I recently saw Somewhere, which predictably goes nowhere and is the same exact movie as Lost in Translation. The only big difference is the flat characters in Somewhere have two hotels (Chateau Marmont in L.A. and some other place in Milan) in which to mope around, rather than one.
Part of Lost in Translation's thesis was that Japanese people are crazy! Their television commercials are silly and they speak a language we can't understand. That's not the case in Somewhere. In this movie, it's the Italians who are crazy and alienating with their foreign language and silly telecasts.
I am 100% over watching pretty people (in and outside of movies) drag themselves through a charmed life, knowing not what to do with their endless options. This worked as a movie plot exactly once in 1961 when Antonioni made La Notte, and even watching that film now, you're like, come onnnnnnnnnnn. Do something!
Coppola has a thing for wispy blonde characters who don't say or do much: All the sisters in The Virgin Suicides, ScarJo in Translation, Marie Antoinette and now this mini-Fanning in Somewhere. If she could give one of them a nasty huffing habit or the impetus to do anything besides look like an X-Girl catalog model, then everyone would be less-bored when they see her movies.
I don't know shit about cinematography, but I do know Coppola is supremely good at making things beautiful. In all her movies everything is prettily lit, framed and colored. Her soundtracks are perfect, too, which makes me think she'd be widely regarded as a genius if her "movies" were actually film installations instead.
This is my favorite thing she's ever done (and look, another hotel room!):
I guess the fact that Sofia Coppola has done anything with her life, instead of idling in her own privilege, makes her infinitely more likeable than any of the characters she writes. The ScarJo character in Lost in Translation is obvies supposed to be her, and the douchey photographer is supposed to be her then-husband Spike Jonze. Coppola basically made a movie about how bored she was following her husband around, and they divorced the same year she won an Oscar for that movie. She could have just stayed the same character, stayed in the unhappy marriage, and never made the movie, but she didn't.
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| Y.G.G! |
