The good news is, the whiskey works.

I finally got around to seeing Lost in Translation this afternoon. I talked last week about how movies need to have a purpose, and this movie's purpose seemed very much to just let you experience different parts of life. To take you away from where you are now, and put you somewhere else.

I have some friends who travel for work a LOT, and I've been thinking about them over the last few weeks. I wonder about how hard it must be to go to new cities and entertain yourself while staying in a hotel by yourself and not knowing anyone. For the first third or so of Lost in Translation I though about this a lot. Not only were the characters having to deal with this issue, but they were in a totally different culture, which makes it even harder.

Of course in the movie they deal with it by connecting with each other. Now the movie took me off onto another path, I started thinking about how we sometimes form these special and intense relationships while traveling. These are a special breed of relationships, they're sort of inextricably tied to being away and being in a foreign place. I've had some of these, and known friends who've done it too - they are almost never maintainable. They're just not part of our regular lives, they don't fit into the routine we come back to. Strangely, depending on the moment, I find this either tragic or expected and OK.

So really, for me, this movie is about showing how traveling and humanity interact. Since I do a fair amount of traveling, but almost never go someplace where I don't know people, it was really interesting and engaging for me. I'll need to ask my traveling friends if they had the same reactions.

But as Roger Ebert says the important thing isn't what a movie is about, it's how it is about it. I was very impressed with the overall quality of Lost in Translation. It's even more impressive that it was done by a first time director, first projects almost never turn out this well. This overall quality (in the acting too) is really what swept me into all the thinking I did about traveling. And that's how I know they did a good job. I don't think about bad movies nearly this much.

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