Word: johansson
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...screen, the only grudging Western take on Asia was a comic one: Sofia Coppola's widely praised Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as two Americans who strike sweet sparks while stranded in Tokyo. These two characters are acutely and lovingly observed in contrast to the Japanese bit players, who fit all the dumb stereotypes: they're short of stature and long of wind, they constantly take photos, and damn 'em, not enough of these people speak English! The U.S. dominates so much of the world, politically and pop culturally, that it seems astonished to discover that...
...movie, a dreamy meditation on midlife crises and the nature of transient connections, Murray plays Bob Harris, a disillusioned movie star in Tokyo to shoot a Japanese whiskey commercial. Scarlett Johansson is Charlotte, a newlywed accompanying her workaholic husband (Giovanni Ribisi) on a job. Coppola shot the film in 27 days and stuck to a relatively minuscule $4 million budget. For some of the scenes, she recorded with no sound and rolled the cameras just to capture a mood. And she purposely used high-speed film to give the movie a homemade intimacy. "She waited for us to have...
...next morning, he is startled out of sleep by the bedroom drapes briskly, noisily, automatically opening to reveal slashes of sunlight--that's his wake-up call. Tokyo has another alarm clock in store for Bob. He needs the jolt of friendship, and he finds it in Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young wife who is as restless as Bob is. When she asks how long he's staying in Tokyo, he replies like a lounge singer at the end of his act, "I'll be in the bar for the rest of the week...
...contradictions. It's a comedy about melancholy, a romance without consummation, a travelogue that rarely hits the road. Sofia Coppola has a witty touch with dialogue that sounds improvised yet reveals, glancingly, her characters' dislocation. She's a real mood weaver, with a gift for goosing placid actors (like Johansson, who looks eerily like the young James Spader) and mining a comic's deadpan depths. Watch Murray's eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status quo. You won't find a subtler...
Ultimately, the earth can meet its energy needs without fouling the environment. "But it won't happen," asserts Thomas Johansson, an energy adviser to the United Nations Development Program, "without the political will." To begin with, widespread government subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy--estimated at some $150 billion per year--must be dismantled to level the playing field for renewables. Policymakers must factor in the price of pollution: coal plants are more expensive than renewable power when one includes the cost of scrubbers on smokestacks and the expense of health care for coal-related illnesses; nuclear energy costs...