Word: chieko
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boys wouldn't have got into trouble if their father hadn't given them a rifle. Pitt and Blanchett's two children, Debbie (Elle Fanning) and Mike (Nathan Gamble), wouldn't be in jeopardy if they hadn't been carted off to Mexico. And the Japanese man's daughter Chieko...
...finally come to Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), the deaf-mute teenager who is deeply, if photogenically, neurotic...
...movie isn't a dry statement of propositions. It's an investigation of complex, flawed, sharply drawn characters. I love the scenes with Chieko: her scenes at the disco, so vital and noisy on the outside, so spookily quiet and eerily illuminated when we are inside Chieko's head. The girl wants someone, anyone, to penetrate the darkness of her silence. Because she can't flirt verbally with men, she reveals herself in the boldest way possible: by her nakedness. It is the oinly way to express what she can offer of herself and, at the same time, revealing...
...movie. We're all victims, at times, and victimizers at other times. Yussef is an agent, an angel, of death. He's also a very charming, then very scared kid. Debbie and Mike, I suppose, are clearly victims, but the two child actors, especially Nathan Gamble, play fear beautifully. Chieko is a scarred creature, who can communicate only through extreme measures, and suffers the memory of finding her dead mother (a suicide victim who shot herself--another gun!). The children in Babel are complicated human beings, just like the adults. And they are certainly crucial to Iñárritu...
...There's a reason why everyone calls Chieko Saito "Mama." To know her, it seems, is to be loved by her, or at least adopted. Her dancers "are like my children," she says. "Sometimes they would get sick, so I would dance for them." The last time she did that she was 58. Saito met Kitano in 1999 when she brought her girls on his TV program, and they quickly grew close. "When we met," she says, "it was like we'd known each other for 30 years." When Kitano's mother died that year, Saito decided he needed...