A visual and aural film that conveys emotion with images and acting rather than plotting and characters

Rating: 10/10 (26 December 2014)

As is aptly covered in many of the other reviews on this website, Lost in Translation is very much a love-it or hate-it film. I know a lot of people find it boring and pointless and generally just a huge waste of time, but it's my favorite film of all-time. I catch my fair share of flak for gushing like a schoolgirl about how much I love the film, with people accusing me of being pretentious or a film hipster or whatever for liking it. Rather than retread ground already covered by the thousands of review on this website, I thought I'd cover why the film appeals so much to me in particular rather than trying to analyze it from a more objective perspective.
There was a blog entry (http://marc-mike- movies.tumblr.com/post/47911260711/a-moment-stretched-to-eternity- sofia-coppolas) I came across not too long ago that really describes why I love the movie so much:
"Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) is one of the great mood pieces of recent cinema, a wise, tender, and melancholy delineation and evocation of what it means to be 'stuck,' to be adrift both in a foreign land and in life. It depends not on narrative, but on feeling, on compositions that express more than a thousand words could. We see in certain scenes, and even certain glances, a range of emotional terrain effortlessly conveyed by the remarkably controlled acting given by a never better Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.
Consider this scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsj9sMDgh-A), begun after a night away from marital issues, crisis, and existential ennui. To describe it would take away its magic. But what makes it so magical? It is a short sequence. Nothing really happens. And the scene doesn't call attention to itself in any self- consciously artistic way. Why then is it so effective? Perhaps it is simply Johansson's face that sells it so well. Perhaps it is for the evocative music of My Bloody Valentine. And perhaps it is for what the scene itself evokes: those respites from a life of uncertainty, basking in a moment that you wished could stretch to eternity, taking it all in before it's gone. Coppola captures those moments of bliss that we've all had, and we all cling to, as well as the knowledge that they can't possibly last forever."
And the film is packed full of scenes that affect exactly as the one listed above.
I've seen thousands of films in my life thus far and it's my absolute favorite of all-time. It's the only one I can watch repeatedly and never get tired of. Something about the way the movie makes me feel when I watch it is what attracts me to it. The dialogue, photography, lighting, and score all combine to give it this ethereal, relaxing, and slightly melancholy feeling that I can't get enough of.
I watched it literally dozens of times last year, so I specifically made a deal with myself not to watch it at all through 2014 in order to keep myself from potentially getting sick of it. If that's pretentious, then I guess I'm a pretentious man. But I'm not going to stop watching this movie several times per year... Beginning in just a few days.