A Case of the Babels

Having watched the film "Babel" on DVD recently, I could not resist posting a link to a strange story I read on Yahoo! Movies: Movie News. The film opened in Japan this past weekend, and apparently there have been 15 reported cases of nausea and headaches from moviegoers. This is nothing new for a movie to cause such a reaction, as similar reports came out after the release of "Breaking the Waves" in 1996, the film starring Emily Watson which is set in a remote Scottish village and features scenes at sea on an oil rig shot with hand held cameras. Also, I myself felt a bit queasy after watching the shaky camerawork of "The Blair Witch Project" (1999), which was shot entirely in documentary style.

http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/ap/20070502/117813012000.html

That history aside, let me just say that after sitting through the rather lengthy and in my opinion much overrated exercise in angst called "Babel" I felt a little ill myself, and it had nothing to do with the cinematography or sound. It has a lot to do with the fact that Brad Pitt wouldn't stop screaming and Rinko Kikuchi's Japanese schoolgirl character wouldn't stop taking her clothes off and coming on to every guy she met, including a police officer and her rather shocked dentist during a checkup. Cate Blanchett does a great job of bleeding and suffering, as that is pretty much all she is asked to do in the film. To its credit, the cinematography is beautiful and "Babel" is ambitious in scope with four stories shot in four countries in four languages. Unfortunately, it bored me in all four.