{"id":1413,"date":"2006-11-25T15:19:15","date_gmt":"2006-11-25T20:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/martinepage.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/25\/babel\/"},"modified":"2006-11-25T15:22:36","modified_gmt":"2006-11-25T20:22:36","slug":"babel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/25\/babel\/","title":{"rendered":"Babel"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw the movie Babel<\/a> last night. I had really liked Amores Perros<\/a> but had gotten impatient with 21 grams<\/a>. I also lost some of my patience watching Babel, especially towards the end when every story line climbs to a crescendo of tears and despair. Blork and I were talking about the movie afterwards (he liked it) and I couldn’t quite find the words to explain what was bothering me about the film. I felt like each storyline, even though very simple, could have been interesting in and of itself, but that putting them together made them lose their interest.<\/p>\n

I always like to read reviews after I see a movie instead of before. This review<\/a> I found in Salon<\/em> expressed, better than I could, part of my reaction to Babel:<\/p>\n

I guess that’s the point: Our actions may have consequences we can’t imagine, halfway around the world; when a butterfly bats its wings a baby is born, and all that. OK, but in the case of « Babel » what that produces is two powerful and intriguing mini-films whose only connection to each other is a third one that’s barely half as good.<\/p>\n

My own reluctant conclusion, after three films of Gonz\u00c3\u00a1lez I\u00c3\u00b1\u00c3\u00a1rritu’s career, is that he’s a brilliant, intuitive director who’s also kind of an intellectual lightweight. That’s no crime when it comes to filmmaking; nobody ever accused Scorsese or Fellini or Hitchcock of philosophical profundity either. I hate to criticize anybody for artistic ambition, but the problem with « Babel » isn’t that it’s a bad movie. It’s a good movie, or, more accurately, it’s several pieces of good movie, chopped up in service of a pretentious, portentous and slightly silly artistic vision.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, this doesn’t take anything away from the great performances of Adriana Barraza<\/a> and Rinko Kikuchi<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw the movie Babel last night. I had really liked Amores Perros but had gotten impatient with 21 grams. I also lost some of my patience watching Babel, especially towards the end when every story line climbs to a crescendo of tears and despair. Blork and I were talking about the movie afterwards (he… Continue reading Babel<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.martinepage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}