Sad

Rating: Null/10 (22 February 2004)

Pointless story of platonic love between a bored little rich girl and a bored movie star in Tokyo. Both characters are supposed to be profound - she as a philosophy major from Yale, he because he knows that acting in japanese ads for big money is not boosting his career... However, their behavior shows how incredibly shallow they are. Scarlett Johansson and "Bob Harris" are unable to learn one japanese sentence or even to consider than any Japanese is a human being worth listening to for more than ten seconds. Every Japanese character is superficial and soulless. He has an epiphany singing overrated white pop music in a karaoke. She gets hers discovering that she is not moved by monks in a Zen temple and then coming back to her 5-star hotel room to cry, looking down on Tokyo, feeling lots of pain... Their choice of life companions - his wife sounds stupid and her boyfriend is a shallow fashion photographer - is telling. The result is one of the less interesting love stories ever shot. Plus Sofia Coppola stole the basic idea of the beautiful In the Mood for Love for this one (she tries to hide it by actually showing us Giovanni Ribisi's character). The whole hype in the US and Europe tells how much international movie criticism is in a sad shape. Hopefully it got bad reviews in Japan.