Babel

THE TRANSPORTER 2 is a better moviegoing experience than BABEL.

BABEL teaches us that guns are bad: look for a young Moroccan boy destroying a gun in a climactic fit of fury, sadness, and despair. THE TRANSPORTER 2 teaches us that guns are for losers: real men use car-fu, firehose fu, bead curtain fu, sword fu, lead pipe fu, axe fu, coconut fu, boat fu, and Gulfstream IV fu, just to name a, er, few. BABEL features heartbreaking turns from a brilliant cast featuring Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, and some cat from SNATCH. THE TRANSPORTER 2 features evil foreigners, anorexic models, and some cat from SNATCH kicking people in the face. BABEL features a girl in a schoolgirl outfit flashing her Britney at random Japanese schoolboys. THE TRANSPORTER 2 featurs a girl in a schoolgirl outfit who jacks cars with a gang of cartoonish thugs. And speaking of girls, all BABEL can give us is a clothing-challenged girl weeping on her father's shoulder, while THE TRANSPORTER 2 delivers a clothing-challenged girl in heavy mascara wielding dual automatic weapons and laying down the aforementioned bead curtain fu.

All kidding aside, BABEL is two hours of the anticipation of horror, horror, and despair. Its painfulness is outweighed only by its heavyhandedness, with self-absorbed first-worlders weighed against salt-of-the-earth second-worlders. Not only did I feel that this film was trying to manipulate me into a decidedly unpleasant emotional place, but I thought that it was doing so dishonestly. And really, enough of these "hyperlink films." I liked SHORT CUTS as much as the next guy, but there's no joy in discovering the connections the film lays out before us. Just tell me a story, goshdarnit. Entertain me. Teach and enlighten me if you can, but don't preach at me. And if you can manage it, try and mix in a little cocounut fu. Coconut fu does wonders for any film.

Amores Perros

I watch movies in roughly 30-minute swaths while riding public transportation. This generally works pretty well, as most movies are roughly 90 minutes long and hew to a 3-act structure. It’s like reading chapters of a book. AMORES PERROS is 150 minutes long, with three separate and intersecting stories, and it is simply not conducive to serialized viewing. It needs to be consumed in one large gulp of time, which allows it to cast a cohesive spell.

Of its three tales, the film’s first one had the greatest effect on me. It’s about a young man who’s in love with his abusive brother’s wife and hits upon a scheme to earn some quick dough and run away with her. Things go poorly.

In the second, a man leaves his family for a new love. Things go poorly, no thanks to the young man in tale #1.

The third story follows a homicidal vagrant whom we meet early in story #1. He left his family to become a revolutionary, but (say it with me now) things go poorly.

All three stories give us people swimming against the tides of their love, and wreaking varying degrees of havoc along the way. They’re beautifully done, and I think this movie could have carried me away. If only I had seen it under different circumstances.

Y Tu Mama Tambien

There's a lot to like about Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. It tackles serious concerns in a serious way, it gives us honest and multidimensional characters, and it manages to infuse the tropes of the road trip movie with a pathos and insight not normally found in the genre. Unfortunately, however, it failed to capture my imagination.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is a story about two young men and one fully adult woman. It blends coming of age, sexual maturation, and class concerns seamlessly, but it does so on a level so accessible that it opens itself to accusations of oversimplicity. Yes, we get that the young need to find themselves, intellectually and physically - we've been there. Yes, we get that rich and poor inhabit entirely different worlds - what else have you got? And yes, we understand that the world is soaked in tragedy - so what? This is a movie that, on first viewing, seems far too easy to decode. Perhaps there's more to it, but I saw this one solo and am stuck with my own impressions.

While Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN's insights may seem all too obvious, the film still earns significant credit for fully realizing its characters. Sure, the adolescents are horny kids, but they're horny kids with real hearts, concerns, and questions about themselves and their place in the world. Sure, the woman is the very personification of the madonna-whore, but she's given a level of humanity and an internal (and internalized) journey that's far more profound than that normally found in coming of age films. I didn't really like these people. I didn't really relate to these people. But I believed in these people. And that ain't bad.

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN is basically a road trip movie, but it's a movie that understands the tedious nature of the road trip, that uses the tropes of the genre to great effect, and that feels for every character on the screen. As its trio of protagonists pass through their various challenges, the film uses those challenges and situations to explore the nature of maturing sexuality and, hell, maturing period. This film "gets it" in a way that so many do not.

So, why did Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN fail to capture my imagination? It clobbered my out of the trap with its lfrequent voice-overs. It's as if the film didn't trust me to intuit pathos and, instead, beat me over the head with it. See this nice spot? People died there long ago. See these nice people? Those nasty capitalists will drive them from their home soon. OK, ok. I get it. Life is hard. Additionally, I had a philosophical problem with some of the movie's assumptions, especially the assumption that freer sex leads to greater happiness. Granted, the film did address the issue forthrightly in its denoument, but even that felt like it was too little, too late.

So, there it is. I respect Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. I admire Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. But I don't particularly like Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. I guess you can't have it all.

Bad Education

I respect BAD EDUCATION's technical excellence, but the movie just didn't capture my imagination.

I can't put my finger on why, exactly. I've enjoyed Almodovar's other works, I recognized that the movie had a good premise and good actors, but I just plain couldn't get into it.

Ah, well.