2Fer Film Night

After watching LOST IN TRANSLATION last night, I turned around and watched MONSTER.

LOST IN TRANSLATION: This is a movie in search of a subject. I think what we see is the semi-autobiographical sentiment that Sofia Coppola herself is going through, because she makes the classic mistake of such endeavors of not displaying the logical conflict faced by the protagonist, thinking that the emotional conflict is self-evident and compelling. In fact, we simply have a post-Yale undergrad Philosophy major tagging along with her photographer husband and his shallow colleagues in Japan -- cultural displacement as metaphor for fish-out-of-water, which you'd think I'd be sympathetic to having lived in Munich and now Montreal, but in fact I'm not -- feeling disconnected and uncertain. She looks to an aging actor, and they have an interesting emotional connection, the sexual aspect gets cut off. HEllllllloooooo father figure, welcome to the film Francis. The film lacks a traditional narrative arc -- but what we end up with at the end is: you confused young people who don't know what to be, what kind of person to be? It's a mistake to look to the older generation, they are just as confused as you are. And the advice they have for you is grabled at best, compeltely incomprehensible. We're all just finding a way through, imperfectly.

MONSTER: I have less to say about truly biographical films, because they don't usually offer thematics, unless they become preachy or cautionary. However, Theron gave a compelling performance, and her physical transofrmation was -- ahem -- huge. I wish she had forgone the prosthetic teeth, because I thin kshe could have carried it off without them, but I suppose her teeth as too perfect to permit that. And, she was memorably good. However, when she and Christina Ricci were on-screen, all that was in my head was "There's Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci on-screen" -- not nearly as self-effacing a performance as, for example, Nicole Kidman in The Hours.