I just saw Lost in Translation

Cafe Society
41

Right, so much for film critics, and for the Academy.

I heard great things about this movie and I have to say, I was extremely disappointed in the screenplay and the direction (although mostly the screenplay).

Please don’t tell me I didn’t get it. I appreciated the shots of Japanese culture, the strangeness of it all, and the characters’ disorientation. I laughed when the long stream of Japanese turned out to mean “turn and look at the camera.” I thought Bill Murray did a great job and Scarlett what’s-her-name did a lousy job (I found the English-with-accent more understandable than about half of her dialogue). But as to character study, I didn’t see it. What character arc? And then there was the great cliche of him jumping out of the car and running off to say the final goodbye. Oh, puh-leeze. A great ending could have saved it, but it didn’t happen.

If I had paid money to rent this I would be pissed. Gotta love Netflix.

I think the Oscar for best screenplay was some kind of kiss-up from the Academy.

42

I own fewer than 20 films on CD, but I bought this one. I loved it.

Having said that, I am not at all surpised that so many people here don’t like it. Look at the threads here in Cafe Society and see which ones get read/posted to - Not fiction, unless you preface it with “Science”. Its all about action films, video games, and comics. There just aren’t a lot of people here who care about films that only offer mood and atmosphere and require the viewer to draw his/her own conclusions (that sounds snarky and I don’t mean it to be).

Open any thread about movies here (best film, best line, best scene, whatever) and it won’t go five posts before The Matrix or a Lord of the Rings trilogy is mentioned. Generally, people who love one won’t care too much for the other. At least that is my experience.

A few years ago, I read Plainsong and wanted to start a thread about it because I thought it was so great, but while composing it I gave up because there are probably only a couple of dozen people here who have read it, and if anyone bought it on my recommendation, I’d find myself in the pit in no time.

Nobody is right or wrong here, just different.

43

If one could just convey that idea to the majority of dopers here, then we we members of the SDMB could really fight ignorance!

BTW, I loved LOTR and Lost in Translation.

44

So did I, truth be told.

45

I like movies with explosions just fine. I also liked “Lost in Translation.”

Was it heavy on plot? No, and that’s fine with me; two thirds of all movies are overplotted anyway. It was a movie that dealt more with atmosphere and imagery, and that was fine by me. It did what it set out to do. I enjoyed every minute of it. I thought the scene of Murray trying to talk to his wife on the phone, while sitting in the bath, was especially effective.

46

I loved 'em both too.

47

Ditto.

48

Well, I love movies, and I’m rarely sorry I’ve seen one (and in the case of LIT I’m not at all saying I’m sorry I saw it). It was just a letdown, that’s all.

It is a funny thing about taste, though, because I like action movies as well as the next person but I much prefer character-driven movies. LIT seemed to me to have more in common with action flicks in the sense of moving from incident to incident.

The person who recommended this movie so highly spent her senior year of high school in Japan. After a few weeks of orientation she was 100 miles from anyone who spoke English. She and I are generally on exactly the same page when it comes to movies, but here we diverged. Maybe if I’d seen it with her, in a theatre, instead of with my grumpy husband (who wanted to know why every single movie I got from Netflix had a theme of adultery), on my teensy-weensy TV, it would have had more appeal for me. Or maybe I would have to have visited/lived in Japan to get whatever she got.

I believe I would still think the ending sucked, though. (As opposed to American Beauty which I’m convinced I liked in large part because of the ending.)

(One thing my friend said that was interesting to me. Not knowing the language or the customs she kept asking her hosts if she was doing it right/saying it right, and the answer was always “yes,” because she was an honored guest and therefore they could not say she had made any kind of mistake. Naturally it took her a bit to catch on that this was happening because as far as she could tell she was doing everything perfectly! Hard to learn when you don’t get honest feedback. So she then had to figure out how to recast her questions so she DID get honest feedback. But then she was never really sure.)

49

I find it fascinating how vastly different people’s preferences and aesthetics can be. This comment hammers that home to me:

Every arguably “artsy” film that Bill Murray has made ranks highly in my Favorite Films of All Time list.

While I loved LiT, I can understand why people don’t. Your reaction is probably akin to mine when Nicolas Cage was so lauded for his role in Leaving Las Vegas, a performance that I loathed beyond comprehension.

50

LiT does not say adultery is “about friendship”, or normal, or forgiveable, at all. Do you really believe, as you appear to, that the mere portrayal of adultery is somehow promoting it in those ways?

BTW I would bet dollars to donuts that some of those dozen couples you mention *have *thought about adultery. How would you know if they had?

51

I wish you had stareted that thread. I love Kent Haruf’s work. I used to work at a bookstore. We got an advance copy of “Where You Once Belonged”. That book was so moving, so proufoundly tragic, written in spare prose that seemed like verse. It was especially heartbreaking at the end because of how awful the event that climaxes the book is, after how much you’d gotten to love and hope for the characters.

Sorry to have hijacked the thread…
My partner bought LIT for me as a gift. He got it because I kept bugging him to go see it with me, but he didn’t want to, and when he finally consented, it had already left the theaters.

When I was going to university, it was my first experience in a big city. I went to LA awestruck and hopeful, marvelling at its glamorous appeal. It gave me experiences I never expected. In a way, it was very much like being in a foreign country, it was so unfamiliar. At the time, I was estranged from my family, because of my abusive and violent father, so I spent all of my holidays on the campus, along with a few foreign students. I did what the girl’s character did, wander around the city, curious about everything, a bit apprehensive, hoping to make a connection with someone. I recall once walking on Flower St in downtown on my way to the Temporary Contemporary Museum, and being struck by a wave of feeling that I later realized was loneliness.

This movie brought that time back. LIT wasn’t just about being in a foreign country with language and customs unfamiliar; it was about a disconnectedness, a feeling of being lost in thought, a fear of having lost one’s way. I understand some might mistake the character’s actions as being adulterous,; this would be a slight misinterpretation of what was occuring with these two. They were both lost in their lives, but found sometihing familiar in each other. That their spouses seemed to have made shut them out isn’t meant to excuse their connection but assists in awakening their acknowledgement of loss and unease. The moment that seemed most to be like a betrayal is when the Scarlett Johansesen’s character discovers Bill’s one night stand. She is at first icy and sarcastic during their tense lunch, but both come to realize that he was acting out the more commonplace method of connecting through the lounge singer something he’d really felt for her.

I was thinking about the films of Alan Pakula recently, and sad that current films telegraph ideas and story so blatantly, whereas his films worked like LIT, collecting images and character interactions that showed the viewer the feeling that was meant to be conveyed. It spoke to one’s intelligence as a viewer to interpret and not only understand the story, but to feel it as an undercurrent of emotion as well.

52

Yeah, got that. So in lieu of saying the film had “no plot,” I’ll say it had an incredibly flimsy plot.

Don’t get me wrong; I like a lot of stories where the emphasis is on character development rather than on events. Joyce, Kafka, and other modern literature come to mind. And I really thought that the acting in LiT was great. My issue is with the writing and directing.

Maybe the problem with the plot as I perceived it was that I didn’t see exactly why each scene was necessary to develop the characters or their relationship. Sure, some of them did that job decently, but others just dragged on: the party scene, the karaoke one, etc. (There were a lot more, but I saw the movie several months ago and have managed to repress most of the memories.) Most of the scenes had something to do with “people adrift in an alien world,” but I thought many were redundant. The other thing that bothered me was the fact that every character in the movie except the two main ones were portrayed completely one-dimensionally. Sure, I understand that that was a deliberate choice meant to highlight the main characters’ alienation from the rest of the world, but it came off as cheap and lazy to me. Plus, the ending was a gimmicky cop-out.

53

While I liked the movie a lot, I was struck by how blatently autobiographical the main character was. I don’t know how intentional this was on behalf of Coppola, but the parallels, to me, were pretty obvious.

Consider: while the Scarlett Johanssen character was supposed to be the “ordinary girl” compared to Bill Murray’s worldly movie star, she was nearly as alien to me as the Japanese. She had gone to Yale and studied Philosophy - the sort of major that people take when they don’t have to worry about a career. She seemed utterly comfortable with extreme luxury, and completely nonchalant, even annoyed, with meeting movie stars. And those “friends” of hers that took her out on the town - do you know those kind of people? Are you invited to those type of parties? The character was a perfect example of a person who, while not a celebrity per se, is an inhabitant of the celebrity millieu… much like the daughter of a legendary Hollywood director.

The weird thing is, I’m not sure Sofia Coppola was aware of all this. As far as she was concerned, this kind of life was perfectly normal. But I found much more in common with Murray’s character who, while a celebrity, gave the impression of not being born into the life.

54

Why do you assume that those who don’t appreciate LiT don’t care about films that offer mood, atmosphere etc. I care a lot about film-making, the mood and feel of the film, the characters, the ambience etc, and I thought LiT was an ordinary film… entertaining in parts, but nothing extraordinary or special.

55

I loved the film. I especially enjoyed the (admittedly redundant) scenes portraying loneliness, alienation and unexpected but welcome human connection. LiT had a personal effect on me, due to the late-night feel. I used to be up late at night, feeling lonely and alienated, and would seek out that human connection. Many scenes in the movie reminded me, in a bittersweet way, the “sad days” of my life.

But that isn’t to say much about anyone else’s reaction. It was just my personal reaction. I’m thinking that many people who like/love LiT are responding to their own identification with one or more of the characters. Those who didn’t like the film are responding to its weaknesses. (At least, that’s what I do, when I don’t like a movie.)

My wife loved it, too. We both appreciated the tone, plotting and character development.