Excerpt from "Lost In Translation" is the Same Old Story by Melissa Bagtan, Asian American Movement Ezine

Sophia Coppola’s new film "Lost in Translation" is this year’s critical darling ... critics are touting the film as an innovative and refreshing antidote to mainstream Hollywood.

And yet, critics have largely ignored the film’s negative portrayal of Japanese culture.  To show the culture clash between American and Japanese culture, the film relies on stale stereotypes of the Japanese for laughs: They’re short! They’re wacky! They can’t pronounce their r’s! (There is one scene involving a Japanese prostitute that bashes viewers over the head with that joke.) The film is replete with racial gags that draw from the same old Hollywood stereotypes, from Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in "Breakfast at Tiffany’s," to the Japanese car makers in 1986’s "Gung Ho," or even "Sixteen Candle’s" infamous Long Duk Dong.

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Excerpt from Is "Lost in Translation" Racist? by E. Koohan Paik, Color Lines Race Wire

The Japanese are presented not as people, but as clowns ... The timing of all the lines, gestures and editing is impeccable, but the hilarity is rooted entirely in the "otherness" of the Japanese people.  We laugh at them, not with them.  This is why the film is accused of being racist.

Even verité-style footage of authentic locals focuses on the Japanese as a sorry lot, preoccupied with cheesifying all things western ... These scenes are occasionally "balanced" by appropriately reverent, but equally inscrutable, shrine-and-temple sequences.  Moreover, the film is simultaneously scornful and smug in the knowledge that imitation, no matter how tacky, is the sincerest form of flattery.  This sentiment is actually articulated in the dialogue, by Charlotte's husband, galled by a rock-band photo shoot: "Let them be who they are! They're trying to make them Keith Richards when they're just skinny and nerdy." The subtext here is, when westerners ape the Rolling Stones, it's normal; but when Asian kids fall prey to the same media hype, they're pathetic wannabees.  They should be meditating in a dojo somewhere, not playing rock and roll."

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Excerpt from Ad-libbing on Tokyo Time by Gregory Weinkauf, Dallas Observer

Once the halfway mark arrives and it's abundantly clear the movie's going nowhere slowly, Coppola sends her protagonists out clubbing, where they encounter Charlie Brown, or "Chalrie Blown" (the director's friend, Fumihiro Hayashi), who's so thinly developed that he makes Bob and Charlotte look like classic Dickensian creations by comparison. Charlie's primary purpose here is to sing us some Sex Pistols at a karaoke bar, which is very much appreciated until it encourages much more disturbing renditions of New Wave classics from the primary cast, which genuinely induce nausea.

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Excerpt from Totally Lost in Translation by Kiku Day, The Guardian

Film reviewers have hailed Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" as though it were the cinematic equivalent of the second coming. One paper even called it a masterpiece. Reading the praise, I couldn't help wondering not only whether I had watched a different movie, but whether the plaudits had come from a parallel universe of values. Lost in Translation is being promoted as a romantic comedy, but there is only one type of humour in the film that I could see: anti-Japanese racism, which is its very spine.

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Excerpt from What time is it there? by Ken Fox, TV Guide

But the film never really transcends its simple situation and seems oddly unembarrassed by its provincial attitude towards foreign cultures.  Coppola shows us Japan solely through the eyes of her characters, who see the Japanese as cartoonishly infantile, infatuated with asinine TV shows, karaoke and silly video games.  It can be funny, but the humor is too often based in stereotypical perceptions of Asians (they're short, they're laughably polite, they eat weird food), and Coppola shamelessly invites us to laugh along with Murray's character, who, believe it or not, thinks it's hilarious when his hosts get their R's and L's switched.

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