Review of why this won an Oscar (hint, the name Coppola won, not the writing itself)

Rating: Null/10 (18 April 2004)

For me, what got lost in the translation was the pace. This was a nice movie, and I liked a lot of it, but the slow languid pace kept me from loving it. I came away from it saying, "what's all the buzz about" Then I remembered. Hollywood treating Hollywood royalty. This film got an Oscar for best writing for the same reason that Nicholas Cage gets movies: Francis Ford Coppola and the movie mafia.
Don't get me wrong, I liked the writing, but it certainly was not Oscar worthy at nearly 2 hours running time for what was an 70 minute movie.
To see the reason why, one only has to watch the self-indulgent "featurette" in the supplemental material. Walking through a parking lot calling out the names of miscellaneous staffers glimpsed on handycam footage is irrelevant. So was the length of the movie.
I loved the "love story" that developed between the principals, and how it resolved on the idea that sometimes what you DON'T need to do is split up your marriage and run off with someone else you just met (no matter how tempting). Oh, by the way, if you leave your husband, call me in LA, and I'll leave my wife for you, he whispers in her ear before leaving in the limo. That was great.
I appreciated the sense of having lots of time to kill in a foreign city. The money shot of the Japanese photographer saying 150 words, which were translated into "more intensity please" could have been easily worn out, but while that was the focus of the trailer to get folks in the theater, that was not the "fish out of water" angle I really saw. What intrigued me was that the principals were both fed up with their own lives, in addition to being stranded in a very different space than they were used to. They were both adrift in their marriages, and professionally, his career over and hers never begun. So that played much more strongly to me than cheap shots of poor translations of words and ideas. This is good stuff.
Why did it take 102 minutes for this to happen?
The filming, especially the cameraman's use of light and the textures of the city (the dinosaurs walking across a glass fronted building) was brilliant, but how many reaction shots of slacker Scarlett Johanssen's somewhat curious face can we really use? Yeah, we see her walk through Tokyo, dressed just intentionally frumpily enough to stand out among the sharply dressed Tokyoans (sp?). That I got the first time. The tenth time, it was tedious. The second or third temple we saw was just the same as the first couple. They didn't advance the story, they just chewed up time.
In all, a good, modest film in search of some serious editing. Pare down the languid scenes, and get rid of the fluff (like the whole hospital scene, which was useless in its final form) and you could still express the exasperation and fruitlessness the characters felt.
If you want to show me how to be bored in Tokyo for a week, please don't shoot it in real time. I have other things to do.
RangeR "back in the saddle again" BoB