Babel, media-hype failure, 12 Monkeys…
May 6, 2007
T he movie Babel…I’m so glad I ignored the media hype, the buzz, the lame descriptions of this brilliant movie, which in typical fashion, the main-stream media did not have a clue how to describe. So, outside the Hollywood norm. How do you pigeonhole a film that defies pigeonholing? Babel was the most “novel”-like movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. And what a novel!!! Not many movies linger like this. One beautiful, heart-breaking, sometimes terrifying scene after another. The Japanese girl, naked on the balcony, grieving her mother, grieving the failure of connection to another human in her life, found by her father…who accepts her nakedness as “nothing” moves in close, lets her reach out to him, and then they embrace …This incredibly vulnerable scene will stick with me for the rest of my life. The movie is big on feeling, low on sentimentality—it carves out new emotional space. And Brad Pitt? As intensely brilliant as he was in 12 Monkeys!
Loved Babel.
3 Comments
1. Rosemary had this to say: May 07, 2007 ~ 08:09 ~ #
I really loved the part with the Japanese girls as well. I found those scenes the most compelling in the film. My friend and I would say “noooo” when they’d switch to another storyline . It really was a simple theme but elegantly presented.
2. Anita had this to say: May 08, 2007 ~ 05:21 ~ #
Hmmm…I’ll definitely see it now. I LOVED 12 Monkeys—that kind of intensity, the interior bleeding through, wild, barely contained. Thanks Thomas.
3. Thomas had this to say: May 08, 2007 ~ 09:35 ~ #
Anita, I would love to write a book this beautiful….some day….
Rosemary, I was crazy throughout the entire film…I loved every thread. It’s so much like a quasi-Ghazal, in a way, the stories are not related, and yet, there is a thread…though invisible….our humanness links these stories. Because we are human, we make the movie. I’m a bit obsessed with ghazals right now, (see this Friday’s upcoming sorbet)….