Word: babel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...beings. They called these entities angels, demons and gods. Today, the complex world that travel, communications and other technologies have created can likewise seem as if moved by mystic forces. If Lost is a jungle of quasi-shamanistic kismet, it resonates because our world appears that way too. In Babel, Heroes and their forebears--from Magnolia to the novels of Thomas Pynchon--even if the connections may be contrived, they feel authentic. That guy in the next car on the freeway could change my life someday! If I save the cheerleader, I can save the world...
...Babel trots out favorite lefty stereotypes, from Third World victims to ugly Americans (and, to be fair, other ugly Westerners). The Moroccan kid who uses a bus for target practice comes off as a poor naïf--if he were American, Hollywood would probably treat him as an example of our sick, gun-crazy society. The American couple are the kind of self-absorbed Yanks who jet off to a poor country to be "alone" among thousands of peasants, guarded and distanced from their surroundings, taking their Cokes without ice so as not to drink the water...
Whatever sententious hoo-ha Babel is freighted with, however, there is a larger point in it and its butterfly-fiction cohort that cuts across political boundaries: that in the globalization, global-warming, global-terror era, other people's problems are our own, and class privilege and a U.S. passport are no force field. (Indeed, Babel's story of Americans in mortal peril among foreigners even echoes, if inadvertently, a Bush Administration refrain: that we are no longer protected by two big oceans.) You can argue the politics and the art of Babel and company. It is harder to argue their...