Babel
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Movie Reviews of Babel
Movie Review: A FEELING MOVIE, NOT A FEEL-GOOD MOVIE
Summary: 5 Stars
BABEL is one of those films that are not often made anymore, and it takes a non-American director to bring it off. It is good to see in this age of TRANSFORMERS and X-MEN and Bruce Willis action pieces that we can still have movies that are about ideas, not just escapism.
The reviewer for Amazon, Sam Graham, is spot-on in his analysis and overview. This is clearly not a film for everyone -- only for those of us who who care to think and who recognize that lack of communication is a central problem throughout the world. Americans are not the only ones who often fail to see what is going on under their noses, and who can realize that small issues can quickly escalate into monumental ones. A mistake, such as taking the children of an American couple across the border into Mexico, quickly grows into a life-threatening event, and the parents of the children, who we don't realize until later, are Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette -- tourists in North Africa who must resort to some difficult-to-watch crude surgery. That those top-billed stars in what is an ensemble piece are not given the full-focus of the long film is not the point. This is not a pretty-boy movie, or even a pretty movie. It is gritty and real, and all of the characters are shown as having clay feet.
If we think that we are really in charge of our lives, we need to think again. At any moment, something can happen which can throw what we think are our self-absorbed and ordered existences into a tail spin -- often because of our own short-sighted perspectives and often because of someone's else's -- wherever they happen to be in the world. The rifle fired carelessly by the boy is the center piece -- the center of the spider web, but the rest of the web strands may seem to be unconnected to the rest until near the end. The story in Japan seems to be unrelated to the other stories until we discover that the rifle used by the boys halfway around the world is one that the father of the deaf-mute originally furnished. Dismiss this as the butterfly effect if you wish, but the connections exist if we are careful enough to look.
The story about the deaf-mute girl in Japan (portrayed by Rinko Kikuchi who was, as she should have been, nominated for an Academy Award) is not as separate as we might first think. In fact, it is her inability to communicate with her father and her friends in an area of the world where personal defects are looked down upon by peers that turns out to be a microcosm for the entire, far-flung story. Her frustration is the distillation of what is wrong with all of us -- we don't take to listen to, or understand, others around us. As a professor who has taught in China for many years and has learned how personal ailments and birth defects are sometimes looked down upon as reflecting weaknesses in character, I understood the Japanese girl's painful frustration. Boys ignore her because she cannot speak to them, and even her father, until the very end in a touching finale, is unable to comprehend her needs and angst. She wants and needs to be recognized as a human being, even if it means only being a sexual being. She, like most of us, needs to be understood for who we are and not expected to be exactly like everyone else.
For obvious reasons, I did not show the film in class to Chinese students, but I did loan it to a former female student. She asked me in an Instant Message why the girl showed, as she put it, her beaver to the boys in public. I told her that she felt that since she could not be noticed as a teenage girl wanting to fit in with the others, she would show herself as a sexual object, which is what, she felt, the boys only cared about. She would get attention in the only way she knew how, even if it meant making sexual overtures to a mature dentist or to a police officer who comes to her home in her father's absence. Of course, she is reeling from the death of her mother and even makes up her own version to explain her untimely demise, but her issues are even deeper and more inward-focused than that.
Even the Brad Pitt character learns that some people, even in a third-world nation, are not interested in helping others for a reward. When he offers money to the man who has helped save his wife's life, he is amazed when his money is rejected. Even in these days of constant terror threats, some people -- in any corner of the globe -- are still human and, more importantly, humane. This humble native of Morocco is not like Pitt's fellow tourists who want to get on with their trip; he is selfless and resourceful, willing to help an American tourist whose wife's life is threatened.
That this film ends with the deaf-mute girl standing nude on the terrace with her father is perfect because it exemplifies the theme of the entire, skillfully woven tapestry. If we don't communicate with others and reconcile our differences -- whether real or perceived -- we are doomed to live in isolation.
When BABEL was overlooked for an Academy Award in favor of the Martin Scorsese film THE DEPARTED, an American remake of a Japanese film, I was disappointed but not surprised. After all, that gangster film, full of violence and vile language, was more accessible to the American public. It was easier to accept a film full of pretty boys and the scene-stealing Jack Nicholson, people who settle their differences by shooting each other, than a film where one single shot fired in stupidity can affect us so dramatically. It's like that uncanny Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. See if you think we are all really unconnected from each other.
Movie Review: You'll probably either love or hate this movie. My take: One of 2006's best
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is a feast for all the senses and another masterpiece from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose debut film "Amores Perros" established him and his writing partner, Guillermo Arriaga, as talents that simply would be ignored.
While "Amores" had a similar narrative style, it was much more consistently visceral and in your face than "Babel," which is also a tough film but one which demands a slower pace and shows a story-teller and a director at the peak of their respective talents. They had a lot to live up to esp. after the initial critical acclaim of "Amores". While some critics/people see the movie as being a little too self-important and some even like the 4 stories (but not in the same movie) I was immediately emotionally involved from the first frame of the movie to the last because of the different stories. One could argue that its message of the need to "communicate" does not warrant the movie's perceived self-important tone, but I was easily able to overlook a possibly didactic tone at times and spent a little over 2 1/2 hours getting to know people from around the world who have universal needs and hopes and how these desires manifest themselves in a story of global scope that is brought together by one element which ties them all.
I won't much more away as I don't like to know too much about movies before seeing them. I can say that any film student would be hard-pressed not to appreciate the use of different film stocks used to differentiate each story and even more importantly the technical/logistical prowess that must have been required to direct a production of this magnitude, working with such a diverse cultural cast, and finding a way to bring together the performances of stars and others who'd never been in a single frame in their entire lives. I want to see the film again just to appreciate the hues, esp. those used in the Japan portion of the film, with emphasis on a scene that takes place at a nightclub. This sequence is as alive as anything that you will ever see in a single frame in any movie made to date. I would compare it to Scorsese's notorious cooking/restaurant scenes in which you can almost smell the garlic coming from the television/movie screen
Some people have complained that the movie is too long, and while the 2 1/2+ hours certainly did not fly by (unlike "The Departed" which managed to feel like it lasted much less than it did), I did not mind. Many of the scenes taking place in Morocco and Mexico required the slower pace to give the horrible events that would soon take place even more life and appropriateness in a story that is not told in a linear fashion, and unlike some movies that use a non-linear narrative for show, this one demands on this slower narrative succeeding or else it would not only be virtually impossible to tell but would take away from its big impact.
The acting is out of this world and, with the exception of a narrative short-coming (which may very well be on the cutting room floor) that makes the talented Gael Garcia Bernal's character feel like he is making a cameo in the movie, you'll be hard-pressed to find an ensemble in any movie in any year that is as strong as this one. Adriana Barraza's performance is so moving that you'll find it hard to forget even after the movie ends. I am glad that she received a nomination as it will hopefully lead to more work by this talented actress.
Bottom-line:
If you don't mind long movies and want to be moved by stories the are universal and timely, you'll be hard-pressed to find a movie that does it better than this one. Is it perfect? No, but it simply can't be, although it would have it would have benefited from allowing its images to relay its "message" as some of the commentary/words (esp. at the end)that the self-importance that some see in the movie in my mind are solely the product of these touches and an advertising campaign that beat the theme to death and sold the movie and an "event". It's a shame that for all the talk that this film has generated, it has not been seen by more people.
On the other hand, if you hate long movies (and still have Elaine Benis from "Seinfeld" type rants when anyone mentions "The English Patient"), this is not the movie for you. All humor aside, read the Amazon review IF you need to know more details for making the choice to see this movie. That synopsis is right on the money. This also is not a movie for kids, nor anyone looking for something "light." Go with your gut. If you think that this movie is not for you, it probably won't be. I for one loved it and think that it's too easy to call it this year's "Crash," which in my opinion was not as "good" as "Brokeback Mountain" but was not the piece of junk that some have wanted to reduce it to.
Movie Review: Fewer than six degrees of separation
Summary: 5 Stars
There are some problems with this widely acclaimed film by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who previously gave us Amores perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003), but they really don't matter because the film is so interesting and so very well acted and directed. The script by Guillermo Arriaga, who also wrote the script for Amores perros and 21 Grams, weaves the lives of people from Mexico, the US, Morocco, and Japan into a single story held together tenuously by the delicate thread of a bullet from a rifle.
The rifle belonged to a Japanese businessman who gave it to a Moroccan guide after hunting in Morocco, who sold it to a goat herder, who gave it to his sons to shoot jackals. The younger son shot at a tour bus in which the very well-to-do American couple Richard and Susan (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are traveling, hitting Susan in the shoulder. Meanwhile, the two young children of Richard and Susan are being watched by their Mexican nanny Amelia (Adriana Barraza) who needs to attend her son's wedding. But she can find nobody to take care of the kids, so she takes them across the border with her to the wedding.
It really doesn't matter how contrived this plot is (actually I thought it was rather creative) because the point is to show how connected we are all in this world. A butterfly may flap its wings in the Sahara and it may rain in Florida and maybe there is some cause and effect, as they tell us is possible in chaos theory. And maybe these people are no closer that six degrees of separation, and maybe their voices are babel to one another. But what Inarritu is intent on showing us is that we are all human and share the same feelings, whether a lonely Japanese girl looking for love in all the wrong ways, or a privileged very white woman in the desert with a bullet hole in her shoulder looking for the love of a husband she thinks she has lost. Furthermore, the character and worth of a Mexican nanny is equal to that of a Japanese tycoon which is equal to that of a Moroccan goat herder which is equal to that of a little white girl, and so on.
While most people admired this movie, and it received many awards and nominations for awards, some viewers did not like it; and some of those viewers vented. When a good movie is trashed because it has a few plot holes or because the logic is a bit off, you can be sure that the person doing the trashing has been offended. Usually it is some kind of sexuality depicted that offends. Sometimes the source of the anger is political or even racial. Here it definitely could be sexual since we see some under age sexual activity (masturbation and exhibitionism) done in a somewhat kinky way. Or it could be that some viewers did not feel sympathetic toward the deaf and mute Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) or were disgusted with a boy who spies on his sister and then gets sexually aroused. Or it could even be that some viewers really were offended by the stupid behavior of some of the characters.
Surely Amelia could have found somebody to watch the kids. Surely she knew it was dangerous to return to the US with her drunken nephew Santiago (Mexican heart throb, Gael Garcia Bernal) at the wheel. And of course the selfishness of Richard and Susan to put her in such a spot was wrong. And the pathetic desperation of Chieko acted out in such a blatant manner, as she throws herself at men must have offended many. To me, though, the psychology projected by Inarritu and Arriaga was striking and largely compelling even while it was controversial. When a young girl presents her naked body to a man and is rejected, it could be psychologically devastating to the girl. She is offering her entire self to him and he does want her. And perhaps the ambiguous question of why she appeared naked on the balcony as her father comes home and embraces her is troubling. We want to understand what is being asked and answered here. Something troubling to the ordinary human psyche perhaps.
Anyway, do not let the nay sayers dissuade you from watching this excellent movie. Regardless of how one might feel about the ideas of Inarritu and Arriaga, they are very much worth viewing in an artistic, a psychological, and a political sense. It may seem easy to construct a movie with a rising sense of tension and to develop characters that will interest the audience with just a few scenes and even fewer lines, but it isn't; and to do it with such a convoluted plot is even more remarkable.
So see this for Inarritu who got the most out of the actors, from top drawer professionals like Pitt and Blanchett to beginners like Boubker Ait El Caid who played the younger Moroccan boy, Yussef, and for Arriaga who wrote the excellent script.
Movie Review: Music and then Silence echoe deep in the tower of Babel
Summary: 5 Stars
It is an intoxicating and powerful tour de force that gets close and personal leaving you stunned by its universal and truthful wisdom.
It's interesting to look up the meaning of 'Babel' and it where it has come from. Babel was actually the tower that early mankind set out to build in their prideful attempts to reach heaven. This angered God and thus God sought to disrupt the project by making everyone involved speak different languages and scattered them amongst the planet. This story is said to be the first-struck origin of globization spelled out in the book of Genesis. Babel is often defined as a confusion of language, sounds or voices. This is relevant to the epic of this movie in that it takes on three stories at four different locations with spoken languages remote and confused from one another. We begin the journey in Morrocco where a gun is sold to a goat farmer to kill and ward off jakal. This gun is then handed over to Farmer's sons, competively starved for attention, set off to kill jakal with obscured intentions in order the protect their goat herd. Close and yet seperate for their struggle to prove their worth amongst the family, they accidentally set off an incident that is the catalyst for the global scale butterfly effect.
This gun is actually the focal point and the tie in between the three stories. Babel is quite literally the cause for the confusion, distance and struggle for unity, peace and comfort. This story couldn't reign any truer in our modern times and has spoke simple brilliance in the tone of a pebble dropped and rippled in a quiet pond. I disagree with anyone who says this film is too preachy. I think the messages conveyed are subtle yet powerful, heart-felt, universal and true in each stroke of its brilliant editing, writing, cinematography and soundtrack. I think it is a message of passion for understanding of other cultures or other circumstance. To perhaps escape from our own narrow perspectives and spend a little more effort trying to understand others through open-mindedness and by doing everything we can to seperate ourselves from our Babel curse.
Next in line, we have an American couple on a tour-guide through Morrocco who are at the bitter point of taking life and each other easily for granted. They are entrapped in petty arguments and petty drama hoping probably that the distance of their trip would change the undertow of their lives. We find out later that it takes a whole lot more than that. A rude awakening sent from the towers of Babylon itself.
I would have to agree with some of other reviews here that the story of the Japanese deaf mute school-girl and her father take on a very powerful depth of intoxicating layers. She has been familiar with the term Babel all her life as communication with others often falls flat on its face.
Rarely getting through to others, she often uses radical measures to be heard. Each radical step leaving her empty handed, she struggles desperately to be comforted. Perhaps the most powerful scene in the movie being her cling to strangers where she takes drugs and enters a rave. With finally perhaps a surge of hope, you find yourself tapping your foot with the music. Later to be jarred by a sudden slap as the scene quickly takes you to her perspective of hollowed silence. Making you realize how quickly and often we forget the other person's circumstance. As if flipping the switch quickly on the soundtrack, we have no choice but to be left stunned as were are left with music then silence. It is quite powerful.
Ameila, the family maid/nanny of the American couple (Brad and Cate) has been the care-taker of their children since their birth. Because the couple's vacation has been extended due to unforseen circumstance, she is forced to take the children to mexico so that she can attend her son's wedding. The highlights of this story for me would have to be the wedding scene and their attempt to cross through the border
back into the U.S. The wedding scene is heart-felt, pure and real. It is utterly fun and amusing. A true encounter of a mexican family in celebration of such a wonderful event. To contrast this, we have the border scene filled with mis-understandings, fear and irrationality. The dark recluse and cold of police officers and govt caring more about their job and policies then the compassion and real justice of human-kind. This is further induced by the concept of Babel that echoes throughout the entire film.
This film is exceptionally binding and powerful, a modern tale of
Babel towers being built and then torn down.
Movie Review: The wilderness of silence, selfishness and intolerance!
Summary: 5 Stars
Since the times of David Ward Griffith' s Intolerance - the supreme Godfather of the rest of the American filmmakers - in 1916, I had never seen before another film so rich in textures, epic stature, tragic consistence, existential meaning and chromatic variations about the human behavior, no matter the proceeding latitude. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu employs the desert not only as a visual resource but as a big tapestry on which exposes, warns and denounces some aberrant ways of thinking, feeling, and living.
The desert to my mind, is the key to find important references in this sense. First at all, the desert as wasteland, the last frontier of the unthinkable or unimaginable: Marrakech: a rifle, two children at the eve of their growing up maturity, who are really convinced about the innocence of their insane action, exemplifies the ingenuity is masked of an invisible violence almost genetic, inherited by ancestors. In his family, the boredom and penuries also constitute a wilderness of affective deficit.
Second: The North American couple who travels to Marrakech and just want to feel the silence (Remember the clever line pronounced by Pitt), once more the desert of the miscommunication, the existential boredom makes he had decided to go in search of that vanished experience.
Third: the desert of the soul in the Mexican housekeeper who breaks the rules in order to share an evening of solace amusement to be present in her son's wedding.
Four: the desert of the loneliness due the deafness in one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the world, where the young people gather in a noisy oasis, but that sensitive girl with serious emotional sequels, just wishes to be listened and loved, but her restriction defines for the rest of the people, a desert of merciless intolerance signed by a supposed reference frame; when smartly the director opens the objective of the camera to show us the variegated swarm of human people joining in the intersections of two avenues.
Five: the desert of the self-centered attitude ( the desert of the selfishness) of the rest of the passengers who accompanied to the young couple fallen in disgrace due that absurd incident.
Six: the desert of the linguistic barriers who makes us feel like the deaf girl, when we listen without understanding and need our conventional and universally prosthesis device: the subtitles in our own language.
Seven: the desert of the legal rules at the moment of the return from Mexico. There are no arguments. The law is the law (Kafka' s echoes?)
Eighth: the desert of the affective silence who is beautifully depicted in the last shot of the film.
The script is admirably made, with a perfect edition process ( I guess this will be one of the secure awards the next February 25), the employment of the music as dramatic support, as well as the rest of secondary dramatic lines as the imprudence of the housekeeper, the ignorance of the destructive power of a weapon and the legal barriers in which the political environment seemed to prevail above the value of a human life at the moment to rescue to Cate Blanchet in the middle of nowhere.
If the desert was a smart metaphor employed by Stroheim in Greed, John Huston in The treasure of the sierra Madre, David Lean in Lawrence of Arabia and Stanley Kubrick in the first movement of 2001, this talented director employed it as a big frame to make us understand the globalization still remains into the closet and just applies for science and development for totally restricted to other areas of the humankind.
A true thousand carats film, that should be win the Academy Award the next 25. But regardless, it will remain as one of the most ambitious films ever made that has achieved an important place in the Cinema from its instantaneous release.
Bravo!