You must be even more upset that the screenplay won!
It’s funny that a film like this gets so many people so upset. I enjoyed it immensely and identified with the characters in a way. Oh well. I’ll be leaving now before I get things thrown at me.
So you haven’t seen Full Frontal, huh? 
As I said in another thread about this movie: This film was very effective. The characters were bored throughout and so was I.
Listening to people gush about this movie made me very afraid to see Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, since the same sorts of people said the same sorts of things about it. I finally saw it this past week, and it was much better than I feared.
Non. Adaptation was like spending the afternoon with a pleasantly eccentric aunt or uncle. LIT was like a dentist visit. To get several fillings.
I got it. I understand exactly what it was about. I still found it boring.
I totally loved ADAPTATION. Nine Stars. Twelve Comets. Pajamas for at least six felines.
LIT sucked.
Oh, and I’ll say that I really liked Adaptation quite a bit as well, but(as I’ve stated before), I didn’t care for Lost In Translation.
I didn’t like it at all although I’d been wanting to see it for months when I eventually got around to it with a friend. We both watched it while having some drinks in her living room and neither of us could get into it. The only part either of us enjoyed was the prostitute scene but the rest left us completely flat… after about an hour of vaguely staring at the screen, she asked me if I thought it sucked too and after that, I didn’t even pretend to watch it anymore.
Completely boring movie. I don’t hate it… it doesn’t even inspire that much in me. It’s just there.
Sorry I’m late to the party. I just rented Lost in Translation and watched it this past weekend. I had my doubts going into the movie - a hipster movie made by a bunch of hip people with a hip soundtrack. In the first 10-15 minutes, I knew my initial impressions were correct. Long boring shots of people looking out of windows. But it started to suck me in. And by the end, I ended up really liking it.
The relationship between Murray and Johansson reminded me of ones that I’ve had. If things were different, if we weren’t in certain situations, maybe things would have worked out differently. People here have talked about a mentor/mentee relationship but I didn’t see it that way. This was a romance without the sex. Two people in the same situation in the right time and place that brought them together.
I found that the film protrayed an intimate relationship between a couple that’s rarely seen in film. This film had a real emotional impact on me and I found myself thinking of relationships that I’ve been in, special moments that I’ve had with them, that I’ll always remember and a longing for times like that again.
Sofia Coppola IMO used Japanese formulas to give us clues about what is going on.
Well, now that this has been bumped I have to mention that in a book on anime, it was mentioned that there is symbolism in Japanese entertainment on how characters in bed are positioned.
Specifically, it was talking of the anime “Plastic Little”, and it showed this image of Captain Tita and Elysse sleeping, the captain with her arm around Elysse and Elysse in a fetal position:
http://webster.commnet.edu/stuweb/~jackson9271/plastic%20little08.html (noting bad, but it shows underwear and it may be not safe for work)
Paraphrasing the book on anime: if the characters appeared embracing each other or next to each other, the relationship was sexual, but if they appeared like in the image, it showed a mentor protecting an underling, and nothing sexual did happen between them.
Of course, the reason I bring that up is because the main characters in this movie appear in virtually the same position! With the Bill Murray character barely touching the curled Charlotte, this reveals what is going on: there is no sexual interest (or action) between the main characters.
Damn, bclouse, you scared me there! I found this thread through a search and was wondering if I should bump it (I finally saw LiT last week). Suddenly it was on page one and I though I’d accidentally hit ‘reply’ instead of ‘back’.
Anyway, I kind of liked it, but it didn’t really impress me all that much. One problem was that I was the wrong audience for the movie. I understand that Coppola wasn’t making an ‘Americans in Japan’ film, but was simply using the alienness of Japan to emphasize how alone the protagonists felt in their own lives. The problem is that for me, the settings aren’t alien at all, and the ‘bizarre’ cultural aspects were the things I do on my weekends, so I had to keep making a conscious effort to not see them as just another pair of rich tourists living the high life (Park Hyatt Shinjuku ain’t cheap) in my backyard. It also didn’t help that I could understand the Japanese dialog just fine, and so the whole ‘incomprehensible Japan’ aspect was lost. Still, the movie was popular in Japan, so maybe it’s just me.
I thought Bill Murray was good at playing with the absurdity of the situations his character was in without going overboard, plus I could actually sympathize with his feeling ‘lost’; he’s rich and successful, but he’s unsure of how long it will last and he’s stressing over losing touch with his wife and kids. Johansson, on the other hand, just seemed to come off as boring and shallow, someone who expects everyone else to entertain her.
Some thoughts:
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One scene that was good, but could have been much better for me was the translation during the commercial filming. The director’s actually giving Murray good, thorough direction for the scene, but the interpretor is doing a completely half-assed, incompetent job. The ‘lost in translation’ effect would have worked much better, in my opinion, if the director had gone on and on with his instructions and, in the end, actually said nothing more than “turn and look at the camera” (which is very possible to do in Japanese). But again, I’m not the one Coppola was writing for.
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Geography’s a problem in a lot of movies, and this was no exception, with cab rides between destinations 10 minutes apart suddenly taking detours to the opposite side of the city (for example, the karaoke bar high above the street is most likely on the west side of the city, either in Shinjuku or Ikebukuro, very close to the hotel, but on the way they cross the Rainbow Bridge, which goes way off to the Eastern suburbs and Chiba). It was actually distracting to watch and think “ok, now they’re going over to… huh? oh, wait, never mind.”
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A cute scene my wife and I both liked was in the hospital waiting room when the old woman is trying to ask Murray “how long have you been in Japan?”. For some reason what really cracked us up were the two middle-age women sitting a few rows back who were listening to their conversation and just losing it.
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Ironic movie-watching experience: we lost the remote to our DVD player and couldn’t turn on the subtitles, so for my wife it was a movie about perfectly ordinary Japanese people dealing with a pair of completely incomprehensible Americans.
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I don’t care what country you’re from, taking off your shoes in a restaurant and putting your bare feet up on the counter so your friend can make jokes about the colors of your toe is simply gross.
I absolutely love Adaptation.
I think it is one of the smartest scripts ever written and made me want to pick up my pen to start writing scripts.
I didn’t like Lost in Translation, though.
I thought it was okay, but a bit boring.
There just wasn’t anything going one.
I expected quite a lot, but couldn’t find it.
I think you could make a lot better movie with the same subject.
The idea was great, the actors were good, the location was perfect but it just didn’t add up.
Funny; after reading this thread a while ago, (to chime in that I hated it) and seeing the comparisons to “Before Sunrise”, which I’d never seen, I decided to rent Sunrise. I think the main factor in my decision was that nobody seemed to like both movies.
And I really enjoyed sunrise. Now I’ll have to try my luck with Before Sunset.
I thought that while the film looked good, set the mood it was going for correctly, and really conveyed the isolation of these people in Tokyo,
my reaction was “okay, got it, now can we go somewhere with it?”
It would be like taking a scene from a great movie that many consider great film making, and then dragging out that scene a full 2 hours. You’ve made your point, now either move on, end it, or build on it.
I think it could have made an excellent 30 minute short film.
There are so many posts here that I agree with word for word that I can’t quote them all. I also did not see what all the fuss was about this film. I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it either.
I thought Bill Murray was being Bill Murray, not that there’s anything wrong with that but being yourself does not make an Oscar worthy performance. Also, not having much of a screenplay and relying on a talented actor improvising being himself does not make for an Oscar worthy screenplay. And Scarlett Johannsen was dull, shallow and everything else that’s been said here. I just did not get all the hype about this film. Please note, I am not saying I did not get the film, don’t try to explain it to me I get tired of all the people who feel a need to explain it and tell you you didn’t “get it” and that’s why you didn’t like it. I just didn’t think it was that deserving of all it’s publicity or nominations.
To the person who thought this was the most boring film ever, have you seen the remake of Alfie? Man, I can’t believe I stayed awake for that.
It seems to me that anytime a movie comes out that deals in some real aspect of human emotion, and has a conspicuous absence of explosions and CGI it gets hyped this way. You are seeing this right now with Sideways. I have found that this tends to make me avoid movies that I might otherwise like. Sort of the reverse of those pretentious people that we all know that will refuse to see a movie if it is popular with the masses.
That said, I loved this movie. I can understand how others could feel differently, but for me this movie captured some genuine emotion and truth about the human condition. In a way, I think that the appeal of this movie is somewhat voyeuristic.
Life, as we experience it, lacks a plot and a story arch. I think that this movie captured that very well, and yet I was still able to watch it unfold without being bored.
For me, it also had some very powerful moments. I have stood at a window, looking down at the streets of a strange city in a strange country paralyzed because I was so out of my element and didn’t know what to do. I have had that moment, Like Bill Murray’s character, where I realized that I was a Father figure to someone that I had romantic interest in.
So I don’t know, I can see that this movie could get on people’s nerves but for me it was one of the best movies that I have seen in a very long time.
Since it doesn’t seem to appear in this thread, and some peeps here might not know.
The main characters in Lost in Translation were based on Harrison Ford and Cameron Diaz according to what I have heard.
I felt she had some growing up to do, and that Murray’s performance sensed that. I didn’t expect great drama or a laff riot out of this movie; I just experienced it as 2 people who didn’t know where they were going, and took the time out to be sweet to each other.
You may be onto something about knowing Japanese, and not experiencing some of the lostness.
Miss Johansson can put her feet on my table any old time.