The Screengrab : lost in translation

Strangers In A Strange Land: Screengrab’s Favorite Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

A sad, funny ode to those fragile bubbles of joy, romance and deeper meaning in life's otherwise bitter cocktail of boredom, loneliness and disappointment, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation captures a certain mood of isolated intimacy so well that I only wish I could've stumbled across it in a deserted movie theater and kept the experience all to myself. Then again, one of the points of the film is the importance of shared experience: disconnected from her goofus husband (Gionvanni Ribisi), familiar surroundings and a sense of forward momentum in her life, Scarlett Johansson's young American abroad drifts through Japan like a lonely camera, recording her isolated perceptions for no one until she herself is perceived by fellow traveler Bill Murray, kicking off a sweet "like" affair through the streets and karaoke bars of late-night Tokyo. "I'm looking for, like, an accomplice," Murray's Bob Harris says to Johansson's Charlotte during one of their early encounters...and sometimes that's all a stranger needs to make a strange land into a momentary home.

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)

At first, Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) isn't clear that he's in a strange land at all. He's arrived in Judgment City, a place that "should seem pleasing and very familiar," assuming you spend a lot of time at golf course resorts in the Phoenix suburbs. The billboards, sterile hotel rooms and crappy stand-up comics do indeed seem familiar, if just a bit off-kilter. That's because Daniel has been killed in a car crash and is no longer on earth at all; rather, he is in a sort of way station between our world and the afterlife, waiting to be judged on his human existence. It's a potentially stressful situation, but there are some pleasant distractions: for instance, the food is delicious and you can eat all you want without gaining any weight. (The full-time residents of Judgment City, on the other hand, enjoy food that tastes a little like horseshit to "little brains" like us.) Indeed, Daniel finds life in Judgment City quite enjoyable once he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), the compatible soul mate he never managed to find in life. It's not so enjoyable once he's put on trial and forced to defend embarrassing episodes from his earthly existence – and Daniel should probably avoid unflattering visits to the Past Lives Pavilion – but no place is perfect.

MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

We're talking about the first third of Mystery Train, to be more specific. The film follows a young Japanese couple riding a train into Memphis to visit the birthplace of rock & roll. The girl, Mitsuko, is obsessed with Elvis Presley. Her boyfriend Jun, dour and aloof, is a Carl Perkins man. They've come to visit Graceland and Sun Studios, but it's clear from the beginning that their ways -- hiking through the hot and empty streets with their suitcase suspended between them on a bamboo pole, giving their bellhop a plum, fetishizing their cigarette lighter -- are not the ways of Memphis or Americans. And yet, somehow by the end of their story, it's Memphis that seems alien. The sweetness underneath their oddity has normalized them, but the American South seems to be bursting with weirdness. Jarmusch, of course, has stacked the deck. His version of Memphis is filled with strangeness, and his cast includes Screaming Jay Hawkins as the desk clerk at their hotel and Rufus Thomas as a colorful local they meet. The Memphis I know is quite different.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

It's hard to tell which is the stranger country in Apocalypse Now: the Vietnam that Willard barely sees, the military that tries to pretend that the situation is normal (rather than all fucked up), or the Kingdom of Death in Col. Kurtz's heart of darkness. Martin Sheen's Willard has not just fallen off the turnip truck; indeed, when the movie opens, he's drunk and bitter about being stuck again in Saigon. But the drunken ennui of Saigon seems more like the height of civilization as he travels further upriver after Kurtz. Even the Apocalypse Now Redux, which adds an odd layover at a French plantation, only increases Willard's alienation from his surroundings. The world is mad. It is madness to make war on people for their own good. It is madness to attempt to carve a jungle into a Western utopia. It is madness to pretend that there is any return when you have raised the ghosts of primordial horror.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)

An important reminder for the would-be Kurtzes and (in the case of this movie) Danny Dravots of this world: gods don't bleed and die. If you ever try to pass yourself off as a god, be sure not to bleed or be ritually assassinated. A better policy is to avoid attempts at passing as a god altogether. The Man Who Would Be King is a deliberately old-fashioned story in which director John Huston demonstrates the lie at the heart of original author Rudyard Kipling's overt imperialist attitudes towards Asia. Two British adventurers (played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both at the top of their games), set out for an unknown area of Afghanistan to pursue unknown riches. Upon arriving, the locals decide that Danny (that's Connery's character) is a god when an arrow that has become lodged in his clothing fails to kill him. Danny, sadly, comes to believe his own press. I hope I am spoiling little when I reveal that hubris is an unforgiving mistress.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

This may be the consummate British colonialist fantasy of knowing a strange land so well that the natives respect you as one of their own. You spend years studying the language and culture at Oxford, only to go overboard completely and become a barefoot, djellabia-wearing, stallion-riding master of the desert. David Lean's film is based on T. E. Lawrence's memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a nutshell it's the story of Lawrence mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, surreptitiously helping the British as their Empire crumbles all around. Real events aside, this is also a fantastic film in and of itself. It is one of those brilliant character studies of a half-mad, half-genius hero, obsessed with an impossible goal. Serpico, The French Connection, and Vanishing Point come to mind. Instead of the inner workings of a nineteen-seventies cop, we get the psyche of Lawrence and the stoic facial expressions of Peter O’Toole galloping up and down the Hejaz. Never mind that Lawrence’s vision — and promise to King Faisal — of a large pan-Arab state based on tribal patterns (including present-day Iraq) went down the toilet in ways we are still experiencing right at this very moment.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Anna Faris, Honorary Bunny

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Anna Faris may be my favorite actress whose movies I never see. OK, that’s probably overstating the case a bit – I should say “screen presence” rather than “actress,” since I’m basing my statement on a small sample size that suggests her range consists of “cute and funny.” Still, on the rare occasions I do stumble upon her work – Lost in Translation, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, whichever Scary Movie installment I reviewed for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram – I thinks to myself, I thinks, “I like that there Anna Faris. Why isn’t she a bigger star?”

Well, her moment may have finally arrived with tomorrow’s release of The House Bunny. Sure, the movie sounds like a stupid retread of Legally Blonde – but then again, Legally Blonde didn’t exactly hurt Reese Witherspoon’s career. And although I’m sure she’d be delighted to learn I’m in her fan club, an even bigger honor was bestowed upon her this week as Hugh Hefner named Faris an honorary Playboy Bunny and put her on the cover (clothed, alas). We know what you’re thinking, but Faris denies it. “"I would like to say that I slept with Hef, but I'll dispel that rumour right now," Faris told Canada.com.

That’s not the only honor Faris has been awarded lately. High Times named her Stonette of the Year based on her work in Smiley Face and Entourage. “I’ve got my bong award on my fireplace,” Faris told Time Out New York. “It’s the only award I’ve ever won. I’m so, so proud. My parents are as well.” Clearly a star is born.

Related:
Anna Faris: The Meryl Streep of Bong Hits
Trailer Review: The House Bunny

Taverns On The Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, last week (as those of you who didn't black out may recall) we here at The Screengrab took you on a very special Pub Crawl through some of the most distinctive gin joints of celluoid.

This week, it’s hair of the dog time as we return to the world of booze (although we can stop anytime we feel like it...really!) for a survey of movies where the dives themselves may be forgettable, but not so the people (and, occasionally, vampires) who inhabit them.

So belly up to the bars and join us for another round of the finest alcoholic action, drunken destruction, boozy balladeering and sudsy seduction in cinema!

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Sofia Coppola’s fantasia about a depressed movie star and a directionless young woman stranded in a Tokyo luxury hotel is short on plot but long on atmosphere and the pleasures of indolence...and it’s hard to think of two better people to kill time with than Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson (in what, hopefully, won’t turn out to be her career zenith). The fizzy high point of Lost In Translation takes place during a haphazard bar hop (involving strange Japanese...spud guns? Anyone?) that ends (as all the finest bar hops do) in a private Plexiglas karaoke pod high above the city, where Murray’s Bob Harris surprises Johansson’s Charlotte (and, possibly, himself) with the naked romantic yearning in his rendition of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” leading to lots of platonic foreplay and climaxing in one of the greatest smooches in all of celluloid. (And if you think your warm, fuzzy memories of the movie would be ruined forever if you ever discovered just what, exactly, Bill Murray whispered into ScarJo's ear following that famous kiss, then for God’s sake, don’t CLICK HERE!)

AFTER HOURS (1985)

Our own Phil Nugent recently covered the convoluted history of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and the question of its true authorship. Whoever really wrote it and whoever deserves credit for it, though, it’s a deftly made and smartly directed little comedy, and plays up Scorsese’s rarely credited ability to handle comedy. Despite taking place in the wards and dungeons of Manhattan, After Hours focuses on only a few locations; but the one it gets the most use out of is the punk club Berlin, where the tortured soul Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), already punished beyond reason for the high crime of trying to get into Rosanna Arquette’s pants, must visit in an attempt to do the only thing in the world he wants to do: go home. Just getting in to Berlin is hard enough: he must confront a side-of-beef bouncer (Clarence Felder) who quotes Kafka at him. When he finally gets in the door, he finds that the price of entry is being forcibly corralled by the staff and given a Mohawk as a filmmaker (a cameo by Scorsese himself) shines a spotlight in his face and Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” blares on the the P.A. system. And even that isn’t the end: when, later in the wee hours, Paul is forced to return to Berlin to avoid the fury of a mob who think he’s a housebreaker, he finds it nearly deserted save for an avant-garde artist (Verna Bloom) who ‘saves’ him by encasing him bodily in a shell of shellac and old newspapers. For this he paid a five-dollar cover charge?

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

Look, we’ve all found ourselves in the same situation as Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes once in a while. Broke, hopeless, down on your luck; everyone thinks you’re crazy, your best girl thinks you’re a heel, and your former elevator operator is stealing your ideas. (Well, okay, maybe not that last one.) And, to make things worse, it’s New Year’s Eve, and you don’t even have a date. So the least you can do is to stumble into the nearest bar and kill the pain with a slow, steady supply of martinis. But when Norville hits Ann’s 440 – the beatnik bar favored by his gal Friday, the fast-talking Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – even that doesn’t help: Ann’s, as the exasperated bartender played by Steve Buscemi in the Coen Brothers’ screwball homage The Hudsucker Proxy explains time and time again, doesn’t serve “al-key-hool”. It’s a juice bar, with coffee drinks for the extra-adventurous, and no matter how many times Norville asks for a martini (and he asks a lot), he can’t get one, and is forced to live on the ten or twelve he’s already got percolating in his bloodstream. Finally, Amy arrives and tries to talk him down to earth – even favoring him with a rendition of the Muncie High fight song – but it’s no good; Norville flees the bar and before the night is up, he’ll end up on a ledge. Frankly, we can’t blame him; Ann’s 440 looks cool enough, but as Norville drunkenly asks, what kind of bar is it if you can’t get a martini?

FAT CITY (1972)

John Huston's comeback film is set in Stockton, California and stars Stacy Keach as Tully, an alcoholic boxer who's managed to become a has-been without ever having been much of anything in the first place, and Jeff Bridges as Ernie, a younger man who Tully takes a shine to. Tully encourages the kid to take up boxing, as if encouraging anyone to follow in his own career path counted as a favor. The movie has its fair share of scenes in rowdy, darkly lit bars full of people with nowhere else to go in the middle of the day, but its most haunting moment comes at the end, in an unnaturally bright-looking cafe bar that seems to be a hangout for dry drunks. Tully has pulled Ernie there after the kid, spurning his offer that they go out together for a drink, has agreed to grab a cup of coffee. After an exchange of ideas on the subject of the ancient looking bar man ("How you like to be him?" "Maybe he's happy." "Maybe we're all happy."), Tully looks around the place, and Huston freezes the frames to pinpoint the moment of horrified sobriety. Ernie starts to leave, only to agree to Tully's desperate plea that he stick around and "talk some," but the two men have nothing to say to each other, and the credits roll over the image of them sitting together not talking. The actors move just enough to remind you that this time the frame isn't frozen. Maybe they're happy.

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Christopher Walken earned his hoofer's stripes in this phantasmagorical Depression musical, in which he appears as Tom, a politely soulless pimp who meets his latest employee, Bernadette Peters, when she's sitting in a bar trying to recover from being fired from her job as a schoolteacher for being pregnant by a married man who she hasn't heard from lately. In the movie, the characters use music-inspired fantasies to help them get through what their lives have turned into; here, Peters, who can't think of any way to support herself besides turning tricks, is doing her limited best to deal with the awful fact that she's actually met someone who can teach her how, and Walken, who can dance like a son of a bitch, has no problem making you believe that you're seeing something that a person could only pull off in a daydream. After the number is over, Tom rudely snaps her back to reality by warning her that if he discovers she's a tease who's wasting his time, "I'll cut your face." Walken doesn't have any problem with that part, either.

NEAR DARK (1987)

"Just how old are you, Jesse?" someone asks Lance Henriksen, and Henriksen, smiling like a redneck crocodile, replies, "Let me put it this way, son: I fought for the South." Henriksen's Jesse is the father figure in a brood of vampires who look like a white trash family and travel around in a van with the windows blacked out. In the movie's money scene, they wander into a roadside bar that Bill Paxton -- the "big brother" -- declares to be "Shitkicker Heaven" and proceed to use it as their own personal buffet table. A young Adrian Pasdar plays the hero, an innocent young dude who's been inducted into the family by the bite of a winsome, lonely blonde bloodsucker (Jenny Wright) and is still learning the ropes. Once the bodies start dropping, the bartender pulls out a shotgun and blasts Pasdar in the torso. Reflexively, Pasdar reacts as if he were dying and then stops and stands there with a hole in his chest, registering his surprise that he isn't. "It's a trip, ain't it?" says Paxton. There have been a shitload of reworkings of the vampire genre in the last twenty or so years, but in few of them does the blood flow so red and thickly potent as in this scene.

Related Stories:

Taverns On The Screen - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Two)

Sweet Nothings: The Lost Words of Lost In Translation, Translated

Separated at Birth: "After Hours" and Joe Frank's "Lies"

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Japandering: The Five Most Embarrassing Celebrity Commercials

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

We’ve known for a long time that famous American movie stars who would never deign to sully themselves doing television commercials at home have no such compunctions about doing them abroad, most often in Japan. This phenomenon was immortalized in Lost in Translation, of course, but the tasteful Suntory ad that Bill Murray’s character struggles to complete is not necessarily representative of the antics our most respected and treasured movie icons will get up to when they don’t think we’re watching. Nowadays, of course, thanks to YouTube and the invaluable resource Japander, we’re always watching! Let’s assume these five stars haven’t been humiliated enough and put them through the wringer one more time.

NICOLAS CAGE for FEVER PACHINKO

It’s not always easy to tell what these Japanese commercials are advertising, and here is a case in point. At first I thought Cage was selling gum, then possibly a car. While this may be the actor’s best performance in years, those of us unfamiliar with pachinko gaming devices may be a little unclear on the message.

BRUCE WILLIS for ENEOS

Once again I had to do a little research to determine exactly what product or service Willis is shilling here. As far as I can tell, it’s motor oil. I should have been able to figure that out, what with the yellow paint and the Elvis impersonator and the backpack raygun thingy and…what was I talking about?

MICHAEL J. FOX for SOME SORT OF BEVERAGE

Honestly, I can’t tell if Fox is selling beer or canned coffee or some sort of energy drink here. Whatever it is, it makes you do crazy things, like trim hedges into animal shapes! Note Fox’s reprisal of the distressed yelp noise that made him famous in the Back to the Future movies. That’s branding, folks.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER for DIRECT TV

It’s hard to pick just one of Arnie’s ads – he seems to be the king of Japandering. I chose this one because of the multiple roles he plays. It gives us a moment to reflect on what was lost when he went into politics.

BEN STILLER for KIRIN

Are we sure this isn’t an outtake from Zoolander or something? No? How embarrassing.

Sweet Nothings: The Lost Words of Lost In Translation, Translated

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

YouTube? Rules.

I know: not exactly news. But I am nevertheless continually astonished by the lost treasures I stumble across there in the digital equivalent of that infinite warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark (and, apparently, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).

Recently, I blogged about the amazing (to me, anyway) discovery of the lost Biggs scenes from Star Wars. And today, while searching for clips for an upcoming post, I suddenly stumbled across an audio-enhanced reworking of the penultimate scene from Lost In Translation, where Bill Murray whispers something mysterious and romantic in Scarlett Johansson’s ear, something that we the audience never got to hear...

...until now.

Now, as the wise YouTube poster vid22dotcom cautions, “If you REALLY don't want to KNOW. PLEASE SKIP THIS VIDEO.” If you think it’s more satisfying NOT knowing what BiMu says to ScarJo (in the same way it was 1000 times more satisfying NOT knowing that the interior of the Mothership in Close Encounters just looked like a bunch of cheesy “Special Edition” effects), then DON'T click on the video clip below.

But you know you wanna click it, right?

Anna Faris: The Meryl Streep of Bong Hits

Phil Nugent — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Ty Burr celebrates Anna Faris, "the very best thing in very bad movies." At a time when good actresses are plentiful and good parts for them seem to be scarcer than ever, Faris is hard-working yet remains cruelly underappreciated by critics, because it's been her fortune to have been kept busy by the makers of the some really tacky movies. Faris's big break came with the Scary Movie series, and though she's had a couple of small but attention-getting roles in classier fare such as Lost in Translation and Brokeback Mountain, her bread and butter has remained comedies pitched at, shall we say, the undemanding audience. Burr writes that "not many people want to admit they sat through the execrable 2002 Rob Schneider film, The Hot Chick, those who did know that Faris just about made it bearable as a woman weirdly turned on by a man's soul in her best friend's body. Or how about the silly romantic comedy Just Friends (2005)? If not for her slapstick turn as a Courtney-Love-style rock star, the movie would be landfill."

Now, Faris has finally landed a starring role in a movie by a major, big-name director. Fat lot of good it's done her. Gregg Araki's Smiley Face, a stoner comedy with political pretensions, should have done at least as much for Faris's career as Araki's previous movie, Mysterious Skin, did for its star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who needed to give a brilliant performance in a challenging role to elevate his image from Third Rock from the Sun kid to serious young actor. Smiley Face isn't as strong a movie as Mysterious Skin — it's a goof, and Araki's attempts to make it a goof with something to meaningful to say just weigh it down. But Faris gives an amazing slapstick performance as an endearing Los Angeles pothead who's lost in her own world. It would be a star-making turn in anyone saw the movie, but after a successful screening at Cannes, Smiley Face was slipped into theaters in New York and L.A. at the tail end of last year for a "limited engagement" run that turned out to be a sneak preview for the movie's appearance on DVD this week. Anyone who's interested to see what brilliant comic acting looks like these days is advised to rent it. In the meantime, Faris will still be out there someplace. The promise of Scary Movie 5 beckons.