Babel: Boring with Some Moments

I finally saw the movie "Babel". I can't understand what the hullabaloo is all about. According to critics and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences personnel, Babel is nominated for 6 awards. You'd think "Babel" would be an impressive work traveling over multiple boundaries of craft and performance.

I didn't see it. I saw a mishmash of widely diverse plotlines held together by the skimpiest of threads. The events by themselves that drive each part of three skeined plots are no more than notable, let alone the tragedy the reviews of this movie would paint them. I had to make myself watch it. This is the most overrated film I have seen in quite a while.

Occasion moviemaking, or "issue" filmmaking, is hot in Hollywood again. The collaborators, Gonzalez Inarritu and Alberto Cuaron, cannot themselves agree on their respective contributions as directors producers and writers. So how, I wonder, can Academy groups have observed these project qualities?

The plot moves between Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt as a married couple in Morocco, their kids and Hispanic nanny in San Diego, and a random Japanese deaf girl mourning her mother's suicide. The premises of all of these stories provoke different questions than perhaps the filmmakers intended.

Goatherding Moroccan kids fool around with a Winchester rifle and practice target shooting at the tour bus, and Cate Blanchett is shot. Nobody has a cellphone and thus Brad Pitt spend almost the rest of the film overacting his way through a backwater village.

What, haven't they seen IBM commercials? There is Internet access anywhere on this terrestrial orb these days. I defy you to show me a child over 8 on this planet without an electronic gadget with connectivity on their person. Brad can't get an ambulance. A CNN news helicopter would have been there in 25 minutes, tops.

As someone who prides themselves on seeing value in movies where others fail, one statement kept repeating itself in my head the whole movie long:

Who cares?