i just saw this movie about a week ago and i felt that it was overrated. i really liked amorres perros (same director), and with all the hype i thought i would like babel too. i know what the director was trying to do but it left me with too many questions about the characters. worth watching to get your own opinion on it.

A good friend said he believes the movie is about how we raise our children in different cultures. I don’t know if that was the main thought that the writer wanted to portray or not, but it definitely brings another source of coherence to the plot besides the interconnectedness/hardship-knows-no-race themes.

I started to watch this movie last night. The first thing I noticed was in the scenes with non-English speakers there were sub-titles. Babel? I thought the point was to highlight communication problems? Anyway, after about 20 minutes I realised I cared not a hoot about any of the characters. Brat Twit sorry Pitt was all beardy serious but that did not work for me.

I must admit I gave up with it after another couple of minutes.

The reason I recommended this movie is because it was an unexpected group of actors in an even more surprising movie. Although the people and places showed in the movie are extremely different in the end they figure out borders and languages are not important. The important thing is to live, and be kind to other people. The story of the Tower of Babel is interesting in that in the end it shows that although we speak different languages, we are all the same.

What I liked about it: The acting, the pace, the interconnections, how very “real” it seemed, the lack of subtitles (you gotta work at it in Moroccan, English, Japanese, Spanish, French and sign).

What I didn’t like about: The lack of any resolution, the underlying pessimism (all roads lead south), the pointlessness.

Hmmm. Very “real” indeed.

This is an extremely well acted and well executed film full of great actors. The plot demonstrates both the interconnectedness of the world and the randomness of unfortunate events. However, it’s extremely dark and the previously described plot points may not be enough of a payoff for me after all that misery.

(POSSIBLESPOILER.) Benjamin pointed out that the white people all end up okay in the end while the brown folks don’t. It’s true, but I think it might be true-to-life rather than true-to-Hollywood.

If you’re the kind of person who likes well done films no matter how depressing, then this is for you. If you can only stand depressing films with a big payoff, then skip this one.

I don’t agree that it was Brad Pitt’s best performance. In fact, I’m tired of his pouty frustration. It was cute the first time he did it.

I love a bleak movie, but not bleak and pointless, bleak and without beauty or meaning. Oh how profoundly damaged and horrible we all are. How interconnectedly miserable. I’ve disliked every one of his films. They all seem like self-aggrandized moralizing.

I normally love this sort of fartsy pretentious woe-is-our-society crap, but this one, I don’t know. Maybe too many obvious stereotypes? Self-righteous rich whiteys, Arabs opening fire on everything they see, young Japanese slut girls, Mexicans in trouble with border patrol… it’s all there. Maybe the point was that it was supposed to be offensive, or maybe I just got bored ofter Crash. Perhaps I should try watching an Adam Sandler film instead.

… less about the difficulty of communicating than about a few people making improbably bad decisions. of course, all of the storylines connect in a schematic way. SPOILER: if only japanese big game hunters didn’t give their guns to tour guides, overpriviledged white children wouldn’t get lost in the desert.

Went looking for something like Amores perros, returned disappointed.

What he said:

“There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. … One such is Babel, the exasperatingly conceited new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is well acted and handsomely photographed, but still extraordinarily overpraised and overblown, a middlebrow piece of near-nonsense: the kind of self-conscious arthouse cinema that is custom-tailored and machine-tooled for the dinner-party demographic. The script is contrived, shallow, unconvincing and rendered absurd and almost meaningless by a plot naivety that is impossible to ignore once its full magnitude dawns on you.”