Analytical Vacancy.

Apparently, the banal depths of the IMDB forums can prove to be more intelligible than individual's passing themselves off as "film critics". OK, certainly that's a bit hyperbolic but there's few things that prove to be more annoying (see: disenchanting) than people just assuming that we're already saddled up for the joke. Pandering or clubbing around your own self-entitlement doesn't mean we're on board already. Hey, there's nothing wrong with pedantry but at least understand that assuming critical supervision means you actually worked on something; boldly attributing innate observation pretension can backfire, you know? Listen, I'm not saying I've never treaded the water on didacticism or that I've ever wrote page after page of expository circumvention, but I sure as hell have never sought to submit something to any sort of a film journal--no matter how informal--that just emphasizes my deficiencies.

Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation finds Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson playing a man and a woman, respectively, both of whom wander around an expensive Tokyo high-rise hotel with nothing to do. They have nothing to do, the film insists, because they are too smart for it all. Anyone not Japanese in the film is depicted as terribly superficial; Johansson's husband is a fashion photographer, Murray's spouse sends him carpet samples. The Japanese, for their part, are hardly depicted at all, except to underscore the protagonists' alienation.

What they are smart about is the mystery. Too bored with their hotel rooms but too smart for all the suffocating superficiality, Murray and Johansson run around a neonlit, arcade-laden Tokyo still doing next to nothing. Maybe they're smart for each other? They kiss at the end, though that doesn't seem to change much of anything.

The problem is, Lost in Translation isn't all that smart. It seeks to capture the alienation of the upper classes, insisting that the air way up there is terribly thin in terms of meaning. Unfortunately, the film is just as thin, about as meaningful as your average episode of Laguna Beach, an MTV reality television with cinema-like production values that documented the love lives of immensely well-to-do teenagers in California. I struggle to see what difference it makes that the vacuity of Lost in Translation is intentional; the result is just about the same.

Maybe the film's problem was that it's director, Sofia Coppola, is the well-to-do daughter of Francis Ford Coppola (known for such films as the Godfather triology, Apocalypse Now and Jack). She's probably had access to cinematic tropes all her life (I hear she name-dropped Antonioni in her Best Screenplay Oscar speech), but Lost in Translation makes me think she's lost as to how to tie all these tropes together into something meaningful.

The internet has been a savior for a lot of things but also has shallowly verified cheap amounts of self-importance. It's recognized that certain informalities are going to be there, but it doesn't mean it's actually just a selling point. Since when has reviewing been more about chauvinism than about perceptiveness? Calling Lost in Translation "vacuous" (irony, I know) or implying fault with it's attempt at "captur[ing] the alienation of the upper classes, insisting that the air way up there is terribly thin in terms of meaning" is much too contrived for any level of reviewing, especially when neither of those jabs are actually defined; after all, the latter denunciation pretty much nullifies Fellini's, Antonioni's, and half of Resnais' catalog. Although, I never knew that alienation, detachment, culture shock, existentialism, etc. were purely high-browed ideals. Does Satantango fail because desolation only holds bearing with those who truly know deprivation and poverty? And above all, are we still at the point where gender and (implied) nepotism are actually being sold as authentic criticism?

I've sort of been on a Lost in Translation/ Sofia Coppola streak as of late, so I'll try to post some responses to common criticism within the next day or two.