Comments on: Lost in Translation

By: blueduck

blueduck — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:12:29 +0000

I don’t really care if characters in movies grow or change. They don’t have to if they don’t want to. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. They just have to be interesting. These characters aren’t.

By: blueduck

blueduck — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:00:44 +0000

My apologies to Miss Lambert. In my defense, my “research”, as you call it, involved getting her name off IMDb and plugging it in to Amazon.com to see what sort of CDs she had for sale. If the Lambert from Australia had her CDs listed on Amazon, I would have picked up on the concept that there were two singers with identical names.

By: Agreed

Agreed — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 04:34:51 +0000

Really liked your review. My girlfriend and I both hated the movie, and I think your point at the end of your review captures a big part of it. I’d take it even farther - it’s not just that the characters’ material possessions fail to make them happy, it’s that they are both spoiled, shallow people. Like you said, Johansson’s character never says anything intelligent in the entire film. We’re just left to take it on faith that they are both smart, sympathetic characters somehow trapped in unhappy situations. In fact, through the course of the film, neither character shows any glimpse of being able to change his/her situation, or even of displaying any insight into why they’re so unhappy. There’s no growth or depth. Frankly, if Coppola isn’t going to go through the trouble of showing why I should care about these characters, I’m not going to give her the benefit of the doubt.