Takes itself way too seriously...

Rating: 3/10 (1 January 2006)

Director Coppola taps into that feeling of being lost we get every once in a while and turns it into a 2-hour movie.
To magnify and sustain feelings of isolation, artificialness, and being 'on the outside', Coppola plops her two characters in Tokyo, a perfect choice thanks to its distinct 'foreign-ness' but lack of 'ickiness'. Dialogue is generally at the level of the stuff you do your best to ignore while walking down the street, so when a good line of scripted dialogue comes out of a character's mouth (e.g. Scarlet's phone call early in the movie), it seems out of place. You can tell it had been in Coppola's little diary for awhile.
Personally, I'm waiting for Lost in Translation II, where instead of two rich white people, the Murray character is a Colombian on a one-year visa working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week in an assembly line at a Toyota factory sending his entire paycheque home to his family, and the Scarlet character is a 17-year old Filipino with a fake visa whose passport has been confiscated by the yakuza and is being forced into prostitution.
But I suspect the people who like Lost in Translation wouldn't like it so much if the characters had real problems.
A disappointing 3/10 for the silly Lost in Translation.