Cinematical Buzz Reviews: Babel
Filed under: Drama, Foreign Language, Cannes, Telluride, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Focus Features, Brad Pitt, Politics, Oscar Watch, Cinematical Indie
With Babel opening today, we at Cinematical thought we'd provide links to two seperate festival-circuit reviews of Babel -- one, from Cannes, by Editor-in-Chief James Rocchi; the other, from Telluride, by Managing Editor Kim Voynar.
Kim's Take:
"There are filmmakers who make good films, even great films, and then there are filmmakers who take making a movie to a whole new level of artistry, so far above the mean as to be incomparable to anything else. Alejandro González Iñnáritu is such a filmmaker, and with Babel he tells his story with such power and control that by the end of it you are at his cinematic mercy, utterly exhausted and spent. ..."
James' Take:
Just like Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Babel is gorgeously shot and made with real filmmaking talent; at the same time, while Iñárritu's working on a worldwide canvas here, he is making very similar strokes to those in his prior films. Part of me watched Babel with a feeling of apprehension -- is Iñárritu in a groove, or a rut?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-27-2006 @ 10:14AM
Kiggle said...
Saw the preview before 'The Prestige' last night. I stand by the off-the-cuff snarky in-theater remark I made about half-way through the trailer:
looks like 'Crash: The International Edition' to me.
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10-27-2006 @ 1:34PM
A Student said...
Going to have to say James has the more credible review. It takes a lot to leave me "utterly exhausted and spent" at the end of a movie, and by a lot I mean a lot of X in the rating.
Still might be an interesting movie, but reviews like that just make me think the reviewer had their mind made up as soon as they read the director's name, long before a single frame was projected.
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10-27-2006 @ 7:26PM
Kim Voynar said...
It's not a credibility contest, just two different points of view. Different people have different takes, which is why we often have more than one reviewer cover a film around here.
Not a lot of movies leave me feeling utterly exhausted and spent -- certainly X-rated content in a film, even if it's the best porn flick in the world, isn't likely to accomplish that for me. Fantastic storytelling on the level Innaritu reaches with Babel, though? Yeah.
As for having my mind made up before I saw the film, actually, it wasn't even at the top of my priority list for Telluride, I just happened to have time to catch it -- and was blown away. You'll have to see the film for yourself to judge the impact it has on you, though. People seem to either really love it, or really be unimpressed by it, not a lot of middle ground.
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