Found in Translation

Rating: Null/10 (7 February 2004)

A Great Movie. Bill Murray deserves the 2004 Academy Award for Best Actor in a "Comedy" for his dead-on performance of a 50-something American male searching for himself and the true meaning of life.
Brilliant real-life Writer and director Sofia Coppola has made the movie Peter Sellers' character Aldo Venucci, posing as a film director, was trying to make in "After the Fox", a wonderful 1966 slapstick comedy actually directed by Vittorio de Sica and written by Neil Simon. Even the Gold of Cairo on the beach of an ancient small town in Italy has been translated into the $2 million the Japanese are paying Bill Murray's character Bob Harris, an aging egotistical actor, in order to do a whiskey endorsement in the ultramodern huge city of Tokyo. FYI, in "After the Fox" the aging egotistical actor was played by Victor Mature and the "romantic" interest was played by a young Britt Ekland, who here looks uncannily like today's young Scarlett Johansson who plays Charlotte in "Lost in Translation." Whether these weird similarities were conscious or subconscious on Coppola's part really doesn't matter - the movie within the movie as shown in "After the Fox" was purposely an unintentional and laughable silly mess and "Lost in Translation" is intentionally bittersweet, serious, and perfect. However, I would enjoy hearing Coppola's and Simon's take on this sometime.
Everyone should see "Lost in Translation" - especially all us American males 50 or over.