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One of Babel’s flaws, and perhaps this is a product of its fractured narrative, is that the narrative, so far as the audience can apply previous events to those currently occuring, doesn’tbegin until the first scene with Cate and Brad eating lunch in Morroco. The family trading for the gun is set up and so is the phone conversation between Brad and his son. The signposting for when we should “start paying attantion” comes from the film’s casting. My ears perked up when I thought I heard Brad Pitt on the phone, and I knew that the major events of the film were starting to unfold when I saw Gael Garcia Bernal. I have mixed feelings about this use of stars as icons. On one hand, it is quite clever: We are going recognize them anyway, so why not use it to tell the story? On the other, it seems weak to me. I feel that this was the weakest of Arriaga/Inarritu’s films, partially because Amorres Perros (the strongest) does not need to rely on this sort of signposting to get its story across. I feel like I might have been lost without stars to cling to in Babel, and perhaps this is why the Japanese story doesn’t seems as connected to the rest of the film: There is no one for us to recognize.

I’m fresh from David Denby’s article…but not ready to tear him a new one quite yet.  I am hung up on his mention of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Given Tarantino’s relationship with Rodriguez–the call themselves The Brothers– I find it ironic that Denby focuses on Pulp Fiction’s  effect on the rise the the narrative style favored by another one of our directors instead. Taratino’s philosophy on filmmaking is to run contrary to the indie crowd’s assertion that genre films are dead. His hyper-genre films have become a genre unto themselves. I fell that the trend toward rebelling against the linear narrative in Hollywood filmmaking is going to follow the same course. It is still in its adolescent phases, and its novelty promotes commentary and propels film which may not have much more going for them than a fractured narrative into some undeserved limelight (This is a harsher criticism of Babel than I want to make, but something rings true about it at least a little). The indie crowd and the critics will formulate some terms to apply to this mode of storytelling, for instance, the tern “fractured narrative” itself. By the time is have terms and a following and/or filmmakers/critics reacting against it, the fractured narrative will become what so many other anti-genre genres (Dogme 95, the French New Wave) have become: a convention!

Whether or not the magic is actually happening in El Laberinto Del Fauno was a point of contention in our class. At first, I was set in my argument that it is not, in fact real, and inexplicable feats by Ofelia were a result of the film’s indecision about the reality/psychology of its magic. Upon further reflection, I still contend that the magic is a figment of Ofelia’s imagination, but I no longer believe that, this being the case, that the oles in the plot are a result of an indecisive narrative. Ofelia’s function as an unreliable narrator is very intentioned. I purpose that we are seeing the world so exclusively through her eyes that even the “cure” of the mandrake root is imagined to be her doing and therefore presented to the audience as fact. That we don’t see how she escapes the Captain in the labyrinth or her rescue of her brother does not require that magic aided her in doing so. We see only what Ofelia–what del Toro–wants us to see, and this creates a fully realized magical world the escape to which is a bittersweet tragedy of the delusional mind.

One of the most appealing contrasts between El Laberinto del Fauno and El Espinazo del Diablo is their effective but totally different uses of voice over.  The bookending set up of Diablo’s repetitive narration grounds its allegory in the real questions the film poses about the nature of death and the obligations of the living and the dead to each other. Laberinto’s voice over does the opposite; it punctuates the narrative’s harsh reality with plot-guiding fairytales as delivered by various voices of magic and portent. This allows these two films, which differ greatly from each other, to bear some structural resemblance despite that the same construct is filling opposing roles.  On the similar side of the same device, the speaker of the opening narration is ambiguous while the course of the film reveals the voice’s owner for the potent closing narration. Jeff Pence teaches that the beginning and end of a film are when the filmmaker has the most of the audience’s attention, and I heartily approve of the use to which del Toro puts his consciousness of this adage.

As interesting as I find the emerging questions about and cultural/artistic responses to the Spanish Civil War, I am curious as to its connection to the Hollywood-Mexico exchange. Are there not examples of responses to the injustices done in Mexico? I can think of two off the top of my head: Hombres Armados and The Dancer Upstairs. Perhaps, then, the lesson is that of the flight of the director from Mexico. Del Toro, Cuaron, and Rodriguez have not dwelt in Mexico permanently, cinematically speaking. Even Inarritu left for 21 Grams. Is Mexico too limited as a working space for these directors? Does the tension between Hollywood and Mexico create toughened veterans of the silver screen hungry for even more international action?

This film was indeed the twin brother of Pan’s Labyrinth, but, to quote Marv, it must have been the nice one. The types of horror in these films matches the strength and style of the allegory within each. The Sixth Sense-style ghost-in-need-of-revenge in TDB mirrors the complexity of the story of the Spanish Civil War in miniature. Santi is a victim of injustice looking to the later generations of orphan boys to right the wrong done him, just as the spirits of los “olvidados” buried in mass graves are supposed to do in present-day Spain. In PL we see the story of the injustice and terror of the War from the perspective of an innocent on the side of the victors. The terror here stems as much from the people in Ofelia’s life as from the monsters. Far from the goal-driven violence and temper of TDB, the characters in Pan’s Labyrinth are sadistic and calculating, making a less allegorical but much more terrifyingly visceral comment on the savage atrocities of the War.

In the 15 minute Flik School, Rodriguez comments on how if he ran out of effects budget, that he could shoot super contrasty shots of pure white silhouettes on black and still be true to the comics. I reckon that he took the fact that Sin City is so hyper-stylized that it attracts attention away from some shaky performances–a deficit in the talent budget, as it were–and used it similarly. With all the bells and whistles attached to the visuals, it is much harder to notice Jessica Alba’s awful work, let alone the incredibly sexist content of the film’s/comics’ plot-lines. This forces the style built into the film by its source text to operate further in favor of the adaptation, making Sin City seem even more purposeful in its stylistic choices despite being forced to make them in a way that Frank Miller was not when penning the originals. In short, Rodriguez uses his technical know-how to appropriate the largest aesthetic concern of the project and not only preserve it, but also use it to even further advantage than the comics.

I’m not arguing for Once Upon a Time in Mexico or more of Sin City, but rather Rodriguez’s newest feature, Planet Terror.  I believe it encapsulates the most extra-cinematically important features of both other options combined. Part of the double feature Grindhouse, it is both a big budget Tex-mexploitation and is inextricably linked to Rodriguez’s “brother” Quentin Tarantino, who authored the second half of the film. Both of these factors are amped up to the point of making comparison to his other works, links to the cult/Hollywood scene of fandom and the clash of satire/homage unavoidable. I would hazard, in fact, that much of the film’s heavily-layered content is intended to provoke an American cult following to analyze the foundations of Rodriguez’s style and origins; such an outrageous film begs the question as to the nature of the mind who concocted it, which we will be fully prepared to delve into.

The concluding remarks in Smith’s fourth chapter, describing the “scrapbook” of location scouting and found objects used in Amores Perros’ preproduction, illustrate one of the film’s larger motifs. The idea behind collage is that one can preview all aesthetic options, choose the most appealing or relevant, and juxtapose them into the perfect hybrid. Collage also suggests that a space is defined by the sum of its parts; it should never be less than that and must strive to be more. Clearly, given the variety of locations used and the intentional obscuring of DF’s better-known features (the metro, the taxis), the collage Inarritu created discards the obliquely Mexican in favor of what is inherently so. The locations were “difficult to pinpoint even for locals” (Smith 52) but were never questioned as being anywhere but Mexico, implying that even before the layers of political/social/ethnic/ collage of characters and plot were added, Inarritu had laid an incredibly strong foundation through a collage of evocative rather than literal spaces.

…Would an American filmmaker make a movie about Washington DC without the inclusion of our capitol’s monuments?

I cut my teeth on Inarritu’s 2003 film 21 Grams, which I have seen several times, only later discovering Amores Perros. Our discussion today of the layers of socio-political commentary, conservative perspective, and (most especially) the dogs as floating signifiers has opened my eyes to the simplicity of its American counterpart. 21 Grams only played at the arthouse in my hometown and, while it involves a similar model of the interconnection of strangers to a tramatic event, its message and delivery revolve around infinitely more obvious symbolism; a heart in a film about the nuances of love and the nature of souls. Even the obscure title is expained at the end of the movie, flying in the face of the discourse on the title Amores Perros.  Don’t mistake me: 21 Grams is a well-crafted (melo)drama in its own right. That being said, I would be surprised to hear an average American middle-classer espousing the same comfortable reaction to it as our Mexican counterparts did with Amores Perros. I argue that it was packaged to weed out all but the cinephile set, in a manner exactly contrary to the Mexican release of Amores Perros. This makes me feel like somewhere along the lines, someone between Inarritu and the American distribution system lost faith in Joe Moviegoer.