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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.

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