Great piece of dreamy cinema - like a highly restrained Last Tango in Paris.

Rating: 8/10 (10 November 2005)

Bill Murray is in Tokyo for a whiskey commercial and the far younger Scarlet Johnson is in Tokyo because her photographer husband is shooting a hip pop group. Somehow -- and some way -- they get involved in a kind of non sexual affair.
(Like a shipboard romance without a ship!)
Americans in the main don't travel. The majority of Americans don't even own a passport. Americans in the main don't speak foreign languages and are frightened of places that don't speak English. They nearest thing they do is to go to the movies and so movie clichés is all they know about the world.
I have travelled and I do know the world from first hand experience and let me tell you something -- I don't really like Japan. It is clean, polite and fairly crime free (in terms of violent crime anyway), but somehow they envy robots. The teach people robotic style and they live robotic lives. They have no natural resources of their own -- no oil, no coal, no gas -- and yet they have a Western style economy.
Don't get me wrong I admire intelligence and hard work, but let us thank god that the whole world isn't like Japan. We'd have no rock and roll songs to sing badly (as they do in this movie) or most of the great arts: Things that are the product of the free thinker.
I was first introduced to Sofia Copolla when she produced what was the worst performance I have ever seen in a major movie (Godfather III) and so thank the living lord she has other talents -- although this might be a lucky fluke. I didn't like the Virgin Suicides at all -- not one little bit, indeed I hated everything about it.
Here she is lucky in being a beginner (look at the goof index!) that has fallen in to the company of pros. Bill Murray's face is not something I wished to linger on in his "Meatballs" prime and yet he has that something that no one can put their finger on. He is that laughing uncle that cheers up the family get together -- the kind that uses words as (secret) weapon. You'd like to be his friend.
Nothing really important happens in this movie. It reminds me somewhat of Manhattan (the Woody Alan movie) in its Spring and Autumn pairing and sense of local exploration.It also reminds me of Last Tango in Paris (although this is far less graphically sexual) in its use of a novelty setting.
The success of this movie demonstrates that the American audience (where it has done best of all by any mathematics) are using this film to go places that they wouldn't dream of going and experiencing things they wouldn't dream of experiencing.
Why not pack a bag and go to Asia or places in Europe that are not tourist clichés? Then you can have experiences like this for real and find out more about yourself and how the whole world isn't -- and doesn't want to be -- an imitation of American culture.