Alternate Takes

http://www.alternatetakes.co.uk/
Reviews of films, written from an alternative point of view.

Lost in translation.

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Comedy

from sextonfurnival.livejournal.com.

let me get this out of the way: scarlett johansson is so fucking pretty. i want to lick her.





there.

i was watching lost in translation and i can't help comparing it's similarities with in the mood for love. it's the cinematography, i guess, or the shot compositions. lots of scenes showing urban detail, corridors and lingering close-ups of the main characters. except that one could feel there is a real story going on behind lost in translation.

i'm not saying i that like one film better than the other.

unlike sex is comedy, there is very little dialogue in lost in translation, and yet it works perfectly. film, after all, is primarily a visual medium: in this film, the narrative is presented visually. much of the acting is done without dialogue, too, and the two leads did a very beautiful job at it. initially, i was skeptical at the idea of any sexual chemistry going on between johansson and bill murray, but in a hotel where every body is either brain-dead or speaking in a foreign language (to them), it's just natural that these two interesting character will be drawn to each other.

and i appreciate the fact that there is no sex that happened between the two. there is too much sex happening in film these days that the act becomes empty and dehumanized. just seeing the flirtation, tension slowly building up is enough.

lost in translation is a brilliant film, but it should be seen when one is in a certain frame of mind. everything happens slowly, a lot of things remain unstated, and nothing ever calls for more attention than it's worth. like in the mood for love, it works best as a mood piece.

but then, i love mood pieces.

Sex is comedy.

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Foreign

from sextonfurnival.livejournal.com.

the title fooled me into thinking the film is a sex comedy of sorts. it's not. what it was is a film within a film: a director is shooting a film and she's finding it difficult to make her actors show sexual tension between their characters on screen.

interesting concept, but the damn film is too dialogue-heavy. that film director can't seem to stop yakking about the relationship of directors and actors (and maybe that's one point of the film), but i, as an audience, don't need to endure an hour and a half lecture on the nuances of a director-actor relationship. argh.

there were some smart sequences though. one is shown a scene where the director is doing a practical demonstration on how the love scene will be acted out to her assistant director (the whole thing does get naughty), making the us (the audience) believe that they're all alone in a room. and then the demonstration and ends and the camera pans to the rest of the crew which all those time was with them in the same room, hidden from the camera.

the film climaxes on the love scene the movie has been blatantly telling us to be coming up. and it does. and it was well-executed, according to how the film director character had been telling us all these time.

but one would only get to appreciate the climax if one is not completely bored of all the talking that went before the film reached that point.