Review. Lost in Translation

LOST IN TRANSLATION

I felt like seeing this film since I am a student in Translation & Interpreting and its title caught my attention. What surprised me was when the film finished and I my air was as just as the beginning of the film. Nothing inspiring, nothing touching.

The film is all-too-often slow or just plain boring. I can resume the whole story in just one line: Two American souls, in a very different country, Japan, where they met themselves and because of the contact they feel an irresistible and impossible-accomplishing desire.

I am not a professional reviewer but, please allow me to criticize in a somewhat negative way this film. The director, Sofia Coppola, seems to have no idea about Japanese culture, and as far as we know about shooting films (and also for writing books) is a must the author should have a deep knowledge about what he or she is going to talk about in its work. This aspect seems not to be important for Sofia Coppola; and what is even worse, she makes fun of something that she knows nothing about.

The film puts forward
an extremely patronizing,
stereotypical and borderline
 racist view of Japanese culture.

A recurring joke in the film is the mockery of Japanese speech pattern of the replacement of the letter r with the letter l. Imagine a situation where you as an American meet some Japanese people in the US. Say, you know a little bit of Japanese language. In order to convey your respect to them, you take the risk of ‘appearing ridiculous by speaking to them in Japanese. Imagine how you would feel if the Japanese people made fun of your poor pronunciation. That is a thing which rarely few Americans do: to try to learn other language since they feel superior (I don’t want to seem racist in that way, but it’s what the film suggests to say, I think the two lead characters epitomize the ‘ugly Americans’).

Another scenes of this type is the one where Murray's character struggles to understand a heavily accented Japanese director during a photo shoot, and his mimicry of the poor man's voice to decipher each instruction isn't funny, just embarrassing, akin to the lack of logic behind an English-speaking tourist abroad raising his voice to make themselves understood to non-English speakers. 

To stick of for the film, I have to say that it has some funny moments, but very few ones… For example the one where Murray is taking photos for the advertisement.

Anyway, the film actually had a profound effect on me. I love travelling, discovering new different cultures, the more striking they are, the better. That’s why I met myself in the characters’ shoes and I understood how they felt when they were for first time in a completely new city, without knowing anybody… but also the positive thing, when you begin to meet new friends, with different thoughts… Traveling to a different country is an effective way to bring out different aspects of yourself.

To sum up, this movie is neither about a specific culture nor about cultural differences. It is about feelings of alienation, loss, loneliness, isolation, and passion. It is about lost souls rediscovering what it is like to feel something for real.

It could have taken place in France or Brazil, but it would not have been as effective. If you were to create the greatest contrast possible, Japan is certainly one of the best places to pick. But, in my opinion the director should have learnt more about Japanese culture before writing the script.

Billy Elliot Review

BILLY ELLIOT

Billy Elliot, a typical film which I’ve not seen yet. My mom used to say it was a really nice film to see and I just used to think it was the classical crying film. Yes, that’s right, that’s how it was.

I sat on the classroom desk disposed to spend two hours of a (more or less) boring film to then, write a compulsory review for homework. My prospects didn’t change as the film started with a boy dancing and a background music; ‘A boring musical film too!?’ I tutted.

But once it started with the north England ambience, set on the miner’s strike of 1984, it caught my attention.

The central character is an eleven-year-boy called Billy Elliot, whose mother has recently passed away. He lives with his father and old brother, both implicated on the miner’s strike that is taking place in their own city; and also lives with his grandmother with whom he has a very close relationship, he’s very attentive with her and looks after her; when she was young she also loved ballet, that’s why she’s one of the few persons who encourage him to dance.

Before start dancing, he used to go to boxing classes but he wasn’t really good at it; while he was in the course he looked at girls taking ballet classes out of the corner of his eye, until a day he decided to try. That day, he realized that it was made for him.

When his father saw him at ballet classes, he strictly locked him in at home. ‘That’s just for girls’, he said.  The poor Billy only had his teacher Ms. Wilkinson & his best friend Michael support (with whom he has a special relationship during all the film, with a homosexual tendency; a moral banned topic in that years.)

As the film goes on, his father realizes how good his son is and accepts bringing him (as his teacher recommended) to West End theatre where, because his circumstances and despite doing a quite bad debut, he’s accepted and  where many years later he will become a really successful dancer.

There are two ‘technical’ things that should be highlightened:  One is the vocabulary used by the characters through which it is showed their limited education and are characterized; words such: Divven’t, Piss off, ‘Dunno > =don’t know’, ‘cas > ‘because’. Phrases like: ‘You don’t get owt for nowt’; etc.

And the other one is the music used (T-Rex, David Bowie ,...), classified on the ‘glam’  tendency which  played with the sexual ambiguity on its aesthetic.

In general, the film deals with two kinds of struggle: the collective one represented by the miners and the personal one represented by Billy. And it also stimulates two ambiances: a harsh reality and a childlike innocent ambiance respectively.

I started to see the film with lack of interest and finally it made me cry.
This is an absolutely poignant and touching film. I highly recommend it.

Adaptation. Film review

Adaptation: A drama film directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman. The film is based on Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, with numerous self-referential events.

First of all we must comment the name of the title: Adaptation in which the director yens to draw a parallelism between the Darwinist concept (ability to adapt to the environment) and the work of a scriptwriter who must transfer any book to the big screen, in other words: ‘to adapt it’.

The plot starts with the desperation of a twin brother, Charlie, who should write a script from a really boring book based on an orchid’s thief.  Concerned with the weak storyline and leaving him with a serious case of writer’s block, Charlie decides to travel to New York looking for advice from the author, Susan. Once there, he feels unable to face her and call his brother Donald to pitch in.

While the plot is taking place, we can see as an audience, the other point of view; Susan Orlean's point of view: Her sadness, melancholy, her work and implication to write her book. Susan starts meeting with the ‘orchid thief’ and soaks up his style-life. She got impressed with the worship that that man cares about his flowers; she wants to know how it feels to care about something passionately, that’s why she got more and more interested on that man.

When Donald pretends to be Charlie on an interview with Susan Orlean, he immediately suspects of her because she has all the answers to his questions studied by heart. He and his brother Charlie follow Orlean to Florida where she meets Laroche, the orchid thief.

Once there, Charlie realized they don’t want the Ghost Orchid as a flower to idolize, but to manufacture a drug that causes fascination; Laroche introduced that to Orlean who was needed of love, and she fall at his feet.  Charlie was spying them outside the window while they were having sex and taking the drug, in that moment Orlean saw him and she wants him to die.

At that point of the film we can see how one of the central characters changes from being a sympathetic, sweet-tempered woman to a fiercely tightfisted and dangerous woman because of the effects of the drugs, and how Laroche take advantage of that condition.

Susan force Charlie at gunpoint to drive to a swamp, where she intend to kill him but the twins manage to run away and hide among the undergrowth. The next morning they escape with a car but they have a car accident and Donald dies. Charlie run again into the swamp (that’s quite repetitive and wearisome) but this time Laroche is attacked by a crocodile (pretty fanciful).

At this juncture the plot starts to be a bit contrived and personally, I was annoyed by the choppiness of the film, the overwhelming storyline and unrealistic details.

At the end Orlean is arrested, Charlie opens his heart and tells to her true love that he desires her and finally he finishes his script. (The closing scenes seem to progress too quickly).

In general, the film deals with the topic of the drugs, very present in our current society, the anger of finding new and powerful drugs that let us to other world, escape from our daily problems, be happy… but just for a moment, afterwards we need more and more and it becomes a vicious circle we can’t get rid off it.

The opening scenes are really searing: wildlife in fast motion; how plants and animals grow up and then die; how life slips through our fingers.

Actually, I really don’t recommend this film at all, because it has some awkward moments with no sense but on the other hand, it has really poignant phrases such this one that I want let you to think about:

“The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility”.