Babel

(Movie Review)

Bear and I rented this movie the other night.

This movie was big news in Japan a few months ago. Like a lot of movies it got a delayed release date in Japan, so around March or April I think there was a week when this movie was all over the news and everyone was talking about it.

As I've mentioned before there are a lot of American movies dealing with Japanese themes, and some of them catch on in Japan and some don't. This movie got a lot of press because the Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi was nominated for an Academy Award. And I think the Japanese fascination with Brad Pitt also aided this movie. Shoko really wanted to see it when it came out, but very few movies make it to the little Nakatsu movie theater, and we can't justify paying for train tickets all the way to Fukuoka just to see a movie.

Anyway:
This movie is often compared with movies like Crash, Traffic, and Syriana, and with good reason. (In fact while watching this movie I thought it had been made by the same people as those other movies, but according to Wikipedia apparently not). It uses the same kind of directing and the same kind of story telling though. And the same idea of having 4 separate stories, loosely connected with each other but all dealing with similar themes.

As the title suggests, the main theme of this movie is language, but some of these four stories are more language related than others.

There are a number of points in the movie where characters do things that are illogical or don't seem to make a lot of sense. Of course people in real life do things that don't make a lot of sense, so it is difficult to know how critical to be of this. But there were a number of points in the movie where Bear and I said to each other: "Now why doesn't he just do this instead of that?" Or "That doesn't make any sense. If she would only do that all the problems would be over."

The Japanese segments deal with a deaf mute girl who can only communicate with sign language. (I thought I was going to get an opportunity to test my Japanese language skills out during this film, but the majority of the Japanese segments deals with sign language).

Interesting factoid: did you know that Japanese sign language is different than American sign language? I just assumed it was a universal language, but it's not. (This came up in a lesson from the textbook we taught out of last year: the difference between American and Japanese sign language).

Both of the main Japanese actors looked very familiar to me while watching the movie. It took me a while to place them but Rinko Kikuchi was also in "69" and Koji Yakusho, who played the father, has actually been in a number of famous Japanese movies, including the main part in "The Choice of Hercules" and the American movie "Memoirs of a Geisha".

Link of the Day
The Squandering of Obama

Babel: Movie Review (Scripted)