. She doesn't feel lost in Tokyo, she knows where she's going. But because she feels so vulnerable and confused and overwhelmed in her life, being placed in such a bizarre foreign place just adds to the craziness. It's like when you're feeling out of sorts and you're in Times Square and there's all this stuff going on. I know Times Square like the back of my hand, but I just can't be there when I feel that way.

>> Working opposite Bill Murray, what did you know about him before you started working with him, and then afterward, what did you learn from him?

I've always been a huge Bill Murray fan. Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies ever. It's perfect really. … I'm rarely star-struck because I've been doing this for so long, and you see how dorky people really are and everything, but Bill was different because he looks like Bill and you associate him with all these lovable characters he's played. You feel like you know him and these characters - Bob in What About Bob? and Phil in Groundhog Day -- because you've seen those movies so many times. Then working with him, he's a really serious actor. He is. Most comedians are. He's very serious about his acting and his timing and his instincts. But I always learn something working with every actor; you learn things about yourself as an actor.

>> What kind of director is Sofia? Is she just as subtle as the performances she brings out?

She's very subtle, obviously. You can't imagine Sofia walking into the hotel room and going [shouts], "We want you to move over here!" It would just be out of character. I don't even think her voice raises to that level. Another thing I noticed is that she's totally sensitive to different sorts of things that actors need. Giovanni [Ribisi] is a Method actor, all the way. He needs tons of rehearsal. Bill is very instinctual, he doesn't need rehearsal, he walks in with an idea of what he wants to do. I don't know what kind of actor I am, but we're all different, we all need different things. And for someone who's just getting started, she was very responsible that way. Which is really unusual.

>> [SPOILER ALERT] I was grateful that the relationship between Bob and Charlotte didn't turn into a romantic relationship, that it didn't cross that line. What was your feeling about that, because my sense is that if a man had been directing this film, that's where it would have gone.

For me, for these two characters to consummate their love or whatever they have, you'd get this feeling like they'd wake up and go, "Why did we do that? Everything's different. Why did we ruin what we had?" It just wasn't right. My character is in love with her husband. She's in this marriage. They're just starting off, and they're a team, but they're just not a team right now. He's busy and she's so not busy. So it just wasn't appropriate and it wasn't right, it didn't feel right and it was never a question. As far as if a man was directing it? I couldn't say. I guess it depends on which man it is. I really do think there are some sensitive male directors and some very insensitive female directors.

http://www.scarlettjohansson.org/qa.html"
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#18 Post by jm » Fri Feb 24, 2006 1:02 am

"Scarlett Fever

By Juan Morales (OC Weekly, September 19-25, 2003)

At one point in Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte, the disaffected photographer's wife who spends much of her time lounging in her underwear in a Tokyo hotel room, laments to Bill Murray's Bob, the jaded movie star she befriends during her visit, that she doesn't know what she wants to do with her life. Many young people grapple with the same existential dilemma, but Johansson, unlike Sofia Coppola, the film's writer-director, who caromed from actress to clothing designer to photographer before finding her bliss as a filmmaker, is not one of them.

"I've known I liked to perform forever," says Johansson, "and I couldn't feel more fortunate for that."

At 18, Johansson may be, to borrow one of the more insipid pop lyrics in recent memory, "not a girl, not yet a woman," but the sandpaper-voiced indie princess doesn't have a Britney bone in her body. Nevertheless, in both Lost in Translation and the upcoming period drama Girl With a Pearl Earring, she plays young women who, far more subtly but no less effectively than La Spears, stir up carnal longings in older men. (A similar vein courses through A Love Song for Bobby Long, the drama she is currently shooting in New Orleans with John Travolta.)

Like so many of her recent characters, the Manhattan-bred Johansson, whose other credits include The Horse Whisperer, Ghost World and The Man Who Wasn't There, is in a transitional phase. Indeed, an interesting contrast may be made between Johansson and her Horse Whisperer co-star Kate Bosworth. Despite a more substantial body of work, Johansson, a favorite at once of discerning art-house habitués and of the cynical teens she and Thora Birch captured so brilliantly in Ghost World, is harder to pin down, and less conventionally beautiful, than the classically blond Bosworth. Which presents a challenge. No one disputes Johansson's talent, yet Bosworth is the one headlining studio movies, while Johansson, at the moment, remains primarily an alterna-ingénue, a refreshingly real, defiantly unmanufactured antidote to the buffed and polished Amanda Byneses and Hilary Duffs of the world.

But on the strength of Lost in Translation and Girl With a Pearl Earring (in which she stars opposite Colin Firth as a shy housemaid who inspires one of 17th-century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer's most famous paintings), greater recognition seems imminent.

OC WEEKLY: Sofia is one of several woman directors you've worked with. Do you find the experience significantly different from working with male directors?

SCARLETT JOHANSSON: There are obvious differences, I suppose. Walking around in my underwear in front of Sofia is not the same as walking around in my underwear in front of [Horse Whisperer director] Bob Redford. But at the same time, when the cameras are rolling, gender lines are irrelevant. A good director is a good director, and I don't think it has anything to do with your sex. I've worked with a lot of woman directors, and I've tried to think if there's been a connection between all of them, but it's impossible. It would be like making a connection between all male directors. There's nothing similar about them other than those girly feminine things that a woman has with another woman. I'm sure if I turned to Sofia and said, "Do you have a tampon?" she wouldn't laugh in my face. But I wouldn't want to ask [Ghost World director] Terry Zwigoff for a tampon.

Charlotte is a fictional character, but in certain respects she seems to closely resemble Sofia.

People always say, "Is Charlotte based on Sofia?" It's an obvious thing. My character has long hair, she wears Marc Jacobs, and there's a quietness about her. And when you meet Sofia, the similarities are undeniable. But it's like giving a line reading. I would never impersonate her.

Just as Charlotte is in a period of transition in her life, you seem to be as well. Where do you see yourself going in the future?

For me, the next step is directing. I've been doing this for so long, and I have so much experience, that it just doesn't seem like it could go any other way. I would like to explore every aspect of filmmaking because I love it so much, and the idea of directing just seems like the greatest thing ever. Not that I would stop acting -- and I would never direct myself. That would just be awful.

In a previous interview you said, "The most important thing to me is that the character is something I can play. I can't play a cheerleader. It's going to come out awful. I don't feel comfortable baring my stomach. I wouldn't pay 10 dollars to see it." Based on your latest projects, it seems you still feel that way.

Unfortunately, terrible movies are made all the time, and they're just making more bad ones as we speak. I think that's what's so great about Lost in Translation -- it's just so refreshing. For Christ's sake, you leave the theater and you're talking about the characters! When was the last time you did that?

When people say, "It must have been really challenging for you to play in Lost in Translation and Girl With a Pearl Earring," I think, "Are you kidding? They were a breath of fresh air. They were all you could wish for." It's difficult when you're trying to make something work that's stupid or unrealistic and sappy. It's terrible to have to do that kind of work. And it's a shame because there are so many great actors who don't really have any other option. I like to think that everybody wants to play the parts that I get to play. But it's not like I don't see my share of the worst material. In every script I get, it seems my character is a detective or something. It's like, "Oh, come on!"

http://www.scarlettjohansson.org/ocweekly.html"
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#19 Post by jm » Fri Feb 24, 2006 1:03 am

"It Girl finds kudos exciting, but scary

By Terry Lawson

Detroit Free Press, September 14, 2003

TORONTO -- Scarlett Johansson is a little embarrassed about being dubbed the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival's It Girl, a sobriquet usually bestowed on a gifted young actress who can be seen in multiple movies at the festival, and who seems likely to have the brightest future. Toronto's It Girl Hall of Fame includes Julianne Moore, Parker Posey and Canada's own Sarah Polley, all of whom Johansson considers "amazing."

But she is also obviously pleased to be in such good company. While she says the accolades she received for her performances in the romantic comedy "Lost in Translation," to be released Friday in metro Detroit, and the upcoming drama "The Girl With a Pearl Earring," in which she plays the shy 17th-Century maid who became the inspiration and model for Johannes Vermeer's famous painting are satisfying, they're scary, too.

"I'm aware I could be entering the next phase of my career," says Johansson, who, in a sexy top and with her hair dyed seriously blond and upswept, looks far more worldly than the average-to-the-edge-of mousy-characters she's played in films like "Ghost World" and "American Rhapsody."

"It's exciting, but a little disorienting, and scary, too," she says, clutching a heart-shaped "Hello Kitty" pillow to her bosom through the interview in a midtown hotel room. "Outside of the MTV Movie Awards, this is the first thing I've ever been to where I felt like people actually knew who I was." By the time "Lost in Translation" spreads out to theaters across North America, everybody is likely to have been exposed in one way or another to the 18-year-old that one major critic at the festival called "the most impressive young female actor in a long time, partly because she seems like she has a secret she won't reveal. She's mysterious, but vulnerable, too."

"Hmm, mysterious, huh? I never think of myself as mysterious. I figure I'm pretty much what you see. But maybe some of the characters I've played have had that quality. Griet in 'Pearl Earring' is timid, and that makes her a little mysterious. Rebecca in 'Ghost World' is more enigmatic. She hasn't quite figured out who she is yet, so other people really can't either."

The same could be said for Charlotte in "Lost in Translation," the woman in her mid-20s who accompanies her celebrity-photographer husband to Tokyo on an assignment. With her husband working and her inability to sleep, she takes refuge in the bar of her swank hotel, where she makes the acquaintance of American TV-turned-movie-star Bob Harris, played by Bill Murray.

Harris is in Tokyo to make a Japan-only whiskey commercial, and he's as disoriented by the city and its neon-infused culture as by Charlotte. He's also fretting over a disintegrating marriage. They end up confronting Tokyo, and their problems, together, forging a relationship unique and unlikely, somewhere between that of Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve in "The April Fools" and the big, communication-impaired gorilla and Fay Wray in "King Kong."

"This film was obviously very personal and therapeutic for Sofia," says Johansson of Sofia Coppola, who directed her own script. "But I had no problem identifying. I've been feeling pretty disoriented myself for a while now. It was just breathtakingly sensitive, and as soon as I read it, I started pestering Sofia for a meeting. I think she originally thought I might be too young, but I convinced her I had to do it. I loved 'The Virgin Suicides' -- Coppola's directing debut -- "and then you throw in Bill Murray and Tokyo? Who wouldn't want to do it? They say you can never really tell how any movie will turn out, no matter how good the script or director or cast is, but I just knew this was going to turn out good."

The native New Yorker -- who reluctantly admits she finally bought an apartment in Los Angeles, to avoid the endless commuting -- has a pretty good prediction record. Though Johansson's film debut at age 8 in Rob Reiner's "North" was a stinker, she was really only in it long enough to score her SAG card. At age 10, she was the costar of her next film, the indie charmer "Manny and Lo," and then scored a plum role in Robert Redford's woefully underrated "The Horse Whisperer." She played the adolescent daughter of Kristin Scott Thomas, who is seriously injured after being thrown by her beloved horse, an incident that has a profound effect on her mother and herself, as well as on Redford, a horse trainer hired to rehabilitate an animal everyone else thinks should be put down.

"It was making that movie that made me realize what I might be able to do if I really worked at it. Bob (Redford) was a wonderful director and very inspiring. He made me really want to do my best. The experience with (director) Terry Zwigoff on 'Ghost World' was very different in terms of personality, but also similar, because he was secure enough to really care about what a kid like me thought."

Johansson says "Lost in Translation" may have been the first movie in which she naturally identified with her character, "instead of having to discover her."

"She's very American, very blond, stuck in this very foreign place at a time where she's having an identity crisis, not really knowing what she wants to be and how to achieve it," Johansson says. "She meets this older guy, going through his own crisis, and they relate. There's an immediate connection, but it's tentative because they're both married, and because he's so much older. But there's no way of getting around it. There is a definite sexual attraction that complicates it. Here's this woman who one minute is being assaulted by all that high-tech craziness in downtown Tokyo and in the next, wanders into this ancient Buddhist temple in the middle of this intensely spiritual ceremony. It's 'omigod, somebody please help me understand what's happening.'

"I dated a classical musician for a while, and I felt like that. I knew something important was being said, musically, but I needed someone to help me find the key. It's like standing in front of a Pollock (painting) for the first time, feeling it, but not getting it, you know? You're searching, you're looking, and you need a guide. Everybody else has gone to Yale, and you have ADD (attention deficit disorder)."

The first thing people usually respond to in Johansson's work is how understated and quiet she is, and one critic at the festival, while praising her It Girl performances, wondered aloud whether she could do anything else: She now needs to try a role, he thinks, where she is aggressive and active. Johansson, who did play a teenage sexpot in "The Man Who Wasn't There," says she may have found it in the film she just finished shooting in New Orleans, "A Love Song for Bobby Long," in which she costars with another happily married older man, John Travolta, on whom she admits a major crush.

"I've been so lucky so far as the people I've worked with behind and in front of the camera. We worked so great together. John is just so gifted and giving, and he's such an amazing, caring human being. And after all this time, he still has the ability to surprise an audience. Have you seen him in the last couple of months? Well, I won't spoil the surprise, but wait until you see what he's done physically to play this part. It's unbelievable, and he's brilliant."

"He's doing what I want to do, which is to never, ever fall into shtick. That gets old. I want to always be fresh and excited about what I'm doing, so I can pass that excitement on to everyone else, including audiences. If I ever start to look comfortable, call me and tell me," she says hugging the Hello Kitty. "Promise?"

http://www.scarlettjohansson.org/detroit.html"
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#20 Post by jm » Fri Feb 24, 2006 1:04 am

"NOW PLAYING: `Lost' a subtle, perceptive drama

By Rick Eskil of the Union-Bulletin, October 30, 2003

As I walked through the lobby of the Grand Cinemas to see Bill Murray's Lost in Translation I couldn't help but see the poster touting the film as a great comedy.

Murray is a funny guy -- a very funny guy -- but Lost in Translation is not a comedy. It's a drama with a few funny moments.

And those who go to Lost in Translation looking for a rollicking, slapstick laugh-a-thon will be very disappointed.

But if you are a fan of Murray's wry delivery and acerbic glances -- as I am -- you are going to thoroughly enjoy Lost in Translation. Murray gives an fantastic, understated performance that quickly and completely reveals his character's personality. Murray will certainly be getting Oscar consideration.

Murray plays Bob Harris, an American movie star who is in Tokyo to endorse a Japanese whiskey. Harris is ambivalent about the whiskey, but for $2 million he is happy to put his name and face to the product.

Still, it's clear Harris isn't thrilled with being in Japan. It's like a suit that is two sizes too small. He's uncomfortable.

So, when Bob isn't sipping tea doctored to look like whisky for a TV spot or photo shoot, he's sipping real whiskey in the hotel bar.

Director and screenwriter Sophia Coppola -- daughter of Francis Ford Coppola -- does a wonderful job of creating that special lonely bar feeling only found in hotels frequented by business travelers. The bar scenes just ooze pathetic.

The international road trip, however, isn't all that's bothering Bob. He's ambivalent about his life -- and his wife of 25 years.

While at the lonely bar, Bob catches the attention of a young woman, Charlotte (played by Scarlett Johansson), who also isn't thrilled about being in Japan. Charlotte's husband is a professional photographer, so Charlotte doesn't have much to do in Tokyo. And you get the impression her marriage of two years has started to crack.

But Charlotte isn't looking to cheat on her husband or have an affair. She's simply bored. And so is Bob.

Charlotte likes Bob's witty banter and he likes that she likes it. There is a real attraction despite their 30-year gap in age.

So, what are they going to do?

Finding out is what makes Lost in Translation interesting. The film is a complex look at two characters lost in Japan -- and lost in their lives.

This drama (that does provide a few good laughs) is well worth seeing, particularly if you enjoy character-driven movies that make subtle-but-powerful statements.

http://www.union-bulletin.com/main.asp? ... leID=18953"
Last edited by jm on Sat Feb 17, 2007 11:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

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