Babel
December 2nd, 2006
Didn’t hate this quite as much as Marcy, but some of that probably has to do with watching it in installments, my own little miniseries of misery. Not the ideal way to watch anything, but I simply couldn’t stand to sit through it all at once.
What’s Babel about? Global scenes of suffering, vaguely interrelated, adding up to nothing whatsoever. The title suggests that there’s a point made about communication with all that screaming and bleeding, but what exactly is it? Seemed to me, the take-away was: guns make bad presents. I already suspected as much.
Babel. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006. *
[tags]alejandro gonzalez inarritu, film, 1 star, suffering, tokyo, mexico, marocco, guns, blood, brad pitt, cate blanchett, gael garcia bernal[/tags]
From Dusk till Dawn
March 19th, 2006
I’ll happily confess to renting this because I once came across Salma Hayek’s Satanico Pandemonium snake dance on late night TV. Should have left it at that though–the rest is trash. QT and Rodriguez are a bunch of hacks. Hacks with hustle, I give them that. Tarantino’s main mode of operation is still the assertion of authority (he probably thinks of it as the projection of cool.) The essential Tarantino scene, which repeats again and again in all of his movies, is one badass motherfucker telling the rest of the bitches to shut the fuck up, or sit the fuck down, or do whatever the fuck he says. Usually, this requires waving a .45 around, and I’m bored to tears with it. From Dusk till Dawn is a mildly satisfying B-picture, but QT’s presence as actor hurts, the script is worse than idiotic, the sfx look circa 1982, and who wants to see Clooney with tatoos? Marcy also raises a good point when she says that Debra Paget’s snake dance in The Indian Tomb is every bit as sexy. Hmm, I see a trend here: otherwise crap movies that try to get by on snake dances.
Battle in Heaven
February 13th, 2006
The kind of pretentious crap that gives art house films a bad name.
