Word: babeling
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Brad Pitt didn't make it to the Cannes Festival - he is still with Angelina Jolie, awaiting the birth of their first child - but his film Babel made its own considerable stir in his absence. Pitt heads an imposing international cast in the new epic by director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who earlier collaborated on Amores Perros and 21 Grams...
...Mary Corliss: In Babel, as with Amores Perros and 21 Grams, the theme is rooted in chaos theory. The idea is that a seemingly insignificant event anywhere in the world (the flapping of a butterfly's wings, in the famous example) can have cataclysmic consequences (a tidal wave or hurricane...
...Babel doesn't get its strength from the coincidences. It gets it from characters whose strength of will and heart is put to the test when bad things happen to them. In that sense, the Biblical reference in the movie is not so much to the Tower of Babel, where man's ambition was confounded by an angry God, throwing humanity into a babble of different languages and customs. It's more like the story of Job, who has to keep fighting and trusting as the calamities accumulate. Can't you accept that a movie can work as a parable...
...parables. But they have to make more than metaphorical sense. My question for a movie like Babel is always: What are the odds? In this case, I can only surmise that the Pitt character, who might lose his wife and his children within 24 hours, is not a representative of modern man. He's just the unluckiest guy in the world...
...that which commentators invoke when promoting the virtues of Scott Podsednik’s hustle or the merits of “small-ball”—there is an even older tradition that advocates of statistical analysis can use to combat the Tower of Babel-esque national baseball coverage: the scientific method...