| Critic |
Review |
Quote |
Analysis |
This Week's Verdict |
David Denby,
The New Yorker |
Babel |
"Arriaga and Iñárritu are trying to create potent fictions by harping on pain and misunderstanding. But why? Serendipity is every bit as likely as calamity. Happy chains of the miraculous exist in movie history—they are called screwball comedies, which is not a genre these filmmakers are likely to take up soon. Arriaga and Iñárritu, confusing sheer dread with dramatic tension, make us suffer, but in that case we had better learn something new, and I'm not sure there's much to be learned from watching Cate Blanchett scream as she's sewn up by a Moroccan village doctor except for the bourgeois lesson that wealthy Westerners should think twice before leaving the friendly confines of a comfortable hotel." |
Any movie that makes David Denby suffer is okay by us. Although we also like the idea of re-imagining Babel as a comedy, especially given that whole Brad Pitt giving himself a wedgie thing. Maybe Gaspar Noe can start working on that. |
|
Jim Ridley,
The Village Voice
|
Babel |
"Time perhaps scrambling it's for Alejandro González Iñárritu to stop his narratives. After making an exciting debut in 2000 with Amores Perros—a movie whose gimmicky Tarantino-esque tinkering with structure seemed fresher en español and grounded in gritty Mexico City location shooting—González Iñárritu apparently decided to devote his feature-film career to telling multipart stories in initially disconnected fragments. In theory, it's an ambitious gambit: a method that can cut off a viewer's dependence on narrative bottle-feeding. In practice—at least in Babel, González Iñárritu's schematic new tract on the world's ills—it's like Crash rewritten by Yoda." |
Crash anybody rewritten by would an improvement probably be. Actually, what awesome you know would be totally? This movie, Iñárritu Gonzalez Arriaga Guillermo by rewritten. (Do all day this we could.) |
|
Armond White,
New York Press
|
Death of a President |
"It's a weird sensation to watch an American-financed movie that condemns U.S. culture and the people who produced it, yet intends those same suckers to watch it. Babel pulls this seditious stunt through Iñárritu's narrative tricks...Babel is a Traffic jam. Iñárritu's plots converge in an accusation of American guilt. Pitt, like George Clooney, is one of those "informed" actors who thinks he's making an important statement by blaming the United States for the world's ills. The press feels obligated to praise such impertinence, but I think any sensible viewer will come away from Babel with the depressing realization that they've just watched almost three hours of global stupidity." |
If we want three hours of global stupidity, we could just turn on the TV. Or stare out the window. Or read our emails. Also, is this really the first American film that Armond has seen that "condemns U.S. culture"? Where has he been for the last five years? Watching home movies in Pat Boone's rec room? |
|
A.O. Scott,
New York Times |
Death of a President |
"The best that can be said about Mr. Range's opportunistic little picture is that, at least in its first half, it faithfully recreates the tone and rhythm of a second-rate American television program...The real phoniness of Death of a President lies not in its counterfeiting of reality — the procedural details have a certain plausibility — but in its facile, melodramatic manipulation of current political anxieties. The extent to which its flat, documentary style is a manipulation becomes clear as its plot starts to follow the contours of a 'Law & Order' episode. Some will find profundity in the film's reversals and revelations, but its provocations are not particularly insightful or original. The Death of a President is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it's a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas." |
Actually, we wish it had followed the contours of a 'Law & Order' episode. Then at least we would have gotten some bad-ass investigators and lots of people walking through corridors. This feels more like something out of one of those late-night public access screeds. |
|
Andrew O'Hehir,
Salon
|
Wild Blue Yonder |
"I suppose in some technical sense "The Wild Blue Yonder" is Werner Herzog's first new fiction film since whenever...But like all of Herzog's recent...this evokes a sort of blissed-out, contemplative mood where questions of fiction vs. reality seem unimportant. There's a plot, kind of, with Brad Dourif as one of the last of a group of aliens from a distant galaxy who settled on Earth, only to discover that they'd lost all their scientific knowledge and couldn't succeed in our society. ("I hate to tell you this," he says to the camera, "but aliens all suck.") Most of the film consists of footage Herzog has pilfered or extracted from real-life NASA space missions and Arctic underwater exploration, all to tell the tale of Earthling astronauts' long and desperate voyage to the Andromedans' home planet, made possible by various discoveries in chaos-theory mathematics that piss the Dourif alien off." |
He makes The Wild Blue Yonder sound like the flip side to Idiocracy — in this one, humans have become so advanced and smart that even the aliens are pissed off. Except that the aliens are played by Brad Dourif — and Brad Dourif is always pissed off. |
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