But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God
At home over Break, we rented Babel, the big Brad Pitt hit of the year that wasn’t really about Brad Pitt & actually wasn’t much of a hit (Oscars, what?). I thought it was all right, but that the entire deaf/mute/horny Japanese teenager plotline was one of the stupidest stories I had seen in a film in a long, long time. That isn’t the point. The point is that reading the back of the DVD case (as most of us are apt to do, I’m certain of it) brought to my attention a quote from a review by acclaimed Rolling Stone film reviewer, Peter Travers. The quote chosen to represent Babel was thus:
A towering achievement…
…a towering achievement. The point-blank Biblical reference made me smile, not because I thought Travers was a wordsmith (searching Google for “towering achievement + Babel” even shows that this was probably the most used phrase in original reviews of the movie), but because the audacity to use such an overblown, meaningless statement just to make a pun work was laughable. Originality in movie reviews can only go so far – especially when a movie itself lacks originality (which this one only partially did) – but to imagine yer testing the intelligence of a reader comes across as really only testing his patience…& by his I mean mine. I know we only briefly mentioned film reviews last class, but I haven’t been able to get that quote out of my head; its idiocy is a bit haunting. …A towering achievement? What does it mean? Can it mean anything other than empty word play? For a film to achieve “towering” status what does it have to do? Perhaps if the dialogue is especially great then it towers here & there, or maybe the lighting & sound men build up the tower…
The idea of a film review as an outlet for smug nonsense is enough to even bring Brad Pitt to tears.