The impracticality of Lost in Translation as travel prep

Having determined it was too early in 2026 for JetStar to have any current year releases available for viewing on my flight to Japan, I browsed all the offerings, and jumped at the opportunity to watch my #1 movie of 2003, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.

It seemed like the perfect choice. I have always associated the idea of arriving in Japan with Bob Harris' blurry eyed arrival at the start of this movie. But there are four major differences between me and Bob Harris:

1) He was arriving in Tokyo, while my flight landed in Osaka;

2) He was flying from Los Angeles, resulting in massive jet lag that never abates during his entire trip, while my disembarkment from Sydney meant only an hour and hour time difference and no jet lag;

3) He's a movie star, and I'm only a movie critic;

4) He's not real, but presumably I am.

Watching the movie was supposed to be the fulfilment of a desire to watch Crazy Rich Asians on my trip to Singapore, an activity that was thwarted by geoblocking on my Australian streaming service Stan. I got a lot of my ideas of things I wanted to do in Singapore from this movie. And given that I, in fairly typical fashion, did no advanced prep for our Japan trip -- which will include Tokyo in its second half -- I figured watching Lost in Translation would remind me of some of the things I wanted to do while here, given that it was similarly foundational in my desire to visit Japan. 

But while Crazy Rich Asians really foregrounds its tourist attractions -- the Maxwell Food Centre hawkers' market and the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in particular -- Lost in Translation isn't that sort of movie.

It's a vibe, not a travelogue. 

You can't really watch Lost in Translation and say "Oh, I really want to go to that one sushi restaurant Bob and Charlotte visited" or "Oh, I should really check out that 10th floor karaoke room" or even "That strip club seemed, um, interesting."

What Lost in Translation does for its viewers is it makes them want to have the sorts of experiences Bob and Charlotte had, not see the things they saw. And for most ordinary tourists not estranged from their partners or in some kind of mid- (or early-)life crises, that just ain't gonna happen. 

That said, visiting the "Lost in Translation Hotel" -- I'm not looking up the name right now,  because the point is it exists more for us as a concept than a real place -- is something we plan to do.

So don't be surprised if you ultimately get two Lost in Translation posts while I'm here.

Keeping tabs on my opposite

As a movie guy, I'm naturally interested in what other people are watching on planes, especially on the long flights between the U.S. and Australia. With the people sitting around me, I always get to know what sorts of movies are calling out to them over the course of the flight. 

Sometimes, of course, it's not movies at all. The woman whose screen I could see in the crack between the seats to my right was only interested in the Sex in the City sequel series And Just Like That, as any time I looked over, there was something going on with Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and the new characters in their lives. Given the unending sameness, I quickly lose interest in what such people are watching. 

The woman through the crack on the left, on the other hand, was doing me better than I do me, only with a a certain opposite quality. 

Not opposite because of the quality of what she was watching, but because of the vintage. But also because of the quality. 

Me, I always jam pack a fight with releases from the current year. That's especially the case in December, when my current year is starting to wrap up, and it's crunch time in terms of getting a lot of middling movies available on the plane -- where I won't care so much about their quality -- onto my list before I close things out for the year. 

That sometimes leaves me a bit jealous of the people who aren't doing that.

Before we even left the ground, this woman had started in on Galaxy Quest. I think I might have watched more of Galaxy Quest than the thing that was on my own screen, Tig Notaro's Am I OK?, which she co-directed with Stephanie Allynne. That's an exaggeration, of course, but Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite comedies of the last -- well, can't say quarter century now because it came out just more than 25 years ago. Though maybe I don't need to qualify that comment at all, as it is just one of my favorite comedies, full stop.

Am I OK? is not destined to become one of my favorite comedies of any time period. It isn't bad per se, but it is just so middling -- so perfectly representative of the sort of film I would/should watch on a plane -- that it was easy to very quickly stop watching every moment to glean its finer details. Being from Notaro, I would expect it to be about the main character's sexual identity, which it is. I would also expect it to be funnier, which it is not. 

After Galaxy Quest, she didn't make a perfect second decision, but then again, neither did I. While she spent her next segment of the flight on Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, which got only 2.5 stars from me as a retroactive rating on Letterboxd, I was slogging my way through Annie Baker's Janet Planet, which ultimately got only 1.5 stars from me. In fact, this was the most tedious time I had with any of the five movies I watched on the flight, even when the mere task of watching another movie was starting to feel burdensome. Fortunately, I also chose this time to address a bunch of Christmas cards I was planning to mail after we landed, which made the experience far more tolerable. 

Before I finished Janet Planet, she got herself back on track in a major way with her third movie, which really made me jealous: Crazy Rich Asians. I've already seen CRA three times within the relatively short six years of its existence, and it would have been four, except I was geo-blocked from streaming it when we were in Singapore in October. That's right, it was on an Australian streaming service (Stan) which I am unable to watch when I'm not in Australia. It was funny enough to me at the time that I was going write a whole post about it, but never ended up doing so.

Crazy Rich Asians was the movie that primed me to want to visit Singapore in the first place, and to do some of the things we ultimately did on our trip, like go to the Marina Bay Sands hotel (the one with the rooftop pool on the 57th floor) and to the food hawkers place that the movie makes look like a culinary paradise, Newton Food Centre. (Never mind that at the actual Newton Food Centre, my stomach started doing somersaults and I had to use the facilities twice in only 90 minutes -- and not for #1.)

I'd wanted to watch the movie while on our trip both to point out places I'd already been and to remind myself of any new ones we hadn't done yet before we ran out of time, so watching to the left through the seat cracks gave me a chance to do a little bit of that. I was mostly curious to see how Newton Food Centre was depicted, since the real one ended up seeming more grubby to me than the one I remembered from the movie -- but indeed, they used the real one in the movie as well, and I had just romanticized it because that movie is an example of the expertise of romanticizing a city on film. I watched that scene through entirely, and only got little snippets of the rest of the film.

Meanwhile, on my own screen, I was watching what ended up being the first of three consecutive musician biopics, though I didn't realize the middle one qualified as such until I'd started watching it. That first was the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black. Ho hum. The musician biopic is the very definition of the sort of middling mainstream fare that a guy ranking all the movies he sees in a given year should watch, but little more than that. 

She was still a bit ahead of me -- I think I paused to sleep a little bit at some point, though not very long -- and she started her fourth before I started my fourth as well. Perhaps primed by seeing Michelle Yeoh in CRA, she then transitioned into Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I loved (it was my #4 of 2022) but which I haven't yet rewatched. Aside from one little detour into mediocre Tim Burton fare, this woman was making all the right moves, and my eye was especially caught by this movie with its constant quirkiness and visual invention. (Though I was also reminded how long it is, which is perhaps one of the reasons I have not yet revisited it.)

Me? At least I was now watching my best movie of the trip so far, Kneecap, which is the story of three Irish-language rappers that feels a little bit like a spiritual successor to Trainspotting. (Yes, I know that Ireland and Scotland are not the same, though I sometimes forget which accent is from which country.) The really interesting thing about Kneecap is that the real-life rappers play themselves, which was an especially strange revelation for me from the credits, since I thought I recognized two of the three of them from other movies and spent a considerable amount of time wracking my brain to remember which ones. They are supported by people obviously not playing themselves, such as Michael Fassbender.

Her fifth -- and as it turns out, final -- movie was another animated misstep. Hey, nobody's perfect. Letterboxd tells me I gave Vivo (2021) three stars, but as I was catching little bits of it, it felt more to me like the 2.5-star equivalent of Corpse Bride, with the latter certainly having more claim to endurance in the culture. 

After Vivo, she went to sleep -- for the remainder of the flight, it would appear. Which was another source of major jealousy for me. 

Watching five movies and still getting to sleep for a good four hours? She did me far better than I can ever do me. 

I also watched five movies -- more on the fifth in a moment -- but it was with less than an hour of sleep. Which, really, is not so surprising, given that our plane lifted off at 11:30 a.m., meaning I wouldn't naturally feel inclined to sleep until just when we were landing in LA. But you need more sleep than that on an international flight, if at all possible. 

The time I spent not watching movies was this sort of jagged, in-between period where I distracted myself with things like two episodes of Saturday Night Live, which I never get to watch now that I live in Australia but which my wife and I watched religiously for about the first five years of our relationship. These were consolidated 55-minute episodes that did not include the musical numbers, but did include a fair amount of mediocrity as well as a widespread failure to stifle laughter by both the guests and the regular players. 

My fifth movie felt like a grim endeavor indeed, but when else would I make the time to watch Bob Marley: One Love?

Don't get me wrong, I love Marley's music, but even if I were to watch a biopic of my favorite musician of all time (Trent Reznor) I would probably find it at least something of a chore. Then again, I hope Trent Reznor would not allow a biopic of himself to be made without some interesting artistic choices. Then again again, biopic subjects rarely get to decide how their own lives are portrayed on film, since it's more likely for them to be dead (Marley and Winehouse) than alive (Kneecap and Robbie Williams, in the brand new biopic that I really liked, Better Man). 

I gave One Love a milquetoast three stars, same as Back to Black, which seems to be reserved for movies where there is nothing really wrong, except that the musician biopic form itself tends to be very limiting. We'll see if I get a chance to see, or ultimately prioritize, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown before 2024 is out.

What I found myself wondering about this other woman was if she has good taste (60% good taste anyway) or whether she just stumbled into some very good movies. Because then the question comes up, if she had not seen these movies already, what does that say about her actual taste? Or if she was revisiting them, what does it say about her wanting to revisit Corpse Bride and Vivo? 

Maybe it was a hybrid approach, where she had already seen the three greats and was revisiting them just for her pleasure, while she wanted to hear what all the hype was about (there was no hype) for the other two animated movies.

But then again, if she was watching half new movies and half old ones -- new to her, old to the rest of the world -- then she isn't properly my opposite, now is she? 

I finally saw: Crazy Rich Asians

SPOILER WARNING for Crazy Rich Asians.

I usually reserve the “I Finally Saw” label on my blog for movies that are genuine classics, or at least cultural touchstones that have stood the test of time, which I have gone without seeing until this point.

I’m changing the rules this time because it does feel like my viewing of Crazy Rich Asians was a long time in coming, especially with how it's become the center of our cinematic conversation over the past month or so. It's taken me longer than most to join that conversation.

My awareness of it dates back into the mid-summer, when I saw a poster at one of the theaters I regularly attend. If I’d seen this poster in the U.S., I might have done a double take. But in Australia, and in Melbourne in particular, it didn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary. We have a huge Asian population here, and a couple of the big mainstream theaters tailor some 20 percent of their available screens to the latest imports in Asian cinema. It was easy to think this might be one of those, just looking at it at a glance.

My editor’s posting of his review way back on August 8^th didn’t do much to increase its visibility on my radar. I guess I knew that he didn’t usually review the random Asian action movie du jour, so that raised its profile a little bit. But only later did I realize that he was doing something he has a habit of doing, which is posting his review straightaway even if he sees the movie at a preview screening held a month before its release. I’m more of the old school journalist who would hold such a review until the moment of its greatest relevance to readers, but he doesn’t care about any of that. Damn millennials. (Note: He is over 30, and I don’t think that qualifies him as a millennial.) Because I didn't immediate detect this habit of his, I thought the movie was already out but that it was pretty small, which was why I hadn’t noticed it on any of the local marquees. In fact, I came to think I must have already missed it.

It was only about two weeks later when Crazy Rich Asians started to become the topic of thinkpieces and film podcasts, which I imagine coincided with its U.S. release. It was at this point that I started hearing people talk about it being the first major studio release with a predominantly Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club, which is just about the most astonishing verifiable fact I’ve heard this year.

It was about two weeks after that it got released here, and yet a further two weeks before I finally saw it. So, “finally” does make a bit of sense here.

And … damn.

I loved it.

I blubbered like a baby at the end. Not once, but three times. (Mahjong, airplane, and the final shot of Michelle Yeoh, for anyone scoring at home.)

I was dubious that I would be so moved by it, and not because I’m not Asian or Asian-American and can’t relate to its themes. Even people who said they liked it were quick to describe it as kind of “just another romantic comedy” but with Asians instead of white people in the lead roles, and I figured that was the reason that a couple Asian film critics I heard talk about it say they loved it. Which would make it similar to the African-American critics who admitted loving Black Panther more for what it represented than what it actually was. (I’m going to revisit it, but at this point I find the actual story of Black Panther a bit pedestrian in its execution, unfortunately.)

So as I got increasingly more invested in Crazy Rich Asians, and then blubbery at the end – I was a frigging mess – I thought “Wow, these people really undersold this movie.”

Okay, yeah, sure, it is a “typical romantic comedy” in some respects. But underlying that is a real thematic heft that struggles with identity and family and other issues I found very involving. When I read my editor’s review – he gave it only a 6 out of 10, but that's not actually a bad rating for him – I was shocked to see him use the word “slight.”

This is not a slight movie. Something so ornately designed – that wedding scene! – could never be “slight.” But even more than that, you’ve just got so much unspoken here that’s contributing to the film’s power. It may be wearing the costume of something slight, but there’s real passion here, real grappling with things that are meaningful.

I'm not even sure the order in which to talk about the things I loved about the movie, but let's start with the cast. With all due props to Henry Golding and Constance Wu, I texted a friend afterward that Awkwafina was my favorite character in any movie this year. Of course, Awkwafina is the name of the actress rather than the character, but I didn't think my friend would necessarily get what I meant if I'd written "Peik Lin was my favorite character in any movie this year." Part of that is that Awkwafina had to overcome two preconceived biases of mine, one against people who go by a single moniker (and one named after a bottled water at that), and two that I didn't like her all that much the first time I'd encountered her in Ocean's 8. Here I was on board and then some. I laughed at practically every line delivery, and the character's heart was ultimately the cherry on top of her performance.

Golding I'd already encountered, just last week, in A Simple Favor, where his undeniable charisma (and handsomeness!) rose above the rest of the material. Wu was new to me, and I think this will be the first of many encounters with her as Hollywood finally recognizes the box office power of an Asian-American lead actress (with apologies to Lucy Liu). (Crazy Rich Asians is just about at $150 million in the U.S., which is amazing.) I also wanted to make a mention of Gemma Chan, who I first encountered in Humans playing a robot. Something about her ability to do that allows her to contain an ocean of melancholy in those eyes.

I wish I had a coherent argument in favor of Asians rather than just the bullet point approach I've been presenting so far. But the movie just made me feel good, and sometimes that reduces you to structural disarray in communicating it.

I loved the bachelor party in international waters, thrown by the guy I still don't love all that much who plays Jian-Yang in Silicon Valley (Jimmy O. Yang). I liked that the movie was willing to stray outside the comfort zone of a pleasant romantic comedy by showing us the fish carcass in Rachel's bed. I luxuriated in all the signs of Nick's fancy life (which he prevents from defining him), especially that upstairs area on the plane that I always want to get a better look at on my trips to the U.S. and back.

In mentioning the cast earlier I didn't mention Michelle Yeoh, perhaps because she's the villain of the piece and I was therefore a bit less magnetically attracted to her performance. But I can't deny that her performance allowed me to cry for the third of three times, at the very end, when she gives her little nod of approval to Rachel (after having given her son the ring to give Rachel). If not earlier, in that moment I understood -- as a parent myself -- what it means to let your children go and to allow them to live their own lives.

There's more I could say on Rachel's simple yet powerful disquisition on status during the Mahjong game, or that incredible shot of the bride coming down the aisle with the water streaming under her feet and the plant fronds waving above her, or any other divine moment in this divine movie.

Instead I'll just say if you haven't seen Crazy Rich Asians, like I hadn't until Tuesday night, well -- didn't you heed my earlier spoiler warning? But also: Go.

Because ... damn.