BABEL ** (out of ****) and AMORES PERROS *** (out of ****) Starring Gael Garcia Bernal Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu & written by Guillermo Arriaga
		AMORES PERROS (LOVE'S A BITCH) Also starring Emilio Echevarria, Goya Toledo, and Alvaro Guerro 2000 153 min R
BABEL Also starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza, and Rinko Kikuchi 2006 142 min R
“And that’s when the CHUDs came after me.”  So says Homer Simpson, in describing the final mishap of his disastrous trip to New York City.  The same could be said of “Babel,” the solemn and humorless new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Amores Perros”), in which one disaster after another keeps mounting and mounting for our poor characters, until you expect the Mongols from “Andrei Roublev” to ride in next, swords held high.  For lack of any other emotion, I wanted to laugh at the movie’s aura of inevitable catastrophe.  At it, not with it. Extremely well-made, utterly inaccessible, and ultimately boring, “Babel” is about as much work and detail you can put into a movie and still not have it be much good.  It’s a fractured narrative about varying catastrophes linked together by one rifle, with episodes taking place in Japan, Mexico, and two in Morocco.  I don’t feel like summarizing; maybe I’ll get the IMDb summary in here.  Ah, here it is:  “Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving six different families.”  The acting is all around very good and the cinematography is lovely. Is it the new kind of Oscar-bait, a blender of trendy, doom-laden Internet buzz words set to “frappe?”  In which “hip” foreign locales (Japan, miscellaneous Middle East) are abuzz with “State Department” and “Homeland Security?”  Like TV soaps and the movie “Crash,” new conflicts arise out of thin air every couple of minutes to be viewed (again, like any TV boy soap like “24”) through an endless parade of cameras hand-held nauseatingly by operators who equate “gritty” with “jittery.”  This glorified episode of “EastEnders” is held together by a theme of “miscommunication” – substance enough for 90 minutes but hardly 140. I was expecting to at least have an experience comparable to “Amores Perros.”  I admire “Amores Perros” as a grueling-to-watch emotionally charged technical exercise, an exercise in filmmaking bravura, in good acting.  Like “Babel,” it follows stories which may or may not connect and may or may not be going in chronological order, focusing only on modern-day Mexico City and not the whole world.  Both movies ooze intensity almost as an end in themselves, but I prefer “Amores Perros’” fable atmosphere. I’d be lying if I said “Amores” made much of a connection to me.  It is a strong, energetic, pulsing movie – I’ve no idea what it means or what point it’s trying to make, but I can’t deny the craft that went into it.  The overall structure may be a bit “Pulp Fiction” derivative – the lives of people in different social strata may or may not connect through romance and dogs – but that’s okay.  It’s sort of there, like a great car that I have no interest in driving.  The only other thing I’ve seen by Inarritu is the weakest episode of the BMW shorts “The Hire.”  His was the one that got a conscience and all preachy – as if anyone wants to see Clive Owen not being an amoral automaton. About the only other good thing we could say about “Babel” is when my wife sputtered out, almost in shock, “Is that Gael Garcia Bernal?  He’s kind of hot.”  And is it just me, or are poverty-line Middle Easterners always put in the same framing? Finished Thursday, December 14, 2006 Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night                                                                                                         Back to home.