I gotta learn japanese finally…

Babel

Yay, that was a good movie. However, I can already warn you that I will most likely talk about the rather bad points of this movie.

First of all, we have Milkmaster who dislikes movies that talk about misunderstandings. Apparently he already has seen too many movies and TV series in his life who deal about misunderstandings (mostly shoujomanga-style lovey-dovey soaps, of course). As for me, I also don’t think that the misunderstandings and the many languages are the prevalent thing in movie. Those are rather superficial characteristics. I think it was more the different cultures than really the ways of communication. On top of that, I think most of them actually managed to communicate pretty well: communication problems because of language itself, not because of the culture, are different.

A propos culture, what annoyed me the most was how the japanese culture was portrayed. Shibuya is not the only place that exists in Japan and girls do NOT wear miniskirts at school. They should at least have shown that the girls shorten their skirts themselves or something like that, but how Japan was portrayed in this movie was just cliché and totally unrealistic. Because of that, I find it difficult to take the movie for serious actually. (Another cliché was the scene where the girls sat on the swings and looked like in trance… that was just SO unoriginal.) So when it comes to the story itself, I think this was the weakest of all of them. Especially since the movie gave the impression that japanese girls are defined by their sexual problems, or rather, that their problems always shows through their failure in having sex. (Another cliché, ugh.)
However, the best part of the movie was also in the Japan part: the soundtrack was fantastic especially in that part (Tommy!), the atmosphere and especially the actors were the best. Rinko Kikuchi had a gorgeous role in which she was able to show her acting skills – and the rest of them (the father, the policist, etc.) looked really authentic. Even though I think it’s logical that Rinko – after finding that her problems cannot be solved by her friends, or by a man – turned towards her father and (probably) found her happiness finally, it was still pretty cheesy. And I don’t think of it as a happy end because I see nowhere how she and her father might be able to understand each other. On top of that, the main thing she wants is not to get over the death of her mother, but to be fucked – it’s not like she can fuck him. (Or does she? *hrr*)

My favourite character in the whole movie was Yussuf. Of course Milkmaster is right when he says that it really is a stupid thing to shoot a bus, but aside from that, he’s a rather sympathetic character: he’s strong, capable and brave enough to first shoot the police and then to give in to save his brother.
Oh! Now that I think about it, we were always talking about three scenes (Morocco, Mexico and Japan) but in fact, there should be four. I’d rather call them Yussuf, Amelia, Chieko and Susan. The Yussuf story and the Susan story both play in Morocco but actually they never meet each other, so that it’s basically two different stories.

The Mexico story was my favourite: Even though the scene wasn’t as good-looking as Japan, it was the most fun, and I also think that it’s the most realistic story (the nearer a country is to you, the less embarassing the prejudices become *cough*). The children were cute and Amelia was good. It also helps that the music was great in this part. But of course the main argument is an (unfortunately underachieving) Gael García Bernal. Oh well, who cares – the mere fact that he plays in this movie is already gorgeous!

The most annoying of the movie (and I think this is a compliment to the movie itself) were the horrible (english) subtitles. Except for the english-speaking part (without subtitles of course), I didn’t know any of those languages well (arabian, spanish, japanese, japanese sign language, but oh there was a tidbit of french in the movie). But from the little bit of spanish and japanese I’ve understood, you could easily see that the subtitles were crap. In my opinion, it was also a sign of mediocricy that there were some sentences they didn’t translate, even though they probably aren’t that relevant. This is just like Tokyopop not translating sound words.
Unfortunately we were also annoyed by an incredibly obnoxious cashier and stupid people in the cinema. However, I’m still very happy that we went to the cinema again *____* <3

So in the end the movie exceeded my expectations, but also was a disappointment. Without being overly meaningful (with that rather trivial message), it was a multi-faceted and extraordinary movie full of intense pictures. But at the same time, I can’t fully appreciate it mainly because of the cheesiness of the japanese part. With that portrait of Japan, the storywriter took away every possibility for me to think that the movie is meaningful in any ways. Well, tried too hard *hrr*
I still want to see Amores Perros though.