Billy Murry, The Chick From Ghost World, The Dude Who Played Pheobe’s Half-Brother On Friends, and Random Japanese Tits…What’s Not To Like?
I finally got around to checking out Lost In Translation today (God do I feel like Jackie Harvey, The Onion’s Hollywood outsider). Man what an outstanding film that was! It had everything one could want in a film: outstanding humor, beautiful cinematography, and Japanese tits…it doesn’t get any better than that!
As a foreigner residing in Asia there were a lot of scenes that spoke to me. The scene where Bob (Bill Murray) is recieving directions from a film director via a translator reminded me a lot of when I first came to Korea. The director would speak for like five minutes and the translator was like, “He said look at the camera.” It was a lot like staff meetings at my first place of employment. The owner would speak for like five minutes and then our supervisor would be like, “He said, ‘Good job.’”
The other thing that really stuck with me was the a brief segment in which the main characters were out on the town and Bill Murray’s character ends up chatting it up with some random Japanese dude at a bar. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country for any period of time will know that experience and know that kind of local who will strike up drunken conversation with foreigners at bars.
There were some things that did not apply to me. Mainly the fact that I have enough of a command of Korean to carry on most conversations (and definately to order dinner without resorting to pointing to a menu). Additionally I did not feel any of the loneliness or desparation the characters in this movie felt due to being in a foreign land, but perhaps this comes from the fact that I can communicate with locals. I’ve met foreingers who can’t speak Korean and end up being miserable here.
One other thing I noticed was the shots of Tokyo really made Seoul seem like a tiny, slum like city. Even if all they stuff shown in this movie was shot in the nicest parts of Tokyo, I’ve been to the nicest, most extravagent parts of Seoul and the stuff I saw in this flick beat Seoul down like Hulk Hogan beating down Andre The Giant.
※ Editor’s Note: The Korean title of this flick is 사랑도 통역이 되나요? which works out to be something along the lines of “Can ‘Love’ Be Translated As Well?” This is kind of ironic in that this title kind of lost something in the translation.
