Overrated sham

Rating: 2/10 (30 May 2004)

I'm not gonna slam this movie because I thought it was slow and that nothing happened. Slow doesn't bother me. I love slow actually. Most of my favorite movies put most people to sleep. I went into this movie prepared to fully embrace it but left the theater with a bad taste in my mouth wondering how Sophia Coppola managed to trick so many people into falling for this movie. Oh it's got style, but that's about all it's got. I found the characters to be shallow and bratty, the script to be devoid of anything interesting. It's like she's being handed these accolades for an eloquently filmed piece of junk. All of the jokes were at the expense of the Japanese which leads me to believe that Sophia couldn't write a straight ahead comedy to save her life. Let's just wait and see if she can come up with another art for nothings sake movie for her third film and if the critics finally catch on to the trick. One scene that really bugged me in the movie was when 8 1/2 was playing on the TV in the hotel room. Was she trying to draw comparisons between Bill Murray's character and Marcello Mastroianni's? If so she clearly took no cues from Fellini's masterpiece and its a completely wasted and shallow gesture. That was a film with deep emotional issues light years beyond her little shallow Hollywood girl comprehension.