Movie review: Creepy climaxes, small whimsies and Herzog unplugged

Session 9: I didn’t know this until IMDB filled me in a few hours ago, but I have seen all of Brad Anderson’s films. In fact I have enjoyed everything he has done. Despite being little more than romantic comedies, Happy Accidents and Next Stop Wonderland escape the suck on the merit of its actors – Marisei Tomei, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Philp Kaufman. As many of you already know, The Machinist is fantastic and actually does justice to Christian Bale’s method acting shenanigans. Of course, there is that gratuitously updated Hitchcock train ride of 2008 – Transsiberian – which then brings us to Session 9 (co-written by Stephen Gevedon) that was released in the year 2001. I watched it a few days ago and I must say, it has left me in a deliriously creeepy state of mind (much ike Wolf Creek, Descent, Eden Lake). The sort in which, you are strangely at ease with not predicting false climaxes since you actually care about what happens to these characters; in which, you are also not cool with the director’s sense of justice, but you choose to make peace with it for the sake of cinema. Seemingly trivial stuff, but constant reminders that there’s more to the relationship between films and free time.

So, this five-member asbestos cleaning crew goes to work on the Danvers State Mental Hospital (now an abandoned asylum) and well, something’s not right. The boss man – Gordon (Peter Mullan) – seems to be a little over the edge, his best friend and crew chief – Phil (David Caruso) – has gotten secretive about his professional intentions while the other two – Hank (Josh Lucas) and Mike (Gevedon…again) – seem more troubled than ever before. Oh there’s Jeff (Brendan Sexton III) too, but he’s just a slacker who’s afraid of the dark. As the film claws its way towards a feverish climax, you are desperately unsure about what exactly is creeping you out; and when you finally realize the cause behind all the bloody carnage, you sigh and think about how enormously frightening it must be for blind mice to find love. If you are one of those normal people, you’ll probably recoil in terror and mumble, “oh that’s messed up”.

Ahem…anyway, Peter Mullan and Stephen Gevedon give fantastic performances with the latter proving his mettle in scriptwriting, as well. Tight, atmospheric, and gripping, Session 9 is definitely one of the creepiest films I have ever seen.

Quarantine: I love zombie films. If my fears about the swine flu were to ring true and the dead start coming back to eat the living, I would want George Romero to come over to India and shoot a film about that. Hell, he could even title the film as  Had To Joke About Pigs Flying, Didn’t You? and I’d still love it. Zombies = fun. Needles to say, I got a real kick out of Quarantine. John Erick Dowdle, along with his brother Drew, took the storyline from Jaume Balagueró and Luis Berdejo (who wrote the apparently superior Spanish original – REC) and gave it an ol’ American twist. For instance, they bring into account the distrust people had towards the Bush administration. In this case, a bunch of middle-class folks are trapped inside a building that has been sealed up by secretive government agents. Inside, a cop and a military officer try to rally up the forces to ward off those pesky zombies. I am pretty sure I have seen this a hundred times before in different films, but I have yet to dislike even one. However I must admit… The Poughkeepsie Tapes movie sounds infinitely cooler.

Dead Man’s Shoes: My consumption of Shane Meadows’ films begins with Dead Man’s Shoes. I have read too many nice things about him for me stay away from his work any further. I guess I’ll post a Shane Meadows edition in couple of weeks, so I’ll make this one brief. Dead Man’s Shoes is a tremendous low-key revenge thriller. The premise is not original, but the atmosphere certainly is. The lush sceneries that embrace the screen every ten minutes, along with the lovely music score, do wonders. The film begins with Richard (Paddy Considine) scouting lambs for the slaughter, as we are told that this former army officer is out to draw blood from all those who did horrible things to his younger brother. And then we meet the perpetrators – some callous, drug-addled men, others normal blokes who just had a wild night out. There’s almost this Woodsman effect (a film in which Kevin Bacon plays a sympathetic pedophile) which causes you to question Richard’s morality – and that’s exactly what makes this film utterly fantastic (and also why Azrael remains as one of the great Batman characters). I will write more about Shane Meadows soon.

Bottle Rocket: Wes Anderson’s films – Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou – have redefined my expectation of humour from mainstream American cinema. Even the recent Darjeeling Limited was pretty great too. As much as I would like to habe them labeled as underground, they wouldn’t fit the billing. They have A-list actors, a decent budget and pristine production – elements that fortunately seem inept at tainting the humour quotient. Prior to watching this, I have heard a lot of nice people say that Wes was never quite as funny as he once was in Bottle Rocket. Well, I don’t know, man…I just wasn’t tickled by Bottle Rocket’s supposedly whimsical comedy. It was almost as though Wes Anderson let the more random of the Coen Brothers (not sure which one) take over the directing duties. While I could have thought of far worse directors to associate metaphorically with this film, it does lack the charm that accompanied his Wes’ films with Bill Murray.

The story is that Owen and Luke Wilson – two likable criminals desperate to play high stakes try to weasel their way into better lives. The jokes draw a laugh or two, but that’s mostly because of the over-the-top delusion of Owen’s character (Dignan). You can almost see where Wes Anderson got the idea for that Eli Cash character in The Royal Tenenbaums. Luke’s a miss in this one as his character channels the mild confusion that drives those kids in Beverly Hills 90210 and passes it off as existential grief. Together they get themselves entangled into silly situations until salvation reaches out to one of them. Unlike the film, life’s happy ending worked out much better. Mr Wes Anderson has grown to become an absolutely terrific director.

Incident At Loch Ness: So, this Hollywood producer (Zak Penn) ropes in Werner Herzog and a few others to shoot a film about the Loch Ness monster. Little does Herzog know that Zak just wants to make a blockbuster without actually giving a shit about cinema, art, German New Wave and all that. The thing is, another crew is already filming a documentary about Werner Herzog’s life so we, the audience, get to watch the making of The Enigma Of Loch Ness, and also the making of the making of the same. Of course, none of this actually true, so what we are left with is a confusing mockumentary that is both hilarious and silly in equal proportions. Directed by Zak Penn (who is friggin awesome as a mean-spirited asshole), and starring Herzog…wait, no really…dammit. Go watch Incident At Loch Ness and you tell me.

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The collected works of Jim Jarmusch

To be honest, never once have I wondered how awesome it would be to stumble upon a Jim Jarmusch collection. You see, a blinding light shone through the weirdly well-lit corridors of Parsons Complex when my eyes caught sight of the Herzog collection. There were fairies and elves prancing everywhere, tossing chocolate-flavoured gummy bears and brightly coloured yo-yos around. In comparison, the Jim Jarmusch DVD was met with a less enthusiastic response. Not that it takes away anything from my regard for the man’s brilliance. Jarmusch certainly rivals Wes Anderson when it comes to infusing films with gloriously offbeat, warm ambience. It should also be said that both the casting and the music in his films are zimbly amazing (most of my friends are mals, it was bound to happen sometime). Hence it is with much delay and delirious coffee-stained nights that I give you the collected works of Jim Jarmusch.

Permanent Vacation: Shot on 16 MM film, Jarmusch’s debut is a weird little feature that follows the trail of Aloysius ‘Allie’ Parker as he walks around Manhattan to find something warm stumble upon anything vaguely comforting. We find out precious little about Allie and the city, which has decisively decided to alienate him. He’s free between the ears (not vacuous), reads French novels, smokes cigarettes, listens to jazz and drifts along without too much fuss. As for Manhattan, well, we discover that she’s into jazz but we already know that from those countless Woody Allen films, don’t we? We meet a few of Permanent Vacation’s characters, as well…gentle, sullen characters who’d sooner light up a cigarette than romance a moment. No surprise it is that nearly a quarter of a century later, he would write an entire film around Bill Murray.

Stranger Than Paradise: With his 1984 sophomore film, Jarmusch had clearly started believing that musicians would make fine actors; a belief that would yield wonderful results a few years later. In Stranger Than Paradise, musicians John Lurie and Richard Edson are focal characters in all three parts of the film. Lurie, a jazz composer for Lounge Lizards, plays a nonchalant New York hipster (Willie) who is a paid a brief visit by his sixteen-year-old cousin (Eva) from Hungary. And there’s Edson, ex-drummer of alternative gurus Sonic Youth, who plays Willie’s sweet-natured friend (Eddie). Digressive fact: Edson also played Turturro’s brother in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. After a hilariously dramatic note of transition, the film takes us on Eddie and Willies’ journey to meet Eva in Cleveland and then on a heartbreaking road trip to Florida. I must say, the characters have been crafted with such fragility that the adventures they go through seem less tolerant towards them. If you’ve never watched a Jarmusch film, start with this.

Down By Law: Despite Bill Murray’s greatness that elevated Broken Flowers to level of cinema that would humble most people, Down By Law smugly remains as my favourite film of the collection thus far. In this charmingly twisted tale that takes place in New Orleans, three goofballs – Tom Waits (Zack), Roberto Benigni (Roberto), and John Lurie (Jack) – inadvertently start a prison break, flee into the nightmarish bayou and then wad through the damp Louisiana marshes to escape a lifetime of confinement. Mr Waits is seven shades of awesome as a local radio DJ whose love for booze lands him severe trouble. He looks like a crazed version of Lyle Lovett and talks with the same gnarly lisp that drove some of his finest music (Alice, Rain Dogs). Roberto Benigni is the Italian arty version of Jack Black. He does the one thing that he can do really well – act goofy and silly.

I wasn’t entirely convinced about Lurie’s character but there was too much love that got in the way of such cynicism. For instance, the cinematography and the music are some of the finest I have ever seen in an indie film. Haunting black-and-white shots of the swamp and New Orleans’ weeping nights set to the tunes of dirty jazz and gnarly, whiskey-soaked ballads? Why, thank you, kind sir.

Mystery Train: Jarmusch’s maiden tryst with colour is a typically wisecracking tale involving foreign tourists in the state Tennessee, looking for their very own Elvis Presley experience in some crappy hotel. The tourists – a teenaged couple from Japan, an Italian widow and a British criminal – all get more than they bargained for, but thanks to Jim Jarmusch’s daft strokes, we somehow feel that they were better off prior to spending the night in Memphis. Don’t ask me how; it’s just one of those things that you suspect the director of. Mystery Train marked the first time (a suspicion, once again) that the director riddled his films with stellar cameos performances to egg the story further into the fantasy territory. Funk and soul legend Rufus Thomas, the ungodly cool Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, vice chancellor of punk Joe Strummer, Steve friggin Buscemi make memorable appearances as Mystery Train’s most delightful characters.

Night On Earth: Like Wikipedia says, it “is a collection of five vignettes concerning the temporary bond formed between taxi driver and passenger in five different cities: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki.” The thing is I liked only one out of five vignettes. The mildly passable Winona Ryder and Cassavettes’ muse Gena Rowlands sink the LA episode into the sort of dozy conversational piece that I’d expect from some dude called Leyfu Pierre who thinks that a master’s degree in advanced cinema would immediately make his short film infinitely more intelligent than it actually is. The Roberto Benigni–ridden Rome episode sucks too; gone is the charm that briefly engulfed him in Down By Law. I think it’s high time that Benigni remade Adam Sandler’s Waterboy. The nocturnal anecdotes from New York and Paris hardly pass for a silver lining with its momentary glimpses of sadness and humour. Thank heavens for the Helsinki episode in which the greatness that is Matti Pellonpää (from the fantastic film Leningrad Cowboys Go America) elevates Night On Earth to what it was originally intended to be. Mildly discomforting and thoroughly enjoyable.

Dead Man: Already reviewed here.

Year Of The Horse: Listen, I love me some Neil Young and the Crazy Horse Band. I mean, Rust Never Sleeps is one of my all-time favourite live albums. I have high regards for Jarmsuch too; his only mistake till date (1997) was casting Winona Ryder in a short film. Having said all that, I must question the wisdom of men, mice, horses, musicians and one Jarmusch himself for having released this documentary about the band’s 1996 tour. The audio is really, really bad and the video quality – all 16 MM of it – is unsuitable for capturing the live ambience of explosive bands such as the Crazy Horse. Call me whatever, but I also expected the godfather of grunge to be more insightful.

Ghost Dog, The Way of the Samurai: Already reviewed here.

Coffee And Cigarettes: I’ll admit that I bought this film (or whatever it is) a couple of years ago on the weight of all the talent (actors, comedians and musicians) featuring in it. Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Jack and Meg White, Bill Murray, RZA, GZA, Steve Buscemi, Steven Wright and a few magnificent others star in this series of black and white vignettes that all have coffee and cigarettes as common themes. While some of the vignettes in Coffee And Cigarettes tread dangerously close to the arty farty territory, a majority of them have enough off-kilter, almost nonsensical humour in them to make this an engaging 90 minutes. The inane conversations between Benigni (I don’t know what to do with this bloke) and Stephen Wright, Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, Bill Murray and Wu Tang Clan’s finest are perfect examples of Jarmusch’s brilliant pseudo-insider, deadpan comedy. Sort of like a Jerry Lewis film; with the physical humour being replaced by absurdist dialogues. I’m talking about a really, really good Jerry Lewis film.

Broken Flowers: Oh crazy old Bill Murray, how I choose to admire the expressionless ennui with which you play all those wonderful characters that directors like Jarmusch and Wes Anderson craft for you. It’s no secret that Bill Murray is my favourite actor like ohmygod ever. In Broken Flowers, he plays Don Johnston, loner and self-loather extraordinaire. A spectacularly detached man who once made a busload of money through computers and then lived without ever owning one. As quaintly funny as that sounds, it’s not what the film is about. As fate would have it, Don gets a pink letter out of the blue that informs him about a son that he never knew he had. Don gives it a serious thought for a few fleeting seconds and then almost reconciles that it would take nothing less than being hit by a tsunami wave littered with ninja piranhas to disturb him from his disenchanted slumber (ok he doesn’t actually say that). Thanks to his hilariously intrusive neighbour Winston (a wonderful performance by Jeffrey Wright), an immigrant from Ethiopian who obsesses about detective stories, Don is forced to go on this road trip to discover his son and his elusive mother. I must reiterate that Jeffrey Wright kills it; in fact Ebert brilliantly describes the character as a “go-getter from Ethiopia who supports a wife and five kids with three jobs, and still has time to surf the net as an amateur detective.”

There is about a million other things that I want to appreciate in this film (stunning Ethiopian jazz, daft one-liners, great performances by the actresses, a Tilda Swanton sighting, and so on), but I fear that I might not have the space to further elaborate on why Bill Murray is the man. In the final scene when the camera pans 360 degrees around Murray’s face, I realized that for the first time in the film, Don Johnston is going through a specific emotion; for those few seconds, I stared at his weary eyes only to realize something far more important. When life gives you lemonades, ask Billy Murray to make rum cocktails.

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Movie review: Gigantic Indians, meth labs and new age butchers

Since the influx of new music is killing time, I have had to delay posting the weekend movie reviews. I have got three Werner Herzog films and a couple of others by Jim Jarmusch left to watch, so next Monday I would be posting the complete reviews of both DVD box sets.

Dead Man: Jim Jarmusch films are bitingly funny. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hires genetically jacked-up vampire bats to write dialogues for his films. People like Jarmusch and Wes Anderson are brilliant in the way they use humour to drive home a particularly gray point. Quite unlike the more theatrical mainstream comedies that rely on execution of humour rather than its actual content. There is more of an onus on making funny faces than actually saying something funny. Case in point, the American Pie series and the decade of retardation it spawned. However, in Dead Man, there is enough deadpan existential humour to tickle seven generations of Nietzsches. And it’s not one of those “you’ve got to be Kevin Smith to understand the one-liners” comedies either. For instance, take the storyline. Johnny Depp plays William Blake, an accountant on the run who ends up meeting Nobody, a large and morose Red Indian in a desolate industrialized small town. After a brief discussion between the two, they decide to kill as many white people as they possibly can; there’s also Lance Henriksen who plays a cannibalistic bounty hunter out to get them by any means necessary. You might wonder, what in the blue hell is this shit? But I assure you…everything works really well.

The William Blake references, the black and white cinematography, Neil Young’s original compositions, Henriksen’s game face, John Hurt’s accent, Iggy Pop’s cross-dressing…gasp, yes…everything.

Spun: Jonas Akerlund’s Spun is a cocktail of few druggie films of the past two decades. Take half a cup of Trainspotting, add a large dose of Requiem For A Dream, squeeze a few drops from Go and throw in a few pieces of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, as well. But the thing is Spun is way more fun (not necessarily better) than any of them. I guess you can thank Renita Whited, the casting director, for that. The energy and exuberance that the Spun’s cast showcase seem so infectious that you almost get the impression that a strange concoction of mashed ecstasy pills and cough syrup was passed around during the shooting of this film. Jason Schwartzman, Mena Suvari, Brittany Murphy and John Leguizamo – all of them do a fantastic job of playing meth-heads looking for a fix and quite possibly, an off-the-road path to serenity. Props to them for going beyond what we thought they were capable of.

One particular scene stands out as a testament to how gloriously fucked up and fun Spun can be. Watch out for the conversation that takes place inside the car between Ross (Schwartzman) and Nikki (Brittany) towards the end of the film. Such twisted fun! For the sake of NOT sounding like I’m gassed up on a few concoctions myself, I’m going to downplay the awesomeness that Mickey Rourke brings to Spun as Cook. A serious challenger to the Michael Madsen’s Cool Cat Of Cinema Award.

Midnight Meat Train: Midnight Meat Train is one of the short stories in Clive Bakers’ Books of Blood, a collection of literary screams. I haven’t read the book yet so I’ll hold back personal biases about interpretations. For what it’s worth, director Ryuhei Kitamura’s film about a serial killer tearing through the heart of city metro subways leaves little to be desired. I say this because nobody should watch this, expecting the sort of subtle titillation that serial killer films such as Elements Of Crime, Cronicas and The Gray Man quietly stir up through visual metaphors and striking passages of dialogue. Watch this as you would those slow-burning, violent and strangely Lynchian Eighties movies.

Matter of fact, grab John Raffo’s Johnny Skidmarks and watch that first. You will have newfound respect for John Lithgow and Peter Gallagher. As for Midnight Meat Train, Vinnie Jones and Bradley Cooper are sort of alright but I’d say Jonathan Sela, the director of photography, should rightfully take most the credit. Who says gore can’t be stylish?

High Fidelity: Nick Hornby’s book is better. Much much better. And Catherine Zeta-Jones is as awful as always. With those clichés out of the way, let us focus on the positives. The music is friggin great. I mean, really really great… like one kickass garage mixtape. Featuring tracks by The 13th Floor Elevators, The Kinks, Velvet Underground, The Beta Band and Stereolab, High Fidelity’s OST is one of the finest of its kind. Oh and Tim Robbins is really funny with his character’s “so hip I’m square” douchebaggery. Wellllll…uhmmmm…uh huh…so much for the positives. Many have opined that the film had a brilliant cast and while the jury is still out on that, I must say that it sort of felt like the actors and actresses were sleepwalking their way through this film. Catherine Zeta-Jones continues to amaze us with her impersonation skills. Once again she plays a role of a woman who thinks she can act. Jack Black plays an over-excitable Pomeranian. Both John and Joan Cusack are wasted yet again (see Grosse Point Blank to see just how good they can be). The mediocrity of observation has started to hurt, so read more about the storyline here.

P.S: Mickey Rourke’s character Cook has been given a lifetime ban in three countries for the sheer amount of awesomeness he exudes every two seconds

P.S.S: Da Bear has reviewed one of my favourite independent American films – Shane Caruth’s Primer. Read it here.

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Kinky stranglers and bloody valentines

British Invasion is one of those rare mainstream experiments gone right. Technically, The Beatles kickstarted the genre by simply further expanding on their sensibilities to glue together a triad of the most popular genres – rock, pop and soul. British Invasion was almost England’s answer to Do Wop music; a sort of entry point across the Atlantic for brash youngsters to wield their steel instruments and cockney accents. The flower power ethos of the Sixties let psychedelia slip into the sounds of the Invasion, which previously only focused on song structures that were candy-coated, and almost retarded in its simplicity. By the mid-Sixties, gone were the love songs and lullabies (and I guess we can all quietly thank Bob Dylan for that) with bands such as The Byrds, The Kinks, The Zombies and The Animals flirting with gritty blues and gnarly soundscapes; British Invasion was a different beast altogether.

Suffice to say the beast began wielding a pitchfork and kicking it’s mother in her stomach while giving the middle finger salute to the Queen with the evolution of the Punk scene. We got the dubious distinction of watching to kids sporting bad Mohawks and strumming guitars with bloody fingers. Sort of the Neanderthal stage in the evolution of music where only attitude and nihilism went under the microscope and where emerged an insane vortex in which Sid Vicious was worshipped as a musician.

With New Wave, Synth Pop and Glam Rock dominating the Eighties, it almost seemed that all hope was lost in redeeming the once glorious British Invasion. I guess, only a brave few such as The Smiths, The Stranglers, Talking Heads and Wreckless Eric survived the onslaught perpetuated by Rod Stewart while the others – The Cure, New Order, Depeche Mode – merely conformed to what was popular at that time.

When grunge exploded in Nineties and everyone and his cousin’s milkman were listening to Nirvana, British Invasion was preparing itself for metamorphosis. A few British artists took it upon themselves to ignore whims and fancies of the American industry and more importantly to convince everyone that there was more to life than The Beatles. A lot of people have different opinions regarding the exact moment when this actually happened. Personally, I think that My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (1991) is birthplace of the new British identity in popular culture. Before Loveless, the shoegazing genre was frowned upon and merely seen as drug-induced stupor and once it was released, for the first time the world stumbled upon what was to be known shoegazing and none could lay a claim to it but the Brits. And it didn’t just stop there as Primal Scream, Happy Monday, Blur, The Brand New Heavies, Massive Attack and a bunch of other bands from England invented new soundscapes and made their into the hearts of thousands who just weren’t impressed with the three-chord mayhem of Nirvana. Also, this was the year when the Greenwood brothers, O’Brien, Selway, and Tom Yorke decided to get together and call themselves Radiohead.

The second wave continued both in spirit and surprisingly even on the popularity polls well into the new millennium especially, with the rebirth of garage rock and shenanigans of the odd American – Jack White. Muse, Razorlight and Artic Monkeys joined in the festivities, as well, with their re-interpretation of Radiohead and Oasis.

Lately, there has been a lull in original Brit music and with the term ‘shoegazing’ raising more eyebrows than wallets, it is only a matter of time before the second wave is dead and buried. But thankfully, the Poms have made enough good music to keep us occupied for the rest of our lives and probably the Queen’s too. And a special mention to directors Wes Anderson and Guy Ritchie for their impeccable selection of songs in films and to Will Ferrell for a rousing rendition of the best love song of 1978.

Download

The Kinks – Nothing In This World (Rushmore soundtrack)

Wreckless Eric – Whole Wide World (Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack)

The Stranglers – Golden Brown (Snatch soundtrack)

Buy

The British Invasion DVD set

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Movie review: Bill Murray is God

Bill Murray, William H Macy, John Goodman, Mickey Rourke and Michael Madsen – so reads the list of my favourite actors of all time. They are neither method actors nor have they showed any sort of affinity for Shakespearean shenanigans. With more wrinkles on their face than on the Queen Mother’s ass, these actors have been known for their portrayal of real men confronted by surrealism, self-sacrifice and several Coen brothers’ scripts.

Bill Murray is my top pick of the list; both for all the quirks he weaves into his characters with dissonant ease and for letting a cigarette dangle from his lips like no other actor could.

Rushmore

Director Wes Anderson is to Bill Murray as John Turturro is to the Ethan and Joel Coen. Having starred in four of his films, Murray has often saved his finest for this Academy-award winning director. Rushmore marked the first time these two brilliant minds came together and it also propelled one Mr. Jason Schwartzman forever into a hyperbole of misguided, uni-browed puberty. It’s an urban tale that draws little circles with its feet before proceeding with the storyline. Rushmore is not innocent enough to be labeled as cute; in fact a dark current of jealousy and alienation runs deep in the script and into the veins of all the lead characters. As for the story, well…so this unlikely duo of a detached industrialist (Murray) and a super geeky, super-enthusiastic student (Schwartzman) fall in love with an English teacher (a lovely Olivia Williams) and inadvertently set in motion a game of one-upmanship. It’s as simple as that…only that it’s not. Huge blobs of dry wit and harsh sarcasm float around throughout the film as the audience is amused to death by a set of characters who forsake civility for getting their point across. Brian Cox and Seymour Cassel are fantastic, as usual. As for Bill Murray, Rushmore re-launched his career and caused him to be pigeonholed for years to come. Thankfully, the coop has been large enough for Murray to shine like the crazy fucking diamond that he is.

Lost In Translation

Sofia Coppola has made a career out of painting films. Much like Virgin Suicides, Lost In Translation moves at a pace that is normally reserved for brushstrokes on canvases. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is an aging Hollywood star whose former laurels rested on a plethora of bad Eighties action flicks. Now he stays at the Park Hyatt Tokyo hotel to film a Japanese whisky commercial. We know that Bob Harris is a good man with a shaky marriage and an even shakier perception of Japanese culture. Through his eyes, we see a sprawling robotic landscape sprinkled with arcade parlours, flashy gadgets, karaoke machines and crazy hairdos. In another room at the hotel, we meet Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson) – the young wife of a hotshot photographer who often finds herself on the losing end of an existential argument. Her husband (Giovanni Ribisi) has left her alone in the hotel during one of his assignments. With one haunted by a failed marriage and the other forever on the throes of existential angst, their paths cross briefly at a pub in the hotel. The rest of the film shows the duo clinging on to each other’s pinkys against a backdrop of loneliness, desolation and xenophobia. Right before the end credits roll, Bob whispers something in Charlotte’s ear. We don’t get to hear it. In fact we can’t even be sure if they have decided to meet up after leaving Japan. What Wes Anderson has left us with is a gentle remainder that there are certain things better left unsaid…on and off camera.

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