The Tower of Babble

We've just recently started watching shorts, and "Tower of Babble" was a wonderful introduction. Absolutely one of the most clever, original, interesting ideas I've seen in film in a very long time.

Terrific cast, with Kevin Spacey doing some excellent narration at the beginning and end.

Currently (August 2003, USA) showing on Sundance; tape it to view again and again!

After having watched the absolutely worthless faux-horror movie Cry_Wolf by the director of this short, none of us who saw it had any high hopes for this, which is included as an extra on the DVD along with another shot by the director.

However, this short is quite entertaining and clever!

The bizarre framing device, narrated by Kevin Spacey, involves the proverbial roomful of monkeys at typewriters. Several different story lines then begin, with the same dialogue being repeated in each of them by different people in different contexts. Inevitably, the story lines begin to intertwine.

"Oh my God!" says the woman who finds herself pregnant. "Oh my God!" says the horny virgin, finding an adult ad he likes, and so on. At times, however, entire exchanges of dialogue repeat themselves in the different scenes. I think that could have been tricky to come up with a script in which that would work, and have it still work when shot, but it did.

I was reminded a bit of the assignment the TV show Project Greenlight gives prospective directors. They had given a script with dialogue that didn't make a whole lot of sense without context, and the directors had to shoot something using that dialogue which would give some meaning to it.

Anyway, while I can't recommend Cry_Wolf at all, the two shorts on its DVD are worth checking out, should you get the chance.

This is a truly great short film. A love story, a police drama, and a "first time" comedy all juxtaposed using the same dialogue, but with much much different connotations. Within 20 minutes, the film takes you through a wide range of emotions with characters that you amazingly identify with.

Greetings from Tucson, me and my actor (Layton Matthews) would like to express our respect to Jeff Wadlow for such an outstanding job. Although our film Liberata Me was in the same film festival competing under you, we are rooting for you. We feel you deserve the award!

Hey, the great thing about your film is, we don't feel embarrassed to lose against you! Respects from your peers in the industry!!

This film has some clever ideas going for it: the idea of using the same conversation in three different scenarios with three different sets of people is an interesting concept, but unfortunately it is not realised effectively. It seems as if the writer has written the conversation for one of the strands first and has clumsily tried to fit them into the other sections unsuccessfully.

I also think that using the 'infinite monkey theory' to bind this story together is a very confusing concept, given that it is only given a small amount of screen time and is barely referred to or acknowledged in the rest of the film. It also doesn't help that the three sections all contain tired,overused clichés.

There are some good ideas, but incredibly poorly executed.