LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)



A sad, funny ode to those fragile bubbles of joy, romance and deeper meaning in life's otherwise bitter cocktail of boredom, loneliness and disappointment, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation captures a certain mood of isolated intimacy so well that I only wish I could've stumbled across it in a deserted movie theater and kept the experience all to myself. Then again, one of the points of the film is the importance of shared experience: disconnected from her goofus husband (Gionvanni Ribisi), familiar surroundings and a sense of forward momentum in her life, Scarlett Johansson's young American abroad drifts through Japan like a lonely camera, recording her isolated perceptions for no one until she herself is perceived by fellow traveler Bill Murray, kicking off a sweet "like" affair through the streets and karaoke bars of late-night Tokyo. "I'm looking for, like, an accomplice," Murray's Bob Harris says to Johansson's Charlotte during one of their early encounters...and sometimes that's all a stranger needs to make a strange land into a momentary home.

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (1991)



At first, Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) isn't clear that he's in a strange land at all. He's arrived in Judgment City, a place that "should seem pleasing and very familiar," assuming you spend a lot of time at golf course resorts in the Phoenix suburbs. The billboards, sterile hotel rooms and crappy stand-up comics do indeed seem familiar, if just a bit off-kilter. That's because Daniel has been killed in a car crash and is no longer on earth at all; rather, he is in a sort of way station between our world and the afterlife, waiting to be judged on his human existence. It's a potentially stressful situation, but there are some pleasant distractions: for instance, the food is delicious and you can eat all you want without gaining any weight. (The full-time residents of Judgment City, on the other hand, enjoy food that tastes a little like horseshit to "little brains" like us.) Indeed, Daniel finds life in Judgment City quite enjoyable once he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), the compatible soul mate he never managed to find in life. It's not so enjoyable once he's put on trial and forced to defend embarrassing episodes from his earthly existence – and Daniel should probably avoid unflattering visits to the Past Lives Pavilion – but no place is perfect.

MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)



We're talking about the first third of Mystery Train, to be more specific. The film follows a young Japanese couple riding a train into Memphis to visit the birthplace of rock & roll. The girl, Mitsuko, is obsessed with Elvis Presley. Her boyfriend Jun, dour and aloof, is a Carl Perkins man. They've come to visit Graceland and Sun Studios, but it's clear from the beginning that their ways -- hiking through the hot and empty streets with their suitcase suspended between them on a bamboo pole, giving their bellhop a plum, fetishizing their cigarette lighter -- are not the ways of Memphis or Americans. And yet, somehow by the end of their story, it's Memphis that seems alien. The sweetness underneath their oddity has normalized them, but the American South seems to be bursting with weirdness. Jarmusch, of course, has stacked the deck. His version of Memphis is filled with strangeness, and his cast includes Screaming Jay Hawkins as the desk clerk at their hotel and Rufus Thomas as a colorful local they meet. The Memphis I know is quite different.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)



It's hard to tell which is the stranger country in Apocalypse Now: the Vietnam that Willard barely sees, the military that tries to pretend that the situation is normal (rather than all fucked up), or the Kingdom of Death in Col. Kurtz's heart of darkness. Martin Sheen's Willard has not just fallen off the turnip truck; indeed, when the movie opens, he's drunk and bitter about being stuck again in Saigon. But the drunken ennui of Saigon seems more like the height of civilization as he travels further upriver after Kurtz. Even the Apocalypse Now Redux, which adds an odd layover at a French plantation, only increases Willard's alienation from his surroundings. The world is mad. It is madness to make war on people for their own good. It is madness to attempt to carve a jungle into a Western utopia. It is madness to pretend that there is any return when you have raised the ghosts of primordial horror.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975)



An important reminder for the would-be Kurtzes and (in the case of this movie) Danny Dravots of this world: gods don't bleed and die. If you ever try to pass yourself off as a god, be sure not to bleed or be ritually assassinated. A better policy is to avoid attempts at passing as a god altogether. The Man Who Would Be King is a deliberately old-fashioned story in which director John Huston demonstrates the lie at the heart of original author Rudyard Kipling's overt imperialist attitudes towards Asia. Two British adventurers (played by Sean Connery and Michael Caine, both at the top of their games), set out for an unknown area of Afghanistan to pursue unknown riches. Upon arriving, the locals decide that Danny (that's Connery's character) is a god when an arrow that has become lodged in his clothing fails to kill him. Danny, sadly, comes to believe his own press. I hope I am spoiling little when I reveal that hubris is an unforgiving mistress.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)



This may be the consummate British colonialist fantasy of knowing a strange land so well that the natives respect you as one of their own. You spend years studying the language and culture at Oxford, only to go overboard completely and become a barefoot, djellabia-wearing, stallion-riding master of the desert. David Lean's film is based on T. E. Lawrence's memoirs, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In a nutshell it's the story of Lawrence mounting an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, surreptitiously helping the British as their Empire crumbles all around. Real events aside, this is also a fantastic film in and of itself. It is one of those brilliant character studies of a half-mad, half-genius hero, obsessed with an impossible goal. Serpico, The French Connection, and Vanishing Point come to mind. Instead of the inner workings of a nineteen-seventies cop, we get the psyche of Lawrence and the stoic facial expressions of Peter O’Toole galloping up and down the Hejaz. Never mind that Lawrence’s vision — and promise to King Faisal — of a large pan-Arab state based on tribal patterns (including present-day Iraq) went down the toilet in ways we are still experiencing right at this very moment.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Sarah Clyne Sundberg