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Saw this last night with
cheesyhill.
Very well executed. Harrowing. I'm kind of amazed that this even got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar -- it is so meditative. It won't win, though, if only because (in a sense) it got the Best Picture award last year. Last year the big prize went to Crash, and this movie is structurally very similar to Crash: interlocking stories about people living on the fringe of society -- both the very rich and the very poor -- trying to succeed within a system that is rigged to prevent their success.
I think the themes in Babel are much stronger than in Crash. As far as I can tell it is a loose reworking of the Tower of Babel parable, with globalization used to represent the tower that stretches to heaven. The writer and director play with communication issues in clever ways: a couple who years ago stopped really speaking to each other; two kids who understand the Spanish their nanny speaks, but do not speak it themselves; a deaf Japanese teenager desperate for the company of hearing kids her age. The themes of communication and the global economy make Babel seem, ironically, more coherent than Crash, which felt kind of improvised to me in a lot of ways.
Still, even if it deserves a Best Picture statue (and I'm not at all sure that it should), it won't get one; the voters will feel like it's just a rehash of last year's winner.
The movie was almost relentlessly depressing. It pulled out of the nosedive -- just barely -- but about halfway through I began praying for something good to happen to someone, anyone. It is a good movie but be prepared for a grimmer experience than you are used to.
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Very well executed. Harrowing. I'm kind of amazed that this even got nominated for the Best Picture Oscar -- it is so meditative. It won't win, though, if only because (in a sense) it got the Best Picture award last year. Last year the big prize went to Crash, and this movie is structurally very similar to Crash: interlocking stories about people living on the fringe of society -- both the very rich and the very poor -- trying to succeed within a system that is rigged to prevent their success.
I think the themes in Babel are much stronger than in Crash. As far as I can tell it is a loose reworking of the Tower of Babel parable, with globalization used to represent the tower that stretches to heaven. The writer and director play with communication issues in clever ways: a couple who years ago stopped really speaking to each other; two kids who understand the Spanish their nanny speaks, but do not speak it themselves; a deaf Japanese teenager desperate for the company of hearing kids her age. The themes of communication and the global economy make Babel seem, ironically, more coherent than Crash, which felt kind of improvised to me in a lot of ways.
Still, even if it deserves a Best Picture statue (and I'm not at all sure that it should), it won't get one; the voters will feel like it's just a rehash of last year's winner.
The movie was almost relentlessly depressing. It pulled out of the nosedive -- just barely -- but about halfway through I began praying for something good to happen to someone, anyone. It is a good movie but be prepared for a grimmer experience than you are used to.