Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

January 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 84

Total Comments: 32

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Babel / U.S.A. / Mexico / 2006

What annoys me about Arriaga’s screenplays and the films Inarritu has made from them is the self-satisfaction they project at the supposed cleverness of the intricate narrative(s). There’s little more to these films than the narrative framework itself. Which is why The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is the only Arriaga script to produce a superior film, because the agenda of the film is entirely separate from Arriaga’s jazzy narrative flourishes.

As for Babel itself, there’s little more I have to add to what Leo and Adam have had to say. Self-inflated nonsense; the Japanese story is irrelevant (apart from the laboured connect-the-dots “how the gun got where it did”) and the least authentic of the film’s stories; and what do they mean by the title anyway? I suspect they themselves don’t know.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
28 Jan 2007 4:12 AM | Comments (1)

Comments / 1 total / Submit Comment

  1. Carl / 28 January 2007 / 5:27 PM

    I certainly agree with you about the title. There aren’t even any scenes where people try to communicate, yet cannot, because they don’t speak the same languages (hell, the white kids appear to be able to understand their surrogate mother’s Spanish even though they can’t speak a word of it themselves). The notion that a film in which are shown speaking different languages in their own countries constitutes “babel” smacks of the usual “ugly American” shock at realizing that languages other than English dare to persist at all. See also Lost in Translation.

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