Wednesday, February 18, 2009

2006 - BABEL, It's a small world after all.


The title rises up to announce this will be an important picture. like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls or Transformers.


Four stories, are randomly introduced. As the stories develop we begin to see how they are interrelated. Two young boys in some unidentified middle eastern hellhole of a country are given a gun by their father to protect the goat herd from predators. Amazingly this irresponsible father leaves the boys and as you know "boys will be boys". They shoot at a tourist bus for the fun of it which happens to contain...



Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as a married couple on the tourist bus. They are fighting about something and the marriage is in some kind of trouble I guess. Brad obviously decided a trip with his wife to revive the marriage was in order, so instead of a nice Hawaiian vacation he has picked the hellhole country in the middle east. After Cate gets shot Brad ends up stuck in a small village while Cate struggles to stay alive. Cate whimpers on about how she wants to talk to her children before she dies. Her children are in San Diego where...


Some Mexican woman is caring for Brad and Cate's kids. The woman is in a high state of anxiety since her son is getting married and she can't find anyone to take care of the little white kids for the day. She ends up taking the kids to the wedding in Mexico. After the wedding party, she gets in a car with the kids driven by her drunken nephew. The nephew is an unsavory person in the great tradition of Hispanic stereotypes. He tears off the head of a live chicken, drinks too much at the wedding and fires a gun into the air during the wedding dance. Unsurprisingly, at the border the nephew decides to run from the border police with the Mexican woman and the little white kids in the back of his car. The nephew dumps the woman and the kids in the middle of nowhere, and takes off. The woman also abandons the kids in the middle of nowhere in search of help and wanders off...

Which brings us to the last story about some teenage girl in Japan. She dresses in the traditional Japanese male fantasy dirty little teenage school girl school outfit and runs around with other slutty girls dressed like that as well. She decides not to wear underwear and rebuffs her father's attempts to go to lunch. It turns out she is a deaf/mute. Part of her handicap seems to be a need to hit on guys at inappropriate moments. Being a deaf/mute teenage girl in Japan clearly makes you sexually promiscuous. Forgot to mention an important plot point, the Japanese girl is required to take off all of her clothes by the director Alejandro González Iñárritu. This helps the audience look into the naked soul of the girl because we couldn't do that if the girl had her clothes on.



Anyway the point of all of this I guess is that we live in a world of babel. We all have issues with communicating with each other and we are all in it together. It's just like taking the "It's A Small World Ride" at Disneyland except the dolls aren't nude. The other point of the story is that young mute Japanese girls are kind of dirty little things.

The stories end up being interconnected in the end, although it seemed like the filmmakers strained to bring them all to a resolution.

143 minutes.

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