comment #1

bipedalist says ...

Wow, sounds great.

comment #2

Mark G. says ...

I've seen the movie last week - it's already a box office flop all over Europe - and it became easily the best movie of the year on my list, beating FLIGHT 93...
And my next trip to the movie theater to see CHILDREN OF MEN is already planned. So it's nice to read that you write "any film buff who fails to see this film at least twice"...
And I agree, some of the camera work is astonishing, especially MINOR SPOILER: the attack in the woods

comment #3

JD says ...

Children of Men sounds very promising, but Jeff's bizarrely obsessive love for Babel is as incomprehensible as his bizarrely obsessive hatred for Marie Antoinette. I'm assuming it has something to do with Inarritu's neverending desire to suck up to him, but it never ceases to amaze me that Jeff Wells is unable to see through the heavy-handed, on-the-nose manipulativeness of films like Crash, Million Dollar Baby, and Babel. It's definitely a weakness.

comment #4

vjp666 says ...

"...it's already a box office flop all over Europe"

It did fine in the UK.

comment #5

Melquiades says ...

I definitely agree about Crash and Million Dollar Baby. But I couldn't disagree more about Babel. It's an insult to lump that film in with those others.

comment #6

MoisesChiu says ...

Melquiades tenga buen opinion. I like to think of his screennamesake as the unofficial bonus fourth entry in the Perros-Grams-Babel trilogy thanks to the brilliant scripting Sr. Arriaga provided all four with. All about borders and boundaries in one way or another...magnifico!

comment #7

berg says ...

COM paints an utterly real although bizarre view of the dystopian near-future ... the immigrant issue has never been more relevant ... and Cuaron makes a point with a great John Lennon song (that wasn't in US vs JL or Departed)

comment #8

sardine says ...

JD is correct. While the director of BABEL IS wildly talented, the movie is false, phony. Babel does not work. His other two movies did not work either.

comment #9

Mr. Peel says ...

Children of Men is fantastic. Nothing really to add to that--don't even tell people about those long takes. Just let them happen. I can't wait for that second viewing.

comment #10

Melquiades says ...

My name is actually inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I agree the Tommy Lee Jones film is a splendid film.

I find nothing false in these films. On the contrary, they feel extraordinarily real. Crash is a plastic fairy tale. Babel explores real lives and real emotions. The Inarritu/Arriaga films have more in common with great novels than other films.

comment #11

JD says ...

BABEL SPOILER ALERT:

In essence, this is the point Babel makes about Mexican immigrants in the US: if you're an illegal immigrant who's willing to risk going back to Mexico for a wedding...and your boss gets shot in Morocco...and you drag her kids along without permission...and you let a drunk guy drive...and he pretends you are the kids' aunt...and he abandons you in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night...you might get deported.

It's obviously unfair that things turned out this way for Aunt Amelia (she's a victim, by design), but she also made several huge errors and several other disasters happened simultaneously. When you make bad decisions and/or random disasters occur at the same time, things turn out poorly. But that has nothing to do with American policy on Mexican immigrants or the other issues the film thinks it's dealing with.

I just can't see why Inarritu didn't deal with a more plausible, authentic story of immigration struggle, one that's fair to both sides. I tend to side with illegal immigrants in many arguments, but Babel distorts complicated issues by making the context utterly ridiculous and implausible. A more competent dramatist would have recognized the complexity of the issues, rather than simplify them to these cartoonish extremes. And could Inarritu have made life in Mexico seem any more idyllic? He wants us to believe that Mexico is the promised land. Fine. But then why would anyone want to leave? For an infinitely more complex (and equally sympathetic) look at the same issues, see the episode of Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days that aired a few months ago. Without Inarritu's over-the-top bias, it makes a much more persuasive argument.

comment #12

JSantos says ...

Jeff: I love this snapshot of my 3 current heroes, but what is up with that phantom black spot? It's like the combined talents of all the directors are burning a whole in your memory card. I love these guys, warts and inconsistencies all. They breathe some fresh perspectiven into Hollywood that seems more wise than cynical, but I get why some people are put off. But man, are those people missing out.

comment #13

Colin says ...

I haven't seen Babel yet, but I would also recommend the 30 Days episode. I also thought that Ken Loach's "Bread and Roses" handled these issues prettty well, even if it wasn't a great movie.

comment #14

JSantos says ...

And about BABEL, while Innaritu may be shining a light on/making an argument about illegal immigration as JD points out, the overwhelming message I took from the film, as simplistic and myopic as this may appear to sound, is that while tragedy may strike the affluent and attractive of the world, it ain't nothing compared to the kind of tragedy that happens to you if you're poor and brown--the further you are from the top of that tower, the harder it is for people to hear and understand you. And of course, vice versa, but in a different, more likely to heal kind of way.

comment #15

Melquiades says ...

More Babel Spoilers:

See, I didn't feel the film was trying to deliver a "message" at all. Was I sympathetic to the nanny's plight? Absolutely. Did I feel it was all the fault of the border patrol? Absolutely not. Nor do I feel the writer/director are trying to suggest as much.

People die, or nearly die, every day crossing that border. Some are "bad" people, some aren't. They are all victims of their own decisions as well as decisions made by people very far away under very different circumstances.

And that's true of everybody in the film, and everybody in the world. I don't see any bad guys in this movie -- not the kids who shoot at the bus out of curiosity, not the border guards who are (rightly) suspicious of an angry Mexican man lying about the two white kids in his back seat, not the tourists who want to get back on the bus and out of that village, not the Japanese father who hasn't paid enough attention to his daugther since his wife's suicide.

What you have in all these cases is, to quote Cool Hand Luke, a failure to communicate. That theme, evoked so nicely in the film's title, is behind all of the confusion and disharmony we see.

comment #16

JD says ...

THE SPOILERS CONTINUE...

But the problem at the border wasn't a communication problem, it was a stupidity problem. No matter how clearly Amelia or her nephew explain themselves, they're behaving like idiots and making several major mistakes. Why are they driving across the border in the middle of the night with small children and a drunk driver? Why is the driver lying? Is it a plea for communication or a plea for honesty? Didn't it occur to Amelia that they were breaking the law in several different ways? She basically kidnapped those kids (of course, they gave her a conveniently irrational, sinister American employer to motivate this act). And how many illegal immigrants go back to Mexico, expecting there to be no consequences?

If you can't acknowledge the manipulation in all of this, you're watching the movie blindfolded. This is a ridiculously egregious act of stacking the deck against a character to make us feel sorry for them. At his worst, Steven Spielberg has never been this manipulative. And let's be honest, the Japan portion of the movie has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie. They tagged on a lazy narrative connection but, thematically, the link is tenuous at best. Compared to 21 Grams, Babel feels like it was written by a grade schooler. I'm truly baffled that the same people made these two movies... and that so many people are willing to see beyond its weaknesses.

comment #17

Craig Kennedy says ...

Hmmm...I didn't like Babel all that much but I just finished dismissing Wells in another thread for being jaded so when he comes out with honest enthusiasm for a film I didn't like, I kind of just have to sit there and take it.

I really like Melquiades' thought about there being no villains in the film. Originally I felt the tourists and the border guards were villains (not to mention tired stereotypes) but maybe I'm just being defensive because I'm a white guy. I'll have to think about that.

Also, even though I agree with his overall opinion of the film, I've got to disagree with JDs estimation of the Mexico story.

ok SPOILER ALERT I guess:

It's fair to say the characters acted foolishly and got what they deserved, but it's more interesting to look at the situation and see how something like that could really happen. It's not often people make one massive screw up, it's usually a lot of little things that build up and get worse and worse. The nanny's first problem was getting to Mexico for a wedding. Add the complication of having to also watch the kids and the chain of events is started that will lead to disaster. A series of bad decisions along the way that escalate in magnitude, one building on the other, until the crap finally hits the fan. Fascinating. Contrived? Probably, but not as ham-handedly as Crash.

I may just have to see the movie again. I might have misjudged it.

comment #18

Melquiades says ...

Absolutley agree with Kennedy's point about little mistakes piling on top of each other. Things like this, and far far crazier than this, happen every day. It's no more contrived than any dramatic narrative. Now Crash... that was contrived.

As to Amelia's decisions, JD... is it kidnapping when a woman in charge of watching these children, and forced by circumstances to watch them past her reasonable availability, takes them with her to her destination? If I'm watching my sister's kids while she's out of town and one of my own children has an accident, I'll bring them to the emergency room with me. Their parents probably would rather they not spend the day in an emergency room, but shit happens. Amelia tried to make other arrangements, but couldn't.

The trip to Mexico went fine. The kids had a great time. Had things gone differently at the border, they would have made it home fine too. And she had probably made that trip many times in the past without incident. I don't see her actions as unbelievable or particularly egregious.

Re: the Japanese storyline. It has a direct narrative link to the rest of the stories. The gift of that rifle led to the shooting of that woman and so on. It was the butterfly flapping its wings. By definition, that link needn't be blatant. Again, see Crash for an example of unnecessarily ham-fisted plot connections between different characters. Thematically, the Japanese segment is absolutely connected. Her literal communication problem involves her being deaf. Apart from that, she is closed off from her father following the death of her mother and behaving in the way so many girls do when dealing with an absent father. She's missing a connection, as are all of the characters in the film.

comment #19

Craig Kennedy says ...

The galling thing about Crash was that its connections all seemed coincidental and there were so many as to strain credibility.

In Babel, the connections were what they were and it was only because the film parcelled out information slowly that the connections seemed to be surprising. That's partly why the Japan story seems to dangle somewhat. I admit the narrative link between it and the other stories is the most tenuous, but it's harmless especially when you find a thematic link between the stories. The thematic link escaped me at first but I'm getting there the more I think about it.

The movie is still weakened for me by the fact that the Brad Pitt story was so massively uninteresting. That the main link between all the stories is the weakest was a big liability for me at least when I first saw it.

comment #20

Mark G. says ...

""...it's already a box office flop all over Europe"

It did fine in the UK."

Well, it did 4.8m Pounds in the UK and is ranked No. 40 of the year (it will drop out of the Top Fifty by the end of the year).
You might call it fine, I think it's bad for a $72m production which takes place in Britain and is toplined by Brits Clive Owen and Michael Caine...
In addition, it opened in the No. 8 spot in the Netherlands, France & Germany and No. 6 in Poland and Spain. That's bad...

Which once again proves that crap works much better than a great movie like CHILDREN OF MEN, which in my book is the best movie of the last five years...

comment #21

JD says ...

I wouldn't compare Babel and Crash because of the narrative linking -- after all, there are only three stories in Babel -- I'd compare them because of the heavy-handed, manipulative, didactic, cynical, and totally inauthentic worldviews of the filmmakers. In these two films, Haggis and Inarritu allow their characters almost no nuance. They're all types that represent the world as seen by filmmakers who live sheltered lives, yet feel they understand precisely the cause and solution of all the world's problems. Babel has a bit more nuance than Crash, particularly the extraneous Japan section (its connection to the rest of the film, as defined by Melquiades, is far too wishy washy), but their weaknesses are similar.

comment #22

Dixon Steele says ...

But what I'd really like to see is a photo of Innaritu with his arm around Arriaga.

Guess not...

I'm curious to see what Inaritu does next without him.

comment #23

Reint says ...

Yup, 'Children of Men' is an absolute masterpiece. I actually found myself thinking several times while watching it:"This might be one of the best movies I've ever seen."

It's technically brilliant (multiple times, I found myself wondering, "How the hell did they do that?") and extremely engaging. An adrenaline rush of a film, it has everything: high-stakes drama, well placed comedy and brutal yet exhilarating action. Wow.

comment #24

elizlaw86 says ...

"JD is correct. While the director of BABEL IS wildly talented, the movie is false, phony. Babel does not work. His other two movies did not work either."

Well, Sardine - How is Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu "wildly talented" if NONE of his movies "worked." That's a blatant contradiction and a statement with which I cannot disagree more.

Inarritu blasted on to the cinema scene with the unbelievably power AMORES PERROS, followed up with the incredibly original 21 Grams and the end of what he's called his "trilogy" BABEL is his best yet. His vision is unique, poignant, important and moreoever, the movie is quite simply the most emotionally riveting, beautiful film I've seen in years and quite a few others agree. It is the best movie of the year and the director is, as you say, WILDLY TALENTED.