Babel - Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I really wanted to like this movie, sincerely, I yearned to like it. There are times in one's life when expectation vanishes in a web of despair, and this is one of those times. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette are superb actors, they can successfully weave themselves into other people's footprints and make it believable for the rest of us. The actors are not the problem with this film, the story and the narrative devices used to tell it are the culprits in this tale of global commerce gone awry, and that is just the beginning. The individual stories work well on their own yet are often filled with assumptions and stereotypes that are displayed as caricatures of this ever failing world. Yet where is the commentary? What are we supposed to take away from this movie? What are we listening to? I was intrigued by the Babel correlation and each story is successfull in displaying this link individually, yet the story falls apart when any attempt is made to link them because the pace of the movie does allot time for the stories to find each other. Although I strongly favour the Japanese narrative over the others, the subject matter of the entire picture left me feeling nothing, and that disappoints me greatly.