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Babel | 
 enlarge | Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Actors: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Mohamed Akhzam, Peter Wight, Harriet Walter
Studio: Paramount
Category: DVD
List Price: $29.99
Buy Used: $1.99
You Save: $28.00 (93%)
New (63) Used (112) Collectible (1) from $1.99
Rating:  373 reviews
Sales Rank: 2735
Format: Ntsc, Widescreen
Languages: Arabic (Original Language), English (Original Language), French (Original Language), Japanese (Original Language), Spanish (Original Language), English (Published)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 143 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: 097363459842
UPC: 097363459842
EAN: 0097363459842
ASIN: B000MCH5P4
Theatrical Release Date: November 10, 2006
Release Date: February 20, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Tragedy strikes a couple vacationing in Morocco which sets off a chain of events linking four groups of people vastly separated by culture and distance.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 31-JUL-2007
Media Type: DVD
Amazon.com
Brilliantly conceived, superbly directed, and beautifully acted, Babel is inarguably one of the best films of 2006. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his co-writer, Guillermo Arriaga (the two also collaborated on Amores Perros and 21 Grams) weave together the disparate strands of their story into a finely hewn fabric by focusing on what appear to be several equally incongruent characters: an American (Brad Pitt) touring Morocco with his wife (Cate Blanchett) become the focus of an international incident also involving a hardscrabble Moroccan farmer (Mustapha Rachidi) struggling to keep his two young sons in line and his family together. A San Diego nanny (Adriana Barraza), her employers absent, makes the disastrous decision to take their kids with her to a wedding in Mexico. And a deaf-mute Japanese teen (the extraordinary Rinko Kikuchi) deals with a relationship with her father (Koji Yakusho) and the world in general that's been upended by the death of her mother. It is perhaps not surprising, or particularly original, that a gun is the device that ties these people together. Yet Babel isn't merely about violence and its tragic consequences. It's about communication, and especially the lack of it--both intercultural, raising issues like terrorism and immigration, and intracultural, as basic as husbands talking to their wives and parents understanding their children. Inarritu's command of his medium, sound and visual alike, is extraordinary; the camera work is by turns kinetic and restrained, the music always well matched to the scenes, the editing deft but not confusing, and the film (which clocks in at a lengthy 143 minutes) is filled with indelible moments. Many of those moments are also pretty stark and grim, and no will claim that all of this leads to a "happy" ending, but there is a sense of reconciliation, perhaps even resolution. "If You Want to be Understood... Listen," goes the tagline. And if you want a movie that will leave you thinking, Babel is it. --Sam Graham Beyond Babel 
Other Interweaving Storylines on DVD | 
Other DVDs by Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu | 
Why We Love Cate Blanchett | Stills from Babel (click for larger image)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 368 more reviews...
 What the hell was that? July 1, 2008
W. W. Sperger (Ithaca, N.Y. USA)
That's 2 hours and 23 minutes that I'll never get back.
Highly overrated and overblown, there are some great scenes and some great acting in this movie, but at the end of the day, you'll be shaking your head.
I especially loathed the story of the deaf-mute Asian girl and her sexual difficulties.
Critics and Amazon scribes fell all over themselves praising this "epic".
Maybe if it was an hour shorter.
I kept wanting to fast-forward.
Cate Blanchett is wasted in this role and to call this Brad Pitt's best performance, is just laughable.
 Bad things happen to stupid people June 8, 2008
Alessandro Abate (Miami, Florida)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This movie is both stupid and pointless. It is one long and dreary series of bad decisions by stupid people. It is sad and depressing for no good reason at all. There is no redeeming value to the pain and misery inflicted on the characters. It isn't worth making or watching a movie merely because the characters in the story suffer. For pointless suffering I can watch the news.
Unless you are a masochist or need to become depressed, don't buy this movie. I am shredding my DVD to make sure it isn't inflicted on anyone else.
 IT'S ONLY ME, BUT: June 1, 2008
Joan M. Mckeown (ontario, canada)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
THEIS FIM COVERS 5 STORIES AT ONCE, ALL GOING ON AT THE SAME TIME. NOT ENOUGH BRAD PITT IN IT. JUMPS AROUND TOO MUCH JM
Beautiful images but CARDBOARD CHARACTERS May 30, 2008
Eduardo Nietzsche (Houston)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I loved Inarritu's first film, "Amor es Perros," not so much his second film, "21 Grams" which seemed overly contrived and relied too much on the non-linear narrative technique derivative of Quentin Tarantino. "Babel" is his third film and continues the downward spiral into ever-greater style-over-substance. It is all about grandiose intentions, gorgeous cinematography and soundtrack, a mediocre mega-star lead actor (Brad Pitt) cast mainly to create more of a mainstream/mass-appeal box office draw, and a generally cliched, heavy-handed and cornily predictable plot built upon a host of mostly two-dimensional characters.
Pitt and Blanchett are the generic spoiled, narcissistic and miserable yuppy Americans who are helpless when calamity strikes them overseas, with two angelic-looking innocent and helpless little kids left back home under the care of an equally angelic and helpless illegal-immigrant Mexican nanny, who stupidly takes them to a wedding party in Tijuana with her crazy nephew (Gabriel Garcia Bernal, whose talent is wasted in a stock role here) driving. Rinko Kikuchi plays a miserably lonely, isolated, and helpless deaf-mute teenager flailing around haplessly in the surreal and soulless landscape of urban Japan. The only truly interesting, authentic, and emotionally involving characters were the Moroccans, in particular the Berber goatherding family whose two young sons initiate the whole movie's plot development through a series of stupid actions that have totally unforseen consequences.
And that, for all the movie's sound and fury, is all that drives this work: the (gasp!) presentation of human life as the outcome of human folly and frailty which, due to our innate interconnectedness on a global and karmic level, like a hair-trigger can set off a flurry of tragic and destructive events, i.e. human suffering. I suppose this might be a GINORMOUS revelation if one spends one's life glued to the boob tube watching "reality TV" shows (perhaps true for the legions of Brad Pitt fans that the casting company was hoping to reel in), but otherwise it's hardly earthshaking news.
However, there are many films with prosaic themes, predictable plotlines and inflated pretentions that can still hold the viewer's interest. "Babel" is not one of those, because it fails to follow the first rule of decent storytelling: create involving CHARACTERS that move the plot, rather than having the PLOT (especially one as didactic as this) move the characters as though in a puppet theater.
It's still not as tedious as "Crash" though, thanks to the cinematography and score. There are clear flashes of Inarritu's considerable directorial talents here and there; let's hope that his next (fourth) film will be worthy of it.
 ALEJANDRO GONZALEZ INARRITU, OPUS 3 May 27, 2008
wdanthemanw (Geneva, Switzerland)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
**** 2006. Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Three prizes in Cannes, one Academy award and Golden Globe in the Best Picture of the year category. Three stories linked by common themes told by the Mexican director who's definitely a first-rate director. With Guillermo Pan's Labyrinth Del Toro, Alfonso Children of Men (Widescreen Edition) Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Mexico is blessed with a new generation of directors who are currently presiding over world cinema. Highly recommended.
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