just this once, PLEASE PLEASE listen to us! Whatever you do, do not listen to the “digitally enhanced” scene from LOST IN TRANSLATION making the blog rounds, which purports to reveal what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of the movie. IT IS NOT WORTH IT. There are some things that are best left to the imagination, like what was in the briefcase in PULP FICTION or what the bass line to “When Doves Cry” sounds like.

Trust us. Please.

1 COMMENT

  1. Huh, I actually like the movie better now. The first non-ponderous line in the movie, then again, I didn’t like Lost in Translation very much…the last scene especially struck me as typical of the film, a scene expecting the audience to imagine weight for the self-indulgent solipsism that was throughout the movie. To each their own, I suppose.

  2. “On the other hand… just for a one time thing… subtitling the final scene in “Magnolia” is not bad.”

    That is the worst idea ever. Every time I hear someone say, “I didn’t understand what the frogs meant”, or any other critique of that film, I just want to throw very large, heavy objects at them. Like monuments and quarries.

  3. Bill said:

    “That is the worst idea ever. Every time I hear someone say, “I didn’t understand what the frogs meant”, or any other critique of that film, I just want to throw very large, heavy objects at them. Like monuments and quarries. ”

    But I tell you, yea verily, should anyone tell you that they understand what the frogs meant, they are full of turkey giblets, aye, and their brains are pure cotton candy, for surely the movie had absolutely nothing whatsoever to say about the human condition except that weak talent likes to steal from Robert Altman, and that you should trust nobody who, when stuck for an ending of a movie, throws a rain of frogs at the screen.

  4. The frogs in Magnolia are actually set up earlier in the film, but you have to know who Charles Fort was and what he did in order to realize it. It’s obscure, but it’s there. Between frogs on the movie posters and the Fort reference, about halfway through the first time I saw it, I was expecting that frogs would start raining down from the sky before the end of the film. Honest. Plus, y’know, “These things do happen.”

    As for not saying anything about the human condition, I dunno, a lot of the film focused on bad relationships between fathers and there kids, and on the possibility of redeeming those relationships. That’s at least a part of the human condition that some of us have experience.

    And sure, Anderson riffs on Altman, but I’ve never understood why that’s a bad thing or why it counts as a critique. It’s not like he’s been trying to hide the fact. If he was trying to hide it, he wouldn’t have agreed to shadow Altman during the filming of “A Prairie Home Companion.” (And if Altman thought he was stealing, he wouldn’t have agreed to having Anderson around.)