Hollywood Brats' Self Delusion about Men 'n Sex 'n Foreigners

Rating: Null/10 (2 January 2004)

This is a film school exercise, not a movie. Had it been made by Joe Schmoe from East Schenectedy, rather than by the daughter of a powerful and lauded auteur, it never would have been marketed.
It's empty. There's a whole lot of nothing up on the screen and in the script.
Shot after shot of people partying indoors in Japan at night. No sense of Japan. Just a sense of hand held camera, smokey room, self congratulatory young "artistes" who haven't had to suffer for their "art."
Minimal script. There are a couple of good lines. A couple. In two hours of film time.
The self congratulation, the self absorbtion, the self masturbation, self everything.
Sofia Coppola is the not-yet-mature, very privileged daughter of a Hollywood auteur, so she goes and makes a movie about a not-yet- mature, privileged, unformed girl (really still in thumb sucking stage) who looks -- amazing! -- very like Sofia Coppola and has a non-and-yet-somehow-very-deep affair with a movie star old enough to be her grandfather.
Which movie star did Sofia have this affair with?
The movie feels so very very sorry for rich and privileged people! It is so hard, the movie tells us, to be in - eck! - Japan! Where the people are all goofy looking and speak nothing but Japanese! Horrors! How dare these Japanese look so goofy and speak Japanese in Japan!
It is so hard to be in luxury hotels. It is so hard to party all day. It is so hard to have everything you want shoved under your nose. Heatlh. Money. Great looks. So sad!
The self delusion. Every woman has this non-affair. We were all young and cute once.
All women were once girls and we all had older, powerful men chase our dewy, doughy, butts and tits, and our easily impressed psyches, around and we all thought it was just so profound and deep and something that his wife and other older women could never understand and
we were all pathetic and too young and fooling ourselves, cause these relationships almost always really stink.
I just read a confessional by someone, forget who, who talks about having a deep, meaningful affair with her teacher when she was 16 and he was 36. She told herself it was really great and only a small, provincial person would condemn her or judge the relationship.
She says that after the relationship ended, she, still 16, went through her diary and painted, with black paint, over every entry about the affair.
She theorizes that she was so hurt by, and ashamed of, this affair while it was happening that she had to paint it over, or her record of it. But she's not sure, cause she's so alienated from her emotions on this matter.
How attractive.
Oh, but it was so meaningful -- because of that one special look he gave me, because of that one special gift, because of that one special comment. Because of that one special kiss on a street in Japan. Which he later disavows when his wife finds out.
and, no, Bill Murray did not play that kind of a jerk. Which makes the whole movie utterly unbelievable.
The Scarlet Johansen part was a psych case, not a character. She lacked any identity, any center. She spent her days in translucent underwear, hanging out in a hotel room. This movie should have assigned her a shrink, a boot camp, a job, not a non-affair she could get all "significant" about.
Again, there is nothing on the screen, other than Bill Murray. No script, few sets, no action.
That's not because this is a deeply significant art movie that only really sensitive people can understand.
That's because this is a monument to self-delusion, the self-delusion of girls locked in the Elektra phase that a non-affair was something deep and beautiful and profound.
After this movie came out, Scarlet Johansen was quoted in the New York Times that she didn't want to get old -- didn't want to be a "hag" -- and that it is necessary for younger women to help older men deal with aging. Older women can't do this, she said, because menopause causes women to "die inside."
Does this chick have a clue? Give her ten years, when she gets fewer and fewer parts and people start assigning her "district attorney" roles. I guess that she is that stupid is part of her appeal to her fans, men going through their Lolita phase.