doing an essay on how the film was perceived...
are all japaneses people shorter than Bill Murray?
would you understand what 'lip my stockings' meant?
are japanese youths pale and poor imitations of western cultural cliches?
thoughts please....
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it's rubbish or lubbish
whichever one you want
ha
im not looking at the good or bad question though... (clearly its good just watch the opening minute)
... the racism question is a pretty tought one
not really
but it is shit, pretentious and overly artistic and drole.
but not really racist
i certainly found myself
hating americans more after seeing it.
me too.
i didn't like the film.
I can see how some may have perceived it to be racist, but..........
it's about culture clash essentially, not race.
I HATE SHIT LIKE THIS!
Firstly, it's not racist, secondly, it's just a film.
Didn't mean to stop there:
I hate this faux-acadmeia. It's just a film or, if you must, a piece of art. It has no relevance to anything important and doesn't change anything. As a result, writing essays about it, or indeed any fictional film, is nothing more than a waste of everybody's time.
This reminds me of that Billy Childish quote
"Conceptual art is continually discussed in terms of dealing with something. They say, 'This brick deals with ...' and it doesn't deal with anything. A dead shark doesn't deal with death; it is dead!"
I like Billy Childish
and I like this quote.
His (non music) art is rubbish though.
Actually, I quiet like his wood carvings.
His paintings are crap.
I quite like a book of his
can't remember what it's called
you know - the one that I read.
billy childish is a sore loserf
he isn't a tenth of the artist that emin is.
and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is one of the single greatest pieces of contemporary art ever created
it is
a very good piece indeed, however i am still a big fan of the Robert Rauschenbergs 'Erased De Kooning Drawing' it is one of the highlights for me. but then as a retired non representational expressionist whos work was solely a re distillation of what art means to me.... its hardly a surprise.
:oD
Maybe in Viceland Emin is some sort of god,
but in the grown-up outside of Shoreditch everyone can see her for what she is: A common as muck junkie slapper.
"Awight boyz, oo fancies a shag?! I'll stick a little patch on me fuck tent for ya, ah does vat saaaand? Wickedz yeah? Ven i'll piss me bed and put it in a fackin gallery. This art shit's well eazee innit?"
*grown-up world
LOL!
last time i looked, that wasn't the only the piece of work produced by ms emin. and your critique of her strikes me as being a little naive. Her mono prints should you ever manage to get over your daily mail-esque critique are in my view fantastic.
btw - i dont think i have ever been to shoreditch. i also count myself fairly grown up enough to view subsequent works fairly and open minded enough not to be tainted be a previous single piece of work that i may not have liked.
I may not be a great advocate for the work you detailed (i have seen better by her and others) however i will defend it against blatantly shite reviews as yours!
a mere 5 minutes revision into her upbringing would give you all the knowledge you need to understand why she produced the work she does, however rightly or wrongly *most* modern/conceptual art only gives to those who bother to bring something to the work - a very similar relationship to music (for me anyway). unfortunately it cant always be taking at face value.
fortunately for me i learnt this lesson when i was an about 12 when i thought jackson pollock threw paint at canvases, it turned out i couldn't have been more wrong.
if this sort of work isn't to your understanding then fine - i dont have a problem with that. but your post sucks.
imho
^^good post
Couldn't agree more.
Also that 'Erased De Kooning Drawing' thing was one of the most awesome acts of recent art history.
Here's how he did it:
1) Go and see De Kooning, who at that point was THE biggest artist in the US
2) Ask him politely if he'll give you of his drawings. For free.
3) Explain that you want it as you want to erase everything on it and call it your own.
4) Get De Kooning to do exactly this.
5) Do exactly what you said you'd do.
Who says rebellion has to be aggressive, loud or violent.....
it is....
as they say in the trade....
Mint!
:o)
myself a few others used to press our understanding of preciousness by painting on/over each others canvases while they were away.... seeing who would crack first! the tension it created was AMAZING. you have to be pretty confident in both yourself and your compatriots, the looks garnered from other students when 'adding' to others works is akin to having shat in their grandmothers mouths while fucking the dog.
my lack of preciousness and hard economics finally led me to paint about 25 works on the same canvas. nice and cheap but a bugger for selling on! ROTFL!! this is why i am retired.... i need a proper job to fulfill my responsibility to 2 children. :oD
Ha....
I wonder if your two bairns have picked up your silver tongue...:
"akin to having shat in their grandmothers mouths while fucking the dog."
;-)
i can proudly
respond in the affirmative!
having told them if teacher tells them off, tell them that you are an artist and your witnessing my performance art, so fuck off and stop repressing me.
<serious answer now follows>
fortunately so far.... no.
LOL!!
ROTFL!
mr childish is such an oaf at best and a parochial narrow minded twonk at worst.
that said - conceptual art aint for everyone. :oD
Woah woah woah
Art doesn't change anything?
What have you been smoking?
^Its not faux academia
Artistic criticism has been around for thousands of years. Not to mention the fact that its often produced by people who actually create art too. And you wouldnt have much philosophy without it either (if that means anything to you).
the ironing is delicious
^this^
it says nothing negative about the japanese culture.
I go with the above.
Not racist. It was about the culutral alienation of being in another country and wouldn't work without him spotting the cultual differences.
It is very, very boring, very, very pretentious and a very, very mediocre and forgettable film. But it isn't racist.
No
I liked it, though I haven`t had the urge to watch it again.
I`d say it`s about loneliness.
yep, isolation and lonliness come across in this
even in the scenes where other americans are featured (when bill murray meets his "fans" in the bar - the model/actress friend of scarlett johansson' husband) they are not portrayed very well; annoying, dumb and very different to the cooler lead charachters.
not racist, no. It is set in Japan to emphasise how alone they are. I don't think the film would of worked so well if set in New York, Cali, etc.
And besides, all those long cityscape shots which feature in the film just wouldn't be as cool if it were set in a city familar with American/Western audiences now, would it?
I didn't like the film.
Well unless you've actually visited japan...
any knowledge of it you have will be filtered through "the west"
so you couldnt' really say
this is what a lot of people argue...
all of the film is through a western gaze and thats half the probelm all the japanese characters are caricatures or stereotypes... also (as much as bill murray is amazing) he is a little like listening to your grandad talk about immagration
I remember hearing
Sofia Coppola say that the Tv show and other parts of Japanese culture were just there, they as filmmakers just portrayed the culture as they saw in real life.
I don't think it's racist, I think it's just showing cultural differences in an affectionate manner. And the two American characters are shown to have flaws as well, so I wouldn't call it unbalanced.
And it's a great film.
no it's not.
my granddads really racist and at all like bill murray. I was bill murray was my granddad.
not at all*
and no, I don't really like him. My granddad that is.
what about laughing with and laughing at?
is coppola allowed to laugh with the hollywood stereotypes because they are with her rather than at the japanese who are foreign or other
yes it is
Yes it/he is.
i actually found lost in translation to be
a great film.
not racist though.
I've always thought
that the "racist" line on LiT is very odd. I don't think Japanese culture is at all demeaningly portrayed in it - it's more the Americans finding it confusing that seems to be the point. In fact I think it's a very affectionate portrayal - which would fit in with Sofia Coppola's on-the-record love for Japan.
it doesnt take much thought to make the link from that
to it being a patronising (intentionally or otherwise) portrayal of japan to the racism thing does it?
well it clearly
maintains the notion of whiteness as the norm to which all others are compared (if you're looking for clever (pretentious) terms that would be ethno-normative). which is made even more obvious in this film than it would have been if were set in western europe/us. but at the same time it portrays the white americans as completely fucking inable to understand and appreciate anything that differs from what they're used to from their western surroundings, and in that way it could just as well be racist towards them. if you see what i mean.
^
also: the biggest advert for japan ever
I think we've gotten to the point where anything
which doesn't put an overtly positive spin on a culture gets bundled in with 'racism'.
I've seen the film a couple of times and I can't think of anything which I would remotely deem racist. There are elements of exaggeration for effect - think the director of he commercial shrieking away instructions at Bill Murray in Japanese through a translator - but it is, deep down, a black comedy. It does involve a bit of sensitivity, but does the fact that you aren't born in a place mean you aren't able to poke fun at certain observations? Would the scene be less 'offensive' if Sophia Coppola had made the director a loud-mouthed American?
I'd be surprised if anyone could be genuinely offended by anything in it.
As a side note I'm always surprised by the level of antipathy people on these boards have for LiT - I think it's a beautiful film.
kind of agree
cause if you really want to start analysing and picking everything apart then you'll find something in every film/book/tv show/music video/etc that could be described as offensive and discriminating to some part of the population. so my post above was not really meant like "OH LOOK AT THIS, WAY OFFENSIVE" but more that if we're really going to actively look for something in this film then this is what i think.
I like this article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jan/24/japan.film
Was I the only one too busy gawking
at Scarlett to pay the blindest bit of attention to the rest of the film? Bill Murray could have spent the whole film with a hitler task on making jokes about Hiroshima for all I would have noticed.
God I wish her Tom Waits album had been good.
Sigh.
can't say that was much of a problem for me
^ lesbian
if i were a lesbian then surely it WOULD have been a problem
That's just what a lesbian would say
i turned lesbian after having been to bristol
all the guys there were so horrible i made a vow never to go near a man again.
I'm not even from Bristol!
So haha to you!
but you live there.
I do
and I hate all the guys there as well (y)
....which makes you one of them
:)