babel06


BABEL (out of ) and AMORES PERROS * (out of ****) Starring Gael Garcia Bernal Directed by Alejandro Gonz�lez I��rritu & written by Guillermo Arriaga

		AMORES PERROS (LOVE'S A BITCH) Also starring Emilio Echevarria, Goya Toledo, and Alvaro Guerro 2000 153 min R
BABEL Also starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza, and Rinko Kikuchi 2006 142 min R


�And that�s when the CHUDs came after me.� So says Homer Simpson, in describing the final mishap of his disastrous trip to New York City. The same could be said of �Babel,� the solemn and humorless new film by Alejandro Gonz�lez I��rritu (�Amores Perros�), in which one disaster after another keeps mounting and mounting for our poor characters, until you expect the Mongols from �Andrei Roublev� to ride in next, swords held high. For lack of any other emotion, I wanted to laugh at the movie�s aura of inevitable catastrophe. At it, not with it. Extremely well-made, utterly inaccessible, and ultimately boring, �Babel� is about as much work and detail you can put into a movie and still not have it be much good. It�s a fractured narrative about varying catastrophes linked together by one rifle, with episodes taking place in Japan, Mexico, and two in Morocco. I don�t feel like summarizing; maybe I�ll get the IMDb summary in here. Ah, here it is: �Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving six different families.� The acting is all around very good and the cinematography is lovely. Is it the new kind of Oscar-bait, a blender of trendy, doom-laden Internet buzz words set to �frappe?� In which �hip� foreign locales (Japan, miscellaneous Middle East) are abuzz with �State Department� and �Homeland Security?� Like TV soaps and the movie �Crash,� new conflicts arise out of thin air every couple of minutes to be viewed (again, like any TV boy soap like �24�) through an endless parade of cameras hand-held nauseatingly by operators who equate �gritty� with �jittery.� This glorified episode of �EastEnders� is held together by a theme of �miscommunication� � substance enough for 90 minutes but hardly 140. I was expecting to at least have an experience comparable to �Amores Perros.� I admire �Amores Perros� as a grueling-to-watch emotionally charged technical exercise, an exercise in filmmaking bravura, in good acting. Like �Babel,� it follows stories which may or may not connect and may or may not be going in chronological order, focusing only on modern-day Mexico City and not the whole world. Both movies ooze intensity almost as an end in themselves, but I prefer �Amores Perros�� fable atmosphere. I�d be lying if I said �Amores� made much of a connection to me. It is a strong, energetic, pulsing movie � I�ve no idea what it means or what point it�s trying to make, but I can�t deny the craft that went into it. The overall structure may be a bit �Pulp Fiction� derivative � the lives of people in different social strata may or may not connect through romance and dogs � but that�s okay. It�s sort of there, like a great car that I have no interest in driving. The only other thing I�ve seen by Inarritu is the weakest episode of the BMW shorts �The Hire.� His was the one that got a conscience and all preachy � as if anyone wants to see Clive Owen not being an amoral automaton. About the only other good thing we could say about �Babel� is when my wife sputtered out, almost in shock, �Is that Gael Garcia Bernal? He�s kind of hot.� And is it just me, or are poverty-line Middle Easterners always put in the same framing? Finished Thursday, December 14, 2006 Copyright � 2006 Friday & Saturday Night Back to home.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws