::Kit's Movie Reviews::

 

This Month's Kit Flick:

Lost in Translation

Another Coppola (Well, Nicholas Cage is a cousin...).

Sophia Coppola directed and wrote this amazing film starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson. Not a pair you’d usually, well, pair up. But, boy, does that casting work. As two jet-lagged tourists in Tokyo who meet and somehow connect, they are sensational.

The film is funny and sweet and romantic and the height of the physicality shown is when he lightly touches her foot. Trust me, it’s highly erotic! The weird part is that I can never remember if Lost in Translation is shot in color or black and white. The entire production is so muted, it’s a terrific background for the terrific acting.

I love movies.

Not all of them, of course, but the ones I love I treat the same way I treat my favorite books—I pick them up again, every year or so, and enjoy them once more. Movies have certainly influenced me. My protagonists, Margot and Max, are in the movie business. My real life daughter is an art director (as well as the cover artist for my stories). Her significant, Marc Greville, is a production director. I’ve had the thrill of being on location shoots, watching sets being created, taken inside tours of the studios, suffered with them when business is slow. And, most of all, listening, listening, to everything that is said around me. Gossip is great for the creative mind!

And movies are fascinating to watch being made. They are such complicated entities. All those people, hundreds of them, all working at their separate jobs, from writer to electrician, lighting director to editor to gaffer. Each group working toward one goal, a completed film.

When finally completed, I think there’s so much to look at while viewing a movie. I like to concentrate sometimes on just the actors, then there’s the production direction, or the music, or the editing or try not looking at the screen and just listen to the dialogue. Fascinating. A good movie is worth multiple viewings, just as a good book can be enjoyed over and over.

Each month I'll talk about some of my faves==all available on DVD. Enjoy!