Movies : September 2003

23 September 2003

Lost in Translation

If one must make a two-bored-Americans-at-loose-ends-in-the-wacky-land-of-the-Japanese movie, one could do worse. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, an actor recently arrived in Japan to follow the money and film whiskey commercials. But with his marriage back home on shaky grounds and convinced, for example, that the director of the commercial said much more than the interpreter is letting on, he is ill-at-ease and finds himself in the hotel’s bar often enough. Which is where Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) makes her move on him. Largely abandoned by her husband (Giovanni Ribisi) who’s more taken with his photographic subjects on assignment (including a blonde Anna Faris whose movie-star character’s geniality ought to overcome her literary ignorance) she’s resorting to listening to books-on-tape and wandering religious sites to seek purpose in life. Slack-jawed, dull-eyed, gauzy-voiced, and emotionally inert ? That’s why we like her. She’s playing bored, after all.

103 minutes.

21 September 2003

Thirteen

Tracy (Rachel Evan Wood) is a nice 13-year-old daughter: she gets good grades at school, she’s friendly to classmates and neighbors, she helps out at home where her single mother (Holly Hunter) runs a hair salon out of a single-family dwelling somewhere in Los Angeles. But the easy way in which Evie (Nikki Reed) attracts flocks of boys arouses longings in Tracy, and one last insult about her socks later, Tracy makes her move into Evie’s circle and in every parent’s nightmare outdoes Evie in every aspect of life that matters: stealing, boys, piercings, men, smoking, skipping class, drugs, more men, cursing, sex, cutting… Mother, with addictions in her past, struggling with deadbeat customers, juggling an ex-husband and a new boyfriend no one else in the family likes, tries to stick to the outline of good parenting without the gumshoe work of following up and is overwhelmed. Distinguished chiefly by the co-writing credit for Reed allegedly playing someone close to her own experiences, and the director’s qualifications including dating Reed’s father, this would-be cautionary tale is undermined by its overwrought approach to plotting and editing.

101 minutes.

Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 12-Sep-2004