Totally soporific! The cure for insomnia.

Rating: 5/10 (23 June 2004)

I kept waiting for something to happen. I kept waiting for the movie to develop. It never did. The film is filled with long, lingering shots of Bob Harris (Bill Murray) looking bored and bewildered and Charlotte (Scartlett Johansson) looking wistful and winsome (Johansson is easier to look at for extended periods of time). There are several scenes in which Japanese people speak to Murray's character in Japanese, which he doesn't understand, and scenes in which he speaks to non-English speaking Japanese in English. In these scenes, there was no translation for anything to be lost in. Bob Harris' inability to care about the new carpet that his wife is fixated on is a heavy handed metaphor demonstrating that you don't have to be separated by the lack of a common language to lose things in translation. The movie also seems to want to convey the message that anyone who is happy and upbeat about life (the cabaret singer, John and Kelly for example) is a moron, and that truly sensitive people have to be miserable and bored, whether they understand the language or not. My wife left to weed the garden about halfway through this movie, but I stayed to the end because I was determined to get my $2 worth from the video rental.