Dear Producers and Director of
Babel,
Your film,
Babel, just rose to the top of my Netflix queue, like the bloated corpse of a drowning victim floating to the surface of a pond.
First, let me say that you were robbed for Best Picture. This is totally the kind of overlong, self-important, humorless Drama About the Human Condition that the Academy loves. How can you go wrong when you deliberately hit so many of the Academy's hot buttons? Do you think somebody found that copy of the
Crash script where you changed the characters' names and wrote "DO THIS PART IN SPANISH" on top of one of the pages? There's really no other explanation.
At the very least, you should have won Best Achievement in Editing. These people obviously don't realize how difficult it is to take four disparate and singularly uninteresting stories and "artfully weave" them (I'm quoting from the Netflix jacket) into something that would almost seem like a coherent motion picture if you were, you know, watching it on mute while stoned. I think the trick is to change gears as soon as the audience starts to think, "Holy crap, nothing interesting has happened for like... oh wait, we're back to the Japanese chick."
Speaking of the Japanese subplot, one of my favorite parts of the film is where the cute 16-year-old Japanese girl spends like an hour of my life trying unsuccessfully to find a man in Tokyo willing to have sex with her. I totally bought this, despite the fact that teenage Japanese sex kittens rank somewhere between signed copies of
Abbey Road and enriched plutonium on the supply/demand scale.
While I'm on the topic of sex, thanks for not involving Brad Pitt or Cat Blanchett in the one sex scene in the film. Who wants to see something like that when you can watch a Moroccan shepherd boy masturbate while thinking about his sister? Personally, I'd have gone with goat sex (I mean, you had like 500 goats! Think of the possibilities!), but I understand that child actors can be uncooperative.
Kudos on the performances from those kids, by the way. Especially Dakota Fanning's little sister and whoever that kid was who played her brother. They were so effective at portraying stark terror that I actually believed that the director subjected them to some kind of psychological torture. It's a sign of a truly excellent performance when the viewer feels complicit in a crime against humanity just for watching. I wouldn't want to have to pay those kids' therapy bills in a few years!
Working with child actors is hard enough, but you also had to work with actors in six different languages (seven, counting Japanese sign language)! I mean, you didn't
have to, but how else are you going to get that foreign-film cachet while appealing to a broad demographic of international viewers
and finding room in the script for some recognizable Hollywood stars? I question the inclusion of Arabic and Berber, as they are the only languages not spoken in any of the top ten foreign markets, but congrats on covering seven out of ten!
I still can't get over how you were able to seamlessly connect so many unrelated subplots. I mean, the part where it turns out that the gun used by the Moroccan kid to shoot Cate Blanchett was once owned by the Japanese girl's father? How on earth did you come up with that, when there are probably eight hundred other equally superficial connections you could have made?
Like maybe the Japanese girl's volleyball coach once saw Brad Pitt an the airport. Ok, well that one's not very good, but you get the idea.
I'm wondering if you have any advice for aspiring filmmakers. For example, let's say that I've come up with several different stories involving characters who are subjected to one horrific thing after another for the audience's amusement. Normally this sort of thing is called "exploitation," and the movie would end up being shown on the USA network at 3am. What's the secret of getting something like this nominated for an Oscar? Is it the big name actors? The "artful weaving" of the unrelated stories? The almost unbearably slow pace?
Whatever it is, keep up the good work. I fully expect to see a retooled, internationalized version of
The Departed from you in the near future. Keep on making movies that we feel like maybe we would enjoy if we were slightly better people.
Labels: Movies