New Category: [Insert Name] Should Totally Sue (Haneke vs. Inarritu)

I find myself saying that someone or the other should totally sue more and more these days - I just said it yesterday about Takashi Miike and the makers of the latest (YAWN) Batman (question: when was the last time anyone saw a Batman movie? I heard the last one was good, and it had Christian Bale in it, and it had Cillian Murphy in it, AND Christopher Nolan directed it, yet you could nothave paid me to go see it. Why is that? I really like all those people - Cillian Murphy least of all because he looked really hot in 28 Days Later and then proceeded to look like a girl in everything thereafter. Gael Garcia Bernal don't pull that shit). I digress (SHOCKINGLY!).

So here I am at 6:27 am (thanks for the insomnia, Wellbutrin. I think this shit works by giving you a sense of accomplishment. I am awake so much more these days that I get a lot done and hence feel good, even when I probably actually don't. It does something like this: "Gee, don't feel bad - you're awesome! It's only 6:30 am and you already watched a Michael Haneke movie!") and I already have someone in mind who should totally sue. Michael Haneke should totally sue Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. I just finished watching "Code Unknown" (I was serious about already watching a Michael Haneke movie today) and Inarritu SO ripped that movie off with "Babel." It's the same movie except done with actual finesse and class, as opposed to beating you over the head with a sledgehammer. The only redeeming quality in Babel - aside from one or two of the performances (I did like Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barazza), athe hot Japanese detective, and Gael Garcia Bernal as a totally hot drunk driving cholo with an awesome mustache - was what I perceived to be the semi-originality of the theme of an increasingly globalized world in which we are, ironically, becoming more and more isolated and fractured. I liked how he used language as a metaphor for our inabilities to understand one another. It was a cool postmodern riff on everything being relative.

Turns out Michael Haneke had the same idea. And did it a million times better. Six years earlier! (The fact that he did it pre-September 11 is even cooler, since this whole rash of "oh we are all connected but so alone and let's convey that by ripping off Altman!" movies are always seen as being emblmatic of the post-9/11 world - ie, a new age of abject horror has been ushered in. I have news for these filmmakers and cultural critics: Abject horror has been around for a while. Just ask the people from The Dark Ages.) Haneke manages to do the interwoven/intersecting lives thing without it seeming totally contrived, ala Crash and Babel (and let's not forget the original somewhat-botched Altman tribute, Pulp Fiction,, which has A LOT to answer for - at least Tarantino was doing it purely to entertain - succesfully - and not to make some labored point about the frailty of the human condition). The characters in Code Unknown cross in that they have some interaction at some point and then see each other again, or cross in the same frame without seeing each other, and that is pretty much it as far as the interconnectedness goes. Anyone who has ever lived in a big city where you walk evrywhere knows this is not only plausible but accurate - when I lived in NYC and London, I had random strangers I had seen so many times that I had made up names for them (eg "Tall French hippie"). In Babel, the interconnectedness is a totally false plot devise designed to exacerbate the emotion of already overwraught Shakespearean tragedy. This is true of Amores Perros (which I liked, actually - admittedly I should see it again as the main reason for my liking it was being struck by cupid's arrow in the form of the twice-aforementioned Gael Garcia Bernal), Crash, and 21 Grams, too, but I'm focusing on Babel here because the similarities go so much further.

The language theme - for heaven's sake, deaf children are even used as a metaphor to convey our inability to understand people outside of our immediate circle! The beleagured immigrant - the Roumanian woman in Code Unknown is beyond heartbreaking. In Inarritu's hands, the desperation of the immigrant experience is conveyed via a plotline that penultimately gives us a woman and two children wandering through the dessert at death's door, the woman paying the price for wanting one tiny thing for herself in the face of her self-absorbed employers. Meanwhile, Haneke gives us a woman who breaks down as she tells a friend that she once washed her hands after giving money to a dirty gypsy, yet that day, a man had been about to give her 20 francs when he looked at her hand and instead threw the money in her lap. Sorry, but the former is heavy-handed and abusive of the audience as we can't relate to it and hence feel really guilty, plus it's pretty implausible, while the latter is so fucking human and heartbreaking because we have felt exactly what she feels. We've all been the repulsed and the repulsive, and we've all felt like shit in both cases.

I am becoming too irritated to write any mre about this. Suffice to say, if you have not seen Code Unknown, do. If you have not seen Babel, good job! Although that mustache is pretty fly...