By Times Staff
Published February 5, 2004 Lost in Translation
DIRECTOR: Sofia Coppola
CAST: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Akiko Takeshita, Catherine Lambert, Fumihiro Hayashi, Yutaka Tadokoro.
SYNOPSIS: An American movie star (Murray) strikes up a friendship with a lonely housewife (Johansson) while visiting Japan. The film garnered Oscar nominations for best picture, best actor, best director and best original screenplay.
WHAT WE SAID: Times film critic Steve Persall, who called the film one of the best of 2003 in his September review, described it as a comedy "in a different, melancholy vein. It's the story of nothing much, focused on two characters with nothing much in common except a growing sense of isolation in a foreign country, Japan, where language is a nearly insurmountable barrier between visitors and locals. . . . In a lesser movie, Bob and Charlotte would tumble into a May-December romance. Lost in Translation defiantly stays off that track, keeping this relationship strictly platonic. . . . Without two sterling actors at its core, Lost in Translation still would be a mesmerizing traveloguef Tokyo's neon fantasy world, from garish electronic billboards to a kinky-chic nightclub. Yet no matter what goes on around Bob and Charlotte, our attention is always drawn to their faces or perhaps their hands to detect the next step in coming alive again. It's an exciting, amusing form of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, superbly staged."
MPAA RATING: R for profanity, sexual situations, nudity
RUNNING TIME: 102 min.
American Splendor
DIRECTORS: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini
CAST: Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, James Urbaniak, Judah Frielander, Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner, Toby Radloff
SYNOPSIS: Comic book artist Harvey Pekar (Giamatti) rails against the world until the world bites back in a unique film biography.
WHAT WE SAID: The film was an honorable mention on Persall's best films of the year list. He called it "original and perplexing. . . . Much of the film is structured like panels in a comic book. Indeed, several live-ction sequences look and sound like one trenchant panel after another. But the filmmakers toy with reality even further by incorporating the real Harvey (along with several other characters in his life) alongside the actor playing him, Paul Giamatti. It's part of the inside joke that Harvey can't draw, so several other artists, including R. Crumb, illustrated his stories, each with their own physical interpretation of him. We get the real Pekar, the drawn Pekar, Giamatti's Pekar, even an actor (Donal Logue) playing Pekar in a stage version of his comics. . . . The movie enables us to empathize with a loser, to see our problems in his and to find a splendor of sorts in the most unlikely places."
MPAA RATING: R for profanity
RUNNING TIME: 100 min.
The Fighting Temptations
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Lynn
CAST: Cuba Gooding Jr., Beyonce Knowles, Steve Harvey, Mike Epps, LaTanya Richardson, Angie Stone, Shirley Caesar, Faith Evans and Rue McClanahan
SYNOPSIS: Gooding stars as an egocentric ad executive who must create a gospel choir before he can collect an inheritance. Knowles co-stars as his showcase songbird.
WHAT WE SAID: Times reviewer Brian Orloff gave the film a C-, describing it as "hackneyed family comedy with one secret weapon: its music. . . . The joyous gospel music is undeniably fantastic. The performances are, at times, innovative but always refreshing and fun. It's a pity that enjoying them entails sitting through the rest of the movie. But here's a solution: If you pick up the soundtrack, you can skip the film."
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sexual references
RUNNING TIME: 123 min.
Secondhand Lions
DIRECTOR: Tim McCanlies
CAST: Robert Duvall, Michael Caine, Haley Joel Osment, Kyra Sedgwick, Nicky Katt
SYNOPSIS: A young boy (Osment) in the reluctant custody of two cranky great-uncles (Duvall, Caine) learns about their heroic past and inspires them to livelier golden years.
WHAT WE SAID: Persall gave the film a B-plus. "Secondhand Lions is a grade-B movie that earns the "plus' just for being so darned affable, like an old buddy telling a familiar anecdote you don't mind hearing again because he's so good at it," he wrote. Persall also praised Osment: "He's a talented cub holding his own with two bona fide lions, and McCanlies' movie is so much better for it."
MPAA RATING: PG for profanity, violence, mature themes
RUNNING TIME: 108 min.
Under the Tuscan Sun
DIRECTOR: Audrey Wells
CAST: Diane Lane, Sandra Oh, Lindsay Duncan, Raoul Bova
SYNOPSIS: A novelist (Lane) vacationing in Italy buys a villa and regains a sense of romance and freedom she thought was lost forever.
WHAT WE SAID: Times reviewer Philip Booth, who gave it a B-, called the film "alternately giddy and sentimental, an upscale chick flick with pretensions of something loftier." Despite that, he wrote, the film is entertaining, almost entirely because of Lane's winning performance.
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sexual situations, profanity
RUNNING TIME: 113 min.
My Boss's Daughter
DIRECTOR: David Zucker
CAST: Ashton Kutcher, Tara Reid, Jeffrey Tambor, Andy Richter, Michael Madsen, Jon Abrahams, David Koechner, Carmen Electra, Terence Stamp, Molly Shannon, Ever Carradine, Dan Joffre
SYNOPSIS: Kutcher acts all grown up - sort of - as a business executive flirting with his employer's daughter.
WHAT WE SAID: The Times did not review this film.
MPAA RATING: PG-13 for crude and sex related humor, drug content and language
