2008 Woodie Awards
Movie Review: "Babel," 1 of 5 stars
By: James Hansen
Issue date: 11/9/06 Section: LifeStyle
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At the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's new film "Babel" was awarded Best Director and hailed as one of the best films of the festival. Upon its opening in the United States, "Babel" is becoming one of the more hotly-debated films of the winter season. The film is being widely considered for Academy Award recognition and is being being praised as Inarritu's masterpiece. However, after seeing "Babel," all of this praise is a complete and utter anomaly.
"Babel," the final film in Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's "we really like intersecting stories a whole, whole lot" trilogy, starts out interesting, but ends in a mess of epic proportions. From false, ridiculous melodrama to cluttered overreaching messages, "Babel" cer-tainly speaks loudly, but never even approaches saying anything resonant.
"Babel" tells four distinct stories, difficult to summarize, ranging from Morocco to Mex-ico, from Tokyo to Los Angeles. The film opens in Morocco with the purchase of a rifle. Two children are enamored with the rifle's 4 km shooting range. The children test this out by firing upon a tourist bus, where they hit an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) vacationing with her hus-band (Brad Pitt).
Back at home in Los Angeles, an immigrant worker watches over the children of the tour-ists. She has plans to go to a wedding in Mexico, but her plans are thrown off by the shooting.
The story in Tokyo seems distant at best, but involves a deaf teen sexually taunting other men. She also is coping with the death of her mother, which has led her to distant relations with her father.
Inarritu rifled onto the filmmaking scene in 2000 with his brilliant film "Amores Perros" - the first part of this trilogy. That film showcased Inarritu and Arriaga's slick talent and ability to blend and mix stories to create a powerful international message. Since then, Inarritu and Ar-riaga have stuck to that pattern of filmmaking, and as each film has gotten louder and louder, the films have gone increasingly downhill.
"Babel," the final film in Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's "we really like intersecting stories a whole, whole lot" trilogy, starts out interesting, but ends in a mess of epic proportions. From false, ridiculous melodrama to cluttered overreaching messages, "Babel" cer-tainly speaks loudly, but never even approaches saying anything resonant.
"Babel" tells four distinct stories, difficult to summarize, ranging from Morocco to Mex-ico, from Tokyo to Los Angeles. The film opens in Morocco with the purchase of a rifle. Two children are enamored with the rifle's 4 km shooting range. The children test this out by firing upon a tourist bus, where they hit an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) vacationing with her hus-band (Brad Pitt).
Back at home in Los Angeles, an immigrant worker watches over the children of the tour-ists. She has plans to go to a wedding in Mexico, but her plans are thrown off by the shooting.
The story in Tokyo seems distant at best, but involves a deaf teen sexually taunting other men. She also is coping with the death of her mother, which has led her to distant relations with her father.
Inarritu rifled onto the filmmaking scene in 2000 with his brilliant film "Amores Perros" - the first part of this trilogy. That film showcased Inarritu and Arriaga's slick talent and ability to blend and mix stories to create a powerful international message. Since then, Inarritu and Ar-riaga have stuck to that pattern of filmmaking, and as each film has gotten louder and louder, the films have gone increasingly downhill.
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