[edit] # 21:01

A Week in Japan

It's not often that a completely deadpan expression is one of the most satisfying parts of a movie, but Bill Murray's face in Lost in Translation definitely hit the spot. He plays an American actor spending a week in Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial and get away from his family for a little while. His counterpart is another American played by Scarlett Johansson, who seems to have been auditioned primarily for her skill in hanging around a hotel room in her underwear, though I'm sure she exhibits many other fine qualities as well. She's the wife of a photographer on a business trip, and mopes around while he's off working all the time. Staying at the same hotel, the two form a sort of comfort relationship that seemed too gentle for the word "affair" but still wasn't something they should go off and tell their spouses about.

This movie isn't really plot-oriented in the usual way, but it's interesting for other reasons. It's more like a little window showing one episode in these people's lives, rather than a complete entity in its own right. The American-Japanese culture clashes are amusing, though not played up as much as one might expect from the title. The visual images of Tokyo were also fascinating. Overall, I wasn't completely sold on the movie, but it was still pretty enjoyable. So readers should accept my conditional recommendation based on their own individual tastes.

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