Word: babel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Tower of Babel in management control before [Essentials]. People used the same terms to mean different things,” he said. “[Anthony] organized everything and created a conceptual framework for all the research being done in systems analysis...
...haphazard and unbelievable that it's almost shocking to read them under the byline of a novelist as seasoned as Crichton. It's possible he is trying something new here, that he deliberately opted out of his usual central driving plot to present us instead with a panoramic Babel-style view of a whole society gone genetically mad, I tell you, mad. If so, the experiment, like so many he describes, has gone disastrously wrong. This kind of messiness doesn't suit him at all. Crichton's narratives work because they're as gleaming and orderly as nature is frighteningly...
...epic, The Fountain, about a man who will do anything to save his critically ailing wife. The film was to cost near $100 million and to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The original financiers dropped The Fountain when those two bowed out. (They later reunited to make Babel, in which they played virtually the same roles.) Aronofsky slimmed down the budget to $35 million, cast Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in the main roles, and made the damn movie. The whole trip, with all its frustrating detours, took six years. Then the Cannes Film Festival rejected The Fountain...
...could stop these creatures, or shut them up? Not Altman: he hears America talking, endlessly, engagingly, whether or not it makes sense. Even in an two-person conversation, the Babel of off-screen voices tells you that the main story is just one of many that could be told-are being told, in shorthand, at the edges of the frame. The murmur of overlapping blarney isn't a carpet of sound; rather, it's swatches, hundreds of gorgeous samples to choose from. This blend of image and voice, meticulously designed, may seem like a glorious mess. But that is Altman...
...Whispering "Meet Joe Black" in Brad Pitt's ear before shooting big emotional scenes in Babel...