Word: babel
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Less hyperbolic opponents point out that granting special official status to English is simply unnecessary: America has been accepting foreign-language-speaking immigrants forever--Brooklyn is so polyglot it is a veritable Babel--and yet we've done just fine. What's the great worry about Spanish...
...that changes when you have an enormous, linguistically monoclonal immigration as we do today from Latin America. Then you get not Brooklyn's successful Babel but Canada's restive Québec. Monoclonal immigration is new for the U.S., and it changes things radically. If at the turn of the 20th century, Ellis Island had greeted teeming masses speaking not 50 languages but just, say, German, America might not have enjoyed the same success at assimilation and national unity that...
...regretful pans. Though we didn't know it then, The Da Vinci Code experience would turn out to be Cannes 2006 in miniature: great hopes for films that mostly underachieved. The big-name items - Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette - all had their adherents, but many others who expressed disappointment or derision. This was a festival with no consensus masterpiece. A few smaller movies got high praise, perhaps because they scaled modest peaks, while the more ambitious works, depending on the individual response, either...
...keeps piling on improbability, and the viewer's interest sours into exasperation. Yes, bad things can happen to decent people. But compared to the calamities that befall the Pitt character in a single day - the shooting of his wife, the disappearance of his children - Job had it easy. When Babel opens in the fall, the mass movie audience may feel similarly plagued. In a provocative Babel subplot, medical aid is slow coming to the wounded Blanchett because of an intergovernmental debate over whether the shooting is an act of Islamic terrorism. That was one of many echoes in Cannes movies...
...Babel Another chance-is-destiny parable from Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams), the drama stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as a couple tested by near tragedy. The film's ambition is imposing, the acting often illuminating, the pileup of coincidences finally exasperating. Marie Antoinette Sofia Coppola reimagines the court of Louis XVI as a gossip party for rich, vapid teenagers. The film, starring Kirsten Dunst as the Queen, above, got a few raucous boos, sending many critics to the defense of this lame satire, which may mean to make fun of emptiness but actually...