Skip to main content

Lost in Translation - Film Review

If anyone can be amazing being deadpan it is Bill Murray, and it is true in this film about two souls lost in Japan.  The protagonist is a film personality of some repute back in Hollywood and in Tokyo to promote a Japanese whisky played by Bill Murray.

He meets another young and relatively newlywed American, a New Yorker played by Scarlett Johansson.  Much better to look at when the film was made circa 2003, the Oscar winning screenplay (by a daughter of Francis Coppola) gave equal screen time to shots of her (almost) naked butt as much as her face.  No problem there.

Bill Murray's character is frustrated (as it is in most movies he is in) with life as a married man and tries to escape it literally by coming to Japan to do this commercial.  But when there he encounters through a series of challenges, that he is looking for something less complicated than his currents state and that frustrates him more.  He finds some solace when he meets the Scarlett character who is also put up at the same hotel as he in Tokyo and they hit it off.

He is hilarious and amazing at that by conveying all these emotions without changing his tone or his facial expressions.  Another actor that can pull this off by looking perpetually constipated is Albert Brooks.

Slow moving except for a few scenes involving the Shinkansen (bullet train), the movie is still a fun watch.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Back in DC

This time for a tech conference in the realm of what else? AI. But applied to an oft neglected space called Knowledge Management. The latter is a community of practice that focuses on analyzing, organizing and making available reams of data that have been gathered over time by various functions within an organization for anyone in the company to utilize. This function or process is ripe for applying AI agents (or agentic AI framework) and optimize for better outcomes. It was informative. More rewarding was getting acquainted with folks who practice this craft as well as learning of what they see in the corporate or public sectors. Since the venue was Washington DC it also afforded me the chance to take evening strolls albeit the weather was trying. With wind chill in the single digit it still is a glamorous place to perambulate through history absorbing what this country has been through since its founding days. I was able to visit the place Lincoln was killed along with his monument t...

Costa Rica

 Our first foray into Central America. That elongated isthmus that forms the geographic boundary between two vast continents of North and South America. Specifically landing for NYE 2026 in San Jose, Costa Rica. Capital city for this region that does not have its own army, instead relying on its big bro the Estados Unidos to the north is a metropolis of approx. 500K people. Largely wilderness and with both a Pacific and Carribean/Atlantic coast the country is rich in bio diversity. In Spanish it means the rich coast so named by Columbus landing in early 16th century and being mesmerized by the local tribes sporting gold jewelry.   Our stay included visiting the foothills of a large strato volcano called Arenal and enjoying the naturally heated thermal baths for a while.  Lunching amidst lush forest and watching indigenous species of avian noise makers fly overhead. Toucans, some sort of pea hens, multiple song bird species completed the spectacle. Iguanas and a lonel...

A few good books

 On an informal mission to read one book a week as long as the eyes allow for such ambition. Fiction or non is not important as long as it entertains and /or educates. To that end the past few weeks have brought a bounty in the form of some wonderful and then not so engaging literature. Among the notables are - Non fiction category: 1. Good arguments by Bo Seo (how to handle a dispute or debate the most efficient way possible) 2. Genesis by Eric Schmidt (and former US Secy of State Henry Kissinger, who recently passed) - how AI might affect our lives as we know it 3. One in a billion - Zarna Garg (an autobiographical look at an Indian born American woman with a bindi narrated in a standup format - yes it is at times cliched but still funny) Fiction: 1. Personal by Lee Child (a vigilante story with Jack Reacher the giant, nomad protagonist of Child's novels goes hunting for a sniper) 2. Ramayana unraveled by Ami Ganatra (she might disagree about it being a work of fiction but oh wel...