The Tower of Babble

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.

I was quite impressed with his recent film, "Cry Wolf." I was even more impressed to find that he shot that film from the cash prizes and grants that he collected for the awesome short film, "Tower" which can be seen on the UNRATED DVD edition of "Wolf." I have not seen such great casting, plot arcing, and direction in years. Look for WADLOW (and his talented friends back at the film school) to be a blockbuster name(s) in a few years! Keep in mind this is the same film school where Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg first cut film--together.

PS: Nice job on Ms. Booth--she is a rare find and this director gave her a great spotlight.

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!

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!!

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.