8 | / 10 |
Users | 3.6 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.6 |
Bob Harris and Charlotte are two Americans in Tokyo. Bob is a movie star in town to shoot a whiskey commercial, while Charlotte is a young woman tagging along with her workaholic photographer husband. Unable to sleep, Bob and Charlotte cross paths one night in the luxury hotel bar. This chance meeting soon becomes a surprising friendship. Charlotte and Bob venture through Tokyo, having often hilarious encounters with its citizens, and ultimately discover a new belief in life's possibilities.
Starring: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Akiko Takeshita, Kazuyoshi Minamimagoe, Giovanni RibisiDrama | 100% |
Romance | 30% |
Video codec: VC-1
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: DTS 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
BD-Live
Mobile features
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Director Sophia Coppola’s first three films, The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette—however different they are—form a loose thematic trilogy about girls on the cusp of womanhood confronting their feelings of ennui and alienation. The troubled suburban daughters of The Virgin Suicides find a violently tragic solution by offing themselves in sequence. Marie Antoinette, of course, lost her head—in more ways than one—to a public who misunderstood her frivolity. But Lost in Translation, paradoxically, is both more positive, in that we can imagine the film’s doe-eyed heroine eventually finding her purpose in life, and more redolently heartbreaking—with perhaps the saddest happy ending in recent memory—than either of its bookends. It’s a film that’s filled with contradictions. It’s about being alone in a city of millions and traveling thousands of miles only to spend an inordinate amount of time in the hotel bar. It’s a melancholic comedy and a platonic romance. And it’s a kind of reverse Harold and Maude, about two people, disparate in age, discovering that they’re soul mates. Bittersweet comes closest to summing it up, but the word is too small to contain the film’s varieties of emotional experience.
Lost in Translation made an appearance on HD-DVD way back in 2007—ages ago—and while I can't confirm, it seems likely that
Universal simply reused that disc's VC-1 encoded transfer for this new Blu-ray release. (Or possibly made a new encode from the old master.) An
important thing to keep in mind when evaluating any film's
picture quality is the way that it was shot; in the case of Lost in Translation, DP Lance Acord's cinematography was what you might call "quick
and dirty," using mostly natural illumination and, at times, fast—and, therefore, grainy—film stock to capture images in low ambient light. This affects
the look of the film in a number of ways. For one, the overall aesthetic is more natural—not as glossy or stylized as most Hollywood productions.
However, this comes at the expense of certain traits that videophiles look for in "reference" quality material. In my opinion, "reference" is how the film
was intended to look, taking into account the type of technology used (film or digital video) and the resolution (16mm or 35mm, SD or HD, etc.), but
that's an argument for another time. Here, contrast is weak—partially a result of not using additional fill light to give "contour" to the image—and
shadow detail, during darker scenes, is frequently lost in a sea of murky blacks. (See most of the scenes shot at the hotel bar.) Likewise, color is
realistically restrained and clarity varies drastically—the daylight scenes tend to look fantastic, with lots of detail, while the textures in evening or interior
sequences have a tendency to appear spongy and soft. (The iconic shot of Murray sitting on his bed in a yukata—used for the cover art—is so
soft as to look blurry.)
Much of this has to do with the techniques used to shoot the film, but it also seems to me that this particular encode isn't necessarily doing the film any
favors. I'm only speculating, but it's reasonable to assume that the black levels don't need to be as oppressive as they are here. And while the film's
grain structure looks fairly natural, there are distracting flurries of chroma noise in darker portions of the picture that sometimes give the image a
blotchy, mottled quality. All said, Lost in Translation does look markedly better here than it ever did on DVD—enough to warrant an upgrade—
but I'd love to see the film get a more refined high definition treatment sometime in the future.
Where the HD-DVD only included a lossy Dolby Digital Plus mix, the Blu-ray comes with a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track. If you've ever been to Tokyo—especially the areas featured in the film, like the enormous crosswalk outside Shibuya station—you know that it's a loud city, with an ever-present amalgam of traffic sounds, pedestrian bustle, and salespeople beckoning you into their shops. The film occasionally puts this urban cacophony to immersive use—you'll be assaulted from all sides by the noise of a pachinko parlor, the digital clamor of an arcade, the roar of street sounds, even air-soft pellets zipping through the rear channels—but not nearly as often as you might think. More frequently, Coppola puts her characters in a quiet bubble of their own thoughts, accompanied by a killer ambient soundtrack with numerous cuts from My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. It's some of my favorite film music from the 2000s, and it sounds great here. There are a few instances when dialogue could potentially sound a bit cleaner, but most of the time the actors' voices ride clearly on top of the mix. You could easily imagine this track sounding bigger and more engaging, but that might steal from the film's subtlety.
Lost in Translation's Blu-ray supplements are practically identical to its DVD counterpart, with the new addition of a brief sneak peak of Sophia Coppola's upcoming film, Somewhere.
Lost in Translation is a beautiful, moving film, and if you give into it fully, it will absolutely wreck you. It's also a sly comedy of displacement and culture clash. Like I said above, it's filled with contradictions. This Blu-ray disc from Universal isn't quite as impressive as the film itself—the transfer seems to have been recycled from the adequate-but-not-superlative HD-DVD release in 2007—but if you've worn out your DVD copy of the film, I have no qualms recommending an upgrade. And if you've never seen the film before, definitely give it a chance. It was my favorite film of 2003 and it's Sophia Coppola's best. Recommended!
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