Lost in Translation (2003)

There is an unfortunate trend where movies sometimes don't fit a genre, but they have a few jokes, and therefore they get labeled as "comedy," despite not actually being funny.
This is the boat that 2003's "Lost in Translation" falls into.
It has Bill Murray and a lot of dry, wry humor, but it's by no means a comedy. I grinned a few times, and I think I chuckled once, but at no point did I laugh, or turn off the TV at the end and think any of the components of the film were worth repeating to try to get someone else to laugh, or to suggest to someone else as a ‘must see’ due to its comedic nature.

In her breakout role, Scarlett Johansson played "Charlotte." Her age wasn't stated at any point, but it's made clear that she's a recent Harvard grad, which should put her at 22. She's also been married for two years, so that could put her as old as 24. However, real-life ScarJo was 18 when this was filmed, and she looks it.
With relatively little makeup compared to her future roles, and her natural youth from the time, she looks young. Very young.
Uncomfortably young, even, which is compounded and made worse by the fact that Murray has always looked old and the makeup department didn’t do him any favors.

When the movie started, I was under the impression that Charlotte was in  a brand new marriage and she’d just uprooted her entire life to follow her husband’s career to Japan. That would have made her unhappiness very easy to empathize and sympathize with.
Instead, she’s a 23(ish) year old woman who went on a one-week business trip with her husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi), where she’s given free-reign to explore Tokyo while he’s working a photography gig, and she decides to spend the first few days in her room, feeling sorry for herself and generally behaving like a spoiled brat because she’s not the focus of someone’s attention. In one, scene she asks him to just not go to work, which sound cutesy and all, but if your career relies on you freelancing your way through gigs, it’s not a particularly reasonable request.
It could be assumed that their marriage isn’t great in general, even when they’re back in the US, but John doesn’t seem particularly out of touch with his marriage, just career oriented as he’s obviously the breadwinner.

Bob Harris (Bill Murray), on the other hand, is a world-weary, burned-out actor. His career been reduced to endorsing whiskey in Japan, but he’s getting paid $2,000,000 for a week of ad pictures and commercials, so he still seems to be doing okay financially. His wife, stateside, is only ever revealed via phonecalls, and is played to be a shrew of a woman. However, since we only see the movie from Bob’s perspective, it’s impossible to tell if he/his career is part of the reason that his marriage seems to be so unhappy now.

Bob is absolutely the bright spot in this film; his constant interaction with the Japanese camera and film crews makes it clear that he’s out of his depth dealing with foreign staff and is more or less on his own. He is constantly flummoxed by the bad translations and heavily accented English being used around him, and his reactions to them makes for the dry humor that keeps this movie afloat.

Anna Faris is in here too, as a weird, ditzy actress staring in an action movie. She’s incredibly insignificant to the plot or any of the character arcs.

This movie suffers from trying to be too artsy, what with being an “indie” movie and all.
There were an unfortunate number of scenes where the actors did stuff silently, where the only sounds were the ambient noises of the scene: doors closing, breathing, etc. No music, no dialogue. Having those types of scenes isn’t the issue, but there were too many of them and they all lasted about twice as long as they needed to.
Then, during the scenes when there was music, it was often something with lyrics that were simply a heavy-handed tool to reinforce what was happening in the scene, as if director Sofia Coppola couldn’t trust the audience to follow the simple story line happening on screen.

The plot relies on Bob and Charlotte both feeling lonely in their own way, then emotionally bonding over that mutual loneliness.
Charlotte, being played by Scarlett Johansson, is a beautiful woman.
Bob, Bill Murray, is not a particularly handsome man, but does have the reputation of a once-famous actor.
While it’s obvious why Bob likes Charlotte’s doe-eyed, breathy attention – who wouldn’t – it’s not clear if Charlotte likes Bob because she knows he’s an actor and is thus enthralled with the implications of big-screen Bob, or if she actually likes Bob for Bob.
How would this movie be different if he’d just been a business man?
I’m positive that’s not something that Coppola wanted me to focus on, but the thought popped up while I was watching, so here we are.

Unlike 2011’s “The Avengers,” which took place in New York City but was actually filmed in Cleveland, this movie appears to have been entirely filmed in Tokyo, which made for some cool scenery and absolutely made me wonder if Bill Murray just wanted to spend a few months in Japan and convinced a movie studio pay for a working vacation.

Throughout the movie, it’s clear that Bob really just wants a friend: his career is dead, his marriage doesn’t seem to be doing great, and he’s in a foreign country with no one he knows. Charlotte, on the other hand, is traveling with her husband, has friends in Toyko that she goes out to meet on more than one occasion, and seems to just be suffering from youthful wanderlust and teenage angst.
I can’t blame Johansson for playing an unlikeable character – that was the role she was given, and she did it spectacularly – but I can blame the director and writers for giving her such a poor character to play.

Finally: this movie is rated R, because there’s an entirely pointless scene that takes place inside a Japanese strip club. It doesn’t offer anything to the story or affect the scene or the interaction between Bob and Charlotte. It’s just… there. This movie could have been PG-13 if Coppola hadn’t decided in favor of some entirely unnecessary nudity.

I saw this movie when it came out in 2003, on an airplane. I was 11 at the time, and didn’t grasp any of the humor. One of my peers at the time claimed it was hilarious.
I’m 27 now, it’s still not funny, and I can only really recommend it for airplane viewing for no other reason than to see Bill Murray’s reaction to Japanese culture.