DVD Review HTF Review: Lost In Translation (1 Viewer)

[Marc Colella]

I agree.

The Virgin Suicides was one of my favorite films of 1999, and I found it better than Lost in Translation (which I still liked).

I also have a problem with the mocking of the Japanese language and customs in LIT. Normally things like that don't bother me, but the humor they were going for seemed really low-brow and cheap. Coppola could have easily showed Murray's isolation from the language/culture/people without using that mocking/ignorant tone.

 

[stewart borland]

Sorry but very over rated to me too! A blind buy which I too regret. It's already deleted from my DVD Profiler list -I've posted it off to my daughter to see if she likes it more.

I wonder if it was all the great comments & reviews that left me expecting more?

 

[Pete Lee]

Ron,

I've seen this movie four times in the theatre, most recently this afternoon. This movie IS blurry because it was shot with an extremely shallow depth of field. Check out the scene where Charlotte goes to Kyoto and wraps a piece of paper on the tree that's made up hundreds of pieces of papers. She's in sharp focus and some of the paper leaves are but many of them are not. Or when Bob calls his wife Lydia after his first night out in Tokyo with Charlotte and her friends. There is an overhead shot of Bob lying on the bed talking on the phone. Bob's head on the right of the screen is in focus but the phone which is immediately to the left is blurry; the keypad can't be made out. Or when Charlotte is sitting in the floor of her room listening to the self-help CD. She picks up the CD case so that it is in the foreground but the title is blurred and illegible while her face is in focus.

In short, the softness or bluriness of the DVD is the movie itself, not the result of a poor transfer. I think people are picking it up now because video is much less forgiving of this sort of thing than celluloid. I can only guess what people will say when Jane Campion's "In the Cut" comes out on video.

Off topic, it's a shame the cinematographer Lance Acord did not get an Oscar nod. I think excellent and interesting photographic work was done in this movie.

 

[Bjorn Thoresen]

Can anyone report whether the Canadian DVD has an identical cover to the R1 release and if the transfer is identical?

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Pete,

Thanks for that information.

It's very hard to give an opinion on transfers
these days because many have no idea how the film
looked theatrically.

 

[Rich Malloy]

Better cover on the Canadian disc, IMO, (bilingual, but without the blurbs), but possibly no insert. I'm waiting to hear about transfer differences, extras, etc.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I was really hoping on reading more
member opinions of this film.

It's one of those films where you are
either really going to love it, or you
won't think much of it.

As I have stated previously, this is amongst
the best films I have seen in the past year.
Saw it almost a week ago and I still think
about it daily. It really is the type of film
that touches you in a very unique way and
continues to haunt the mind long after the
viewing.

 

[dpippel]

Have patience Ron, the disc doesn't hit the street until tomorrow. I'll be posting my thoughts once I've seen the film.

 

[Sam Davatchi]

I saw it few weeks ago and on the whole I liked it very much but it wasn’t like a life altering experience for me. But again I enjoyed it and will see it again.

I would have preferred the relationship of the 2 leads differently than what everyone says. I don’t see it much as a love story. Maybe that’s my only problem with the movie. I don’t see any romantic chemistry between the 2 leads. I would have preferred it if the movie had gone the route of "2 friends helping each other through a difficult time".

I also very much liked the making of.

 

[Rich Malloy]

Would you really have excised all the romantic/sexual tension, that feverishly transgressive sense of vows itching to be violated, the increasing possibility that one might just step over the line if one keeps going?

I don't know, Sam. If you remove all that, I don't think you have very much left that resembles real human psychology and interaction. The particular longing that these two lonely souls felt is inevitably wrapped-up in sexual urges, sublimated or no / consummated or no. Making them "just buddies" doesn't strike me as being in anyway true.

 

[Rob Willey]

Now that I've seen the DVD, I think this is a faithful transfer of what I saw in the theater. The fuzziness and shallow depth of field observations are accurate and belong there.

I'm still laughing over the Premium Fantasy Woman scene: "Ohh! Oh please. Let me go, please!"

Recommended.

Rob

 

[Andrew Bunk]

Anyone else get a strange case with theirs? Mine has these two little tabs you have to flip open in order to open the case. Never saw these before...

 

[RobertCharlotte]

I saw a case like that on something else recently. Really weirded me out.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

My case came that way.

Funny, I spent a minute feverishly prying
open the case till I realized there were
tabs there.

That's a first.

 

[Magnus T]

Yup. My copy of About A Boy also have that type of case. Weird, indeed.

 

[Frank Grimes]

Forced trailers=
tabs=
movie= let you know when I'm done

 

[Rob Lutter]

Just break the tabs off!

 

[ZacharyTait]

My copy of the Pianist came like that, with the two tabs on the side.

Anyone else surprised that no-one did a promotion of this with Sofia's first movie, Virgin Suicides? I expected Best Buy to have a deal where you could get this and Virgin Suicides for $25.

 

[Zen Butler]

Was there supposed to be an insert?

 

[RobertCharlotte]

I got mine at Costco. No insert, no tabs either.