OK, maybe it should have titles like Movies Where Not Much Happens… or… Movies Where Some Things Happen, But Not How You Think, And They Don’t Really Get In The Way Of The Movie.

I’m not going to complain about the Hollywood garbage factory or how formulaic most movies are. It’s like trying to teach a pig to dance. It makes no sense and just annoys the pig. It’s not that I’m a “Cinema” fanatic, I just like what I like. I’m certainly not above liking, and sometimes very much liking, what others might regard as completely indigestible gut.

But I like small movies that don’t try to impress me. Movies that don’t believe that the guy has to get the girl, and that if he does, he has to mess it up somehow to fill out the plot and add “tension.” I really like movies where nothing happens. Of course things happen, I wouldn’t want to see a movie of grass growing (okay maybe time lapse is cool).

Since I haven’t seen as many as I’d like, I only have a small list of these. The first on the list, and this is not to say that I like it more, just that NOTHING happens in it, is Sophia Coppola’s Lost In Translation. I know I’m parting ways with a lot of Bill Murray fans here, but let’s face it; they are mostly one-dimensional troglodyte sportswriters.

Bill plays a world-weary famous actor who has been hired (for what I guess is an ungodly amount of money; why else would the character put up with the guy in the hilarious commercial director scene?) Filming an ad for the Suntory whiskey, a product with which he is already associated.

He meets the wife of a world-weary (or maybe he’s just an insomniac) photographer who’s in Tokyo because her husband is, too. Scarlett Johannson does an exceptional job. She suffers from her husband’s schedule and random meetings with a dumb American actress.

That’s it. Sure, they drink a little and party around town with their new compadres. Karaoke, a meal here and there, but no big drama. And that’s what made it great for me. They don’t hook up, no one cheats on them, no one gets shot, stabbed, pregnant, or vampirized. Just a small portion of a couple of extraordinary people who can’t sleep in Japan.