The New Hollywood-Mexico Connection

In the English-language section on Wednesday somebody (I think it was Jake) tried to build an argument starting from the idea that the American characters in Babel, and we the audience, find ourselves between the pre-modernity of Morocco (and Mexico?) and the hyper/postmodernity of Tokyo. He then went on to suggest that the film implies a different kind of psychology for the different sorts of cultures: a sort of primitivism for the decisions made by the Moroccan children and police, and an anxious perverse depressive brittleness for the decisions made by Chieko, while the psychology of the Americans (and the other bus passengers) gets to be the baby bear’s porridge, not too hot and not too cool, just right.

In another part of that conversation, Rachel went through what she considered to be the plausible and implausible parts of the movie and its characters’ motivations, and said that, alas, probably the most realistic part of the movie for her were all the scenes involving the U.S. border patrol, and that the center of the movie’s realism was in its understanding of how Americans are utterly convinced that of course they are always doing the right thing in presuming that the alien is always wrong.

This is an open-ended question: what do you think of (my reconstruction of) these comments about when and where the movie is most realistic in its psychology? If it is more or less accurate, is there something a bit off about treating a poor country as a place where the inhabitants have “less” psychological depth, and a rich country as a place where the inhabitants are more neurotic and inexplicable?

Sometimes Sight and Sound does very serious cinematic criticism, sometimes it adds interesting paratexts, interviews, information about the shoot, etc. These two brief essays are an interview and an essay with information about the shoot.

How to get there: Read the rest of this entry »

I made a big deal in the Spanish-language session today about a moment in Babel that I then completely forgot to mention in the English-language session: the climax of the movie as a whole, in some sense, comes when Yussef realizes that they are not only trapped on the hill but also that shooting at the policemen has only caused the police to return fire and kill the already wounded Ahmed. At this point Yussef does two things: he breaks the rifle into pieces. and he shouts his confession to the police that he was the one who shot at the bus. The police do not shoot him, although they take him into custody, and almost immediately in the film a series of resolutions appear: the housekeeper Amelia is found, the helicopter comes for Cate Blanchett, naked Chieko is rejected but also comforted by the hunky detective, Amelia is told that the children have been found. These events happen at the “same time” in the movie, although reconstructing the plot we know that they happened at different times chronologically.

So which of the events is the moral/symbolic cause of the turn in fortune, the breaking of the rifle or the confession? Read the rest of this entry »

In the Spanish-language section Sheera told us that the Wikipedia entry for Babel includes a translation of what is legible of the letter Chiekako gives the policeman. Indeed it does, and I thank them both very much. The entry also gives Read the rest of this entry »

I believe I said in the English discussion that there was a precedent for the kind of grotesqueness del Toro presents in The Pale Man, namely, the turn-of-the-century illustrator Arthur Rackham. He is all over the web, and if I knew how to paste pictures into this blog I would do so. Look, for instance, at

http://www.artsycraftsy.com/rackham/ppk39_elderberry.html

The selection I have found on line tends to be the “cute” Rackham, who illustrated Peter Pan and Rip Van Winkle as well as gloomier children’s fare.

I believe I also Read the rest of this entry »

Four books which are the place people start when thinking about the fantastic: Read the rest of this entry »

Si Uds. miran el blog de Shannon (”S.Blake”), leerán que Shannon vio algunos elementos en común entre 21 Grams y Cronos, sobre los órganos humanos y la representación del dolor en ambas películas.

Como dije en la clase de ingleshablantes durante la discusión de Sin City, un elemento típico (pero quizás inesperado) de “cine machista” es la brutalización del cuerpo masculino: Read the rest of this entry »

For people who like to use gender as a point of comparison, the two films by Guillermo del Toro set in the era of the Spanish Civil War, El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone)(2001) and El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth)(2006) make a natural 6-9 page topic: one has a boy protagonist, and one has a girl protagonist. Where can one go from there? Read the rest of this entry »

We won’t have time to discuss the essay by Ilan Stavans in class, so this is a good place for anyone to post a reaction to it. According to Stavans, what if anything is unique about the exuberant lowbrow taste of Mexico and Mexican-America? Do you agree?

I am so much older than Brian Doan: I would be embarrassed to teach a course on comic books! But I love comic books and (of course) think that they can be subtle and valid works of art! But Brian is much younger than I am –is that it? Is it a generational thing? Or could it be Read the rest of this entry »