Adventure

It starts as a primitive civilization doing their typical primitive stuff – hunting, building fires, finding beautiful lovers with perfect teeth, etc.

But the truth is, this was a good movie.

However, in order to enjoy this movie, you must truly suspend reality.

What’s interesting is the way this movie attempts to tie the primitive notions of “Africa” circa-10,000 B.C. with the great civilization of Ancient Egypt around about the same time. In this sense, it was a little bit of a groundbreaking story. We typically see Ancient Egypt as a standalone subject, sometimes with the occasional tie-in to Greece or Rome, but never in contrast to the rest of Africa.

If you cried at the end of Moulin Rouge or City of Angels (like me) because of the tragic ending, you will feel about the same towards the end of this movie. Don’t worry, this is not a complete spoiler – there is an interesting twist!

Babel (DVD)

If true art portrays the culture that spawned it, Babel is art in its purest form. Perhaps that is why this film won an Oscar, plus 26 other awards from ALMA to Eddie to Best American Film, plus 72 additional nominations.The historical significance: human hands built the tower of Babel at a time when everyone spoke the same language. Mankind was attempting to build a tower to reach God. God struck the tower down, and when the people dispersed, they all spoke different languages.

Perhaps today’s shrinking world, the ease of travel to other countries, is the attempt to bring mankind to the lowest denominator, the striving for survival.

In Babel, four very diverse countries and cultures are involved. The convoluted story begins in Morocco with a family of goat herders, and their purchase of a rifle from a friend. The rifle’s purpose was to kill the jackals that were decimating the goatherd. But the boys were testing it out while watching the goats, to see if it would actually reach three kilometers as promised. The younger son, who was by nature a good shot, hit a bus that was approaching from some distance away. He thought he had missed, until the bus stopped not long after his shot. So the two boys ran back home, and later heard that an American tourist had been shot.

Meanwhile, the American tourist (Cate Blanchett) was there with her husband (Brad Pitt), who was trying to make amends for having left her and their two kids at some time in the recent past. She was not ready to acquiesce at that time. The tour bus got them to a small town where she was patched up. Her husband contacted the embassy for assistance.

While all this was going on, the children’s nanny, an illegal from Mexico, decided to take the two small children with her to her sister’s wedding in Mexico. She had tried unsuccessfully to get someone to watch them for the day. During the course of events, Amelia and the two children are dropped in the dessert on the American side of the border after the wedding.

Where do the Japanese father and his daughter fit into the picture? Besides providing the nude scenes, it turns out that the father had given the rifle to his hunting guide in Morocco as a thank-you for the trip. The daughter is deaf, and adjusting to the loss of her mother. The teenage form of the angst all humanity goes through. Her misguided attempts to lose her virginity are deep cries for comfort.

Babel literally means confusion. And this movie is definitely about the confused states of the people involved. Awareness comes slowly, and to some it doesn’t come at all.