Review – Lost in Translation

I guess I would have expected this kind of a movie from a middle-aged man, but I’m genuinely puzzled about what might motivate a young, successful woman like Sofia Coppola to film a serious take on such a Humbert-ish relationship. Here we have Bill Murray playing an aging actor stuck in the middle of a mid-life crisis, which might have slipped past me – let’s face it, Murray’s at least a decade or so past a “mid” life crisis – if the script hadn’t literally come out and said so more than once during the course of the movie. Trapped in a hotel in Japan, he befriends an equally befuddled twenty-something neglected by her photographer husband. Some of the camerawork isn’t too bad (visually Sofia’s somewhere between daddy and Paul Schrader), but otherwise the flat characters, go-nowhere plot and unsavory quasi-romance don’t offer much edification or entertainment. See if desperate