shallow, empty and colourful.

Rating: 1/10 (25 January 2004)

"the virgin suicides" by sofia coppola was a good movie, and since this one got good reviews everywhere, I watched it.
to give the conclusion first : I did not like it at all, indeed its one of the weakest movies ever.
as you may know, the story is about some old actor which meets a young girl during his stay in tokyo and for a few days they share their depression. the point is : thats all way to uninteresting for me. after about 30 minutes it started to bore me watching two very upper-class people looking all sad and talking about their problems. It simply has nothing to do with me. If I go to a movie I either want to see something totally fantastic and far out that I know its not even close to reality, or a movie about certain parts of reality, which are so special in itself that its interesting for me. An example for the latter might be "my life without myself" (as a recent movie). But watching these two rich and bored people celebrating their depression just made me sick. In my opinion coppola knew why she made this happen in tokyo, imagine this movie in new york or similar, and I think more people would see it as what it is : boring.
also, I cant understand how a woman like sofia coppola can take part in the usual sexism in hollywood and even tries to push it even further. the movie starts with the highly disturbing image of the female star lying on the bed, shot from behind so we see her butt through a pink slip. I know that for some people this is a good start, for me its really not. I dont like movies which think they have to start off with exposed parts of a female body, especially when it has nothing to do with the story. no, I am not gay, I am simply sick of sexism and soft-pornography in movies. this first impression carried on trough the whole movie, because the director did not miss any chance to display the female star in underwear, whenever possible. another scene is in a stripclub, where we are forced to watch the performance of some japanese table-dancers, which had nothing to do with the movie at all, while a song by "peaches" (a very feminist songwriter, does she know this, btw ?) was running in the background. apart from this visual sexism also the role of Scarlett Johansson is higly questionable, all the time she is looking around like a little bambi-girl which cant think or decide anything without the help of men. I am sick of these kind of clichès of small and frightened woman. And no, Scarlett Johansson cant act. I doubt she can do any other face than she did trough the whole movie.
The third thing which really made me upset is the high use of music, there is always something playing, often paired with images of tokyo and such, so my advice to sofia coppola is to make musicvideos instead, she surely has the ability to link nice pictures with music, but obviously she is not able to make a full-length movie with a decent story.
in my opinion this is a very, very overrated movie and I will cry out loud if it gets any oscar or similar. as the headline says ... its 90 minutes of shallow, empty and colourful imagery without any interesting story and a weak cast. what a turn-off after "the virgin suicides".
(After we watched this one we went home to watch "bridges of madison county" and although I dont like meryl streep and clint eastwood at all and normally a movie starring both would make me run the other direction as fast as I could, this was exactly the kind of movie that "lost in translation" wanted to be. go watch this instead, I mean it.)