Babel - movie review
We went to see Babel tonight - I chose this one. Ten minutes into the film I heard Tuffy P's review: "You're not picking any in 2007 after picking this one".
It had a few high points. We both loved the Mexican wedding scenes (I liked the outfits the band wore, and the button accordion). There was some good cinematography, but some of it was very pretensious, like the excruciatingly long strobe light scene. I wanted to scream out, "Enough already".
Tuffy adds, "They creped up Brad Pitt's eyes too much".
This movie links some barely linkable stories that neither succeed on their own nor together. Nuff said.
On the 5 anchovy rating scale, I give this film one pathetic salty fin. If anyone out there has seen this one and would care to tell me what it was about beyond the obvious, I'm listening.
7 comments:
Whoa...cold. Um, when I first heard about this I couldn't wait to see it...then someone who I respected their opinion about movies said it stank...I was so excited to see this, too bad. At first it was all like Oscar Oscar! buzz...I'll see it, but not yet.
Laughing - I too used to pick really rotten movies - my family voted and cut me out of the picking out favor for a while! Now, I take my recommendations from other people! Don't trust myself anymore!
I just saw this a couple of days ago, too. I didn't like it either. While I wouldn't call it pretentious, I would say that it just lacked any sort of cohesion at all. You're right; the stories were barely linkable, particularly the Japanese girl. That one, though, might have stood alone on it's own - the others, no way. I thought the talent like Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gabriel what's his name (I recognized him from The Motorcycle Diaries) was totally wasted on this film. Over all, I just didn't get it and wasn't gripped at all.
PS: could also not figure out how the title fit into this. Any ideas?
hey WC, you spell pretentious much better than I do. hehehe....
The title comes from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel God punishes man for his arrogance in attempting to build a tower to the heavens. The punishment is that man gets separated into different races with different languages.
Oh, I know of the bible story; I just didn't think it fit in well, or really at all. For me, at least.
We just saw the film, and, while it is not nearly as good as Amores Perros, it had some fine moments. The film only hints at the problems that the wealthy first world types have. The Japanese mother recently committed suicide. The wife in the bus is not happy and hints at big problems in the marriage. There is an air of neurosis about the wealthy people.
This contrasts sharply with the basic issues of survival for the Mexican housekeeper and the Moroccain family. Notice also the role of the police authority in each locale: from the consoling Japanese inspector to the arrogant US border guards to the torturing Moroccain policeman.
The unhappy rumblings below the surface of modern first-world life combined with the almost schizophrenic fear of terror post 9-11 that directly impacts the people in the developing world are major themes.
On top of that, communications difficulty, not just language barriers, really stand out as a major theme. We're all interlinked, often in ways we don't understand, but we're still talking past one another on so many different levels.
Some of the acting was over the top. I found Brad Pitt to be a distraction, not an asset to the film. The strongest thing about the film was its patient pace. It gives the viewer enough room to breathe and to digest the scenes. The photography is beautiful (love those ending shots from Tokio!).
After reading your and other critiques to the film, I guess I have to downgrade my opinion from quite good to OK.
Based on what I read, maybe Innaritu got sidetracked with his political message when he started out trying to tell three stories about children.
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