Thirty-five. That is the approximate number of times I bellowed the
usual two-word, seven- letter refrain at the screen while watching this
abomination of cinema. That would bring the total number of instances
I've bellowed this phrase at a movie to perhaps forty.

Every other movie I've ever seen is a better movie than 'Amelie', but
it will appeal very well to people who'd rather live in a different
universe. It picks up real, living humans and uses them like toys, like
terminally uninformed parodies of humanity. It squanders reality. See
that bar-maid there? That actress playing her is probably a fascinating
woman - I'm SURE she's a fascinating woman - people tend heavily to be
fascinating. Sadly though, this cartoon of a movie allows no
manifestation of any side of any of its performers' personalities to
show through at any point. I have never, ever been more infuriated by a
movie. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's previous film was 'Alien: Resurrection',
which goes part-way, but not all the way, in explaining how this movie
is as bad as it is.

Although there is ever so much more to be said, that's about all I'm
going to say about 'Amelie'. I'd like to tell you that this is because
the film's Hadesian wretchedness is beyond my ability to properly
describe, but that would constitute a falsehood on the scale of
'Amelie'. The truth is that I am dismayed by the idea of exerting any
more mental energy contemplating this grotesque puppet show. That the
film receives such unbroken acclaim is a dreary testament to the desire
of so very many people to escape from any form of recognizable life.
For Jean-Pierre Jeunet to spit in my face would be so much kinder than
what he did to me by making this movie it would constitute an
atonement.

(Note: Buried in the film's sound-track is one of the greatest songs
I've ever heard; a version of 'Guilty' sung by Albert Bowlly in 1931.
An acquaintance haplessly gave this film to me, and afterwards I told
her that, although it was the single most detestable film I'd ever
seen, without it I'd surely have gone the rest of my days without
having heard that sublime melody, and was grateful to her. My
relationship with that song will end only at the hour of my death,
unlike my relationship with this film and its director, which
terminates with the completion of this sentence.)

This is an offensively inept, amateur film with its heart in the right place. So many casual movie-goers like submediocre films like this because they're the kind of movies they'd direct themselves if they were into movies to any substantial degree, which they're not. This movie repeatedly left me dumbfounded and irate with its boundless inanity, its preadolescent writing, its loathsome attempts at humor.

Despite having made this crater of a film, Tommy Lee Jones is and will continue to be a great actor and a fascinating man; this movie's spectacular awfulness falls several feet short of unforgivable.

I've never before been bored by a slow-moving film. Ever so much more weight is put on the horse-head scene than it supports. A husband-wife fight is phoney, weak, amateur and isn't even peanuts compared to any such scene by Scorsese. A curly-haired guy beats a guy up and it looks as fake as the fakest action I've ever seen; it was so bad it was hysterical.

As in the faintly superior sequel, Robert Duvall's role consists almost entirely of standing around looking mildly concerned. Early scenes with Brando are effective enough, but not a whole lot else is. That curly-haired guy gets shot by a whole buncha guys later on and some friends asked me if I understood how and why the ambush happened as though I could possibly care why it happened or who he was. I heard one person complain that the film 'insists on itself', but it seemed to me more like it didn't even care it existed.

At the moment, this movie has nearly five hundred and fifty thousand votes on I.M.D.B., but 'Goodfellas' has only three hundred and twenty-five thousand and 'Casino' barely over a hundred and fifty thousand. Sad. But Francis Ford went on to make an infinitely better film only seven years later, and his daughter an unutterably better one three decades later, and so the Family thrives.

If, in 'Volume 1', Quentin Tarantino made one of the best movies for people who love Japanese grindhouse, then in 'Volume 2' he made one of the best movies for people who love movies. Tarantino is just about the most unerring director I've seen. He has never made a film that was less than Very Good, and 'Kill Bill Vol. 2' is the greatest of all his films to date. This isn't a sequel to 'Vol. 1', as he didn't decide to split 'Kill Bill' up until just after he finished shooting, it's simply the second half. 'Vol. 1' is an excellent, excellent film, but no where in the range of this one. I grin ear-to-ear all the way through this movie.

This is Quentin's most visually beautiful movie yet (and the magnificent opening chapter in the chapel, shot in gleaming black-and-white, is profoundly resplendent, as is the great sequence at Pai Mei's ancient abode, shot in gloriously seventies-style over-saturated greens and glaring whites), and it's where his flair for spaghetti-Westerns comes out the most; the majority of the movie is vintage Wild West. As in all of Tarantino's films, the dialogue is an unadulterated joy, and there's actually relatively little of it here, nearly all of it spoken slowly and ponderously, much of it philosophically, as befits a movie with this Western setting. The way the characters each savor and weigh their words is one of the best aspects of the film; Quentin has never written dialogue as lastingly satisfying as this.

In a beautiful scene that grins at us with delight (as is Tarantino's wont), the Bride tracks down a father-figure of Bill's to learn his location, and he tells her a story about taking him to a movie as a little boy, at which he learned what type of women Bill 'was a fool for', even at that age. We learn from this brief story the fancy Bill always had that first attracted him to the Bride long before the 'Kill Bill' story began. Where so many movies would give us a disturbing childhood story explaining how the villain became that way, Quentin gives us one about a likable, positive trait that reminds us of his humanity, just before our heroine confronts him.

'Vol. 2' is nearly his least violent film yet, and I've read both the original script and David Carradine's 'The Kill Bill Diaries', about all he saw of the making of the movies, and it's clear that many of Quentin's best decisions had to do with diminishing or removing the action. In place of the more obvious strategy of showing us a detailed sequence of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad gruesomely gunning down the people in the chapel, he decided no, pull back and let us just listen to a brief event from a distance, observing it in a kind of silhouette. And in place of Bill firing a warning shot at the Bride and holding her at gun-point while she walks towards a couch to seat herself, he decided Bill simply regards her casually, his pistol just visible at his waist, of which they are both aware. In the earlier idea, all suspense would have been spent with the warning shot. When Bill relates the tale of Pai Mei to the Bride, he decided it would be more effective to let us use our imaginations while listening to Bill's ponderous speech by the camp-fire in the dark than to play seventies Kung Fu footage of Pai Mei in action over the monologue.

The first time I saw the movie, the first big thing that struck me was Budd, one of the Bride's three remaining targets. His is a great and tragic character, and Michael Madsen is a great actor. His performance begins in a singularly perfect scene with Carradine which shows us his indifference to, and acceptance of, his approaching probable demise. And for a long stretch the Bride is forgotten, and we simply follow Budd into the lonely strip club he tends bar at, getting a taste of what his existence has become, of his disappointment and withdrawal from life (the scene where he argues with his boss Larry and finally relinquishes both his hat and his pride is worthy of applause). Every time I watch the scene of the Bride's sneak-attack on him, I am more amazed by how exquisitely constructed the whole sequence is. A long, meticulous build-up ending in unexpected truncation is a trade-mark of Quentin's, in activity as well as dialogue. What Budd does with the Bride is endlessly fascinating to me in its brilliant, terrifying, primeval simplicity. This is the stuff of great myths.

A while ago I realized I can't truly cherish movies, even great ones, that zip right along, whose scenes each seem to exist mostly to set the next scene up. 'Vol. 2', and for that matter, all of Quentin's movies, allow us to inhabit its scenes' settings, their situations, their characters, their moods. The scenes in this movie are each genuine, distinct places to me. Discussing his 'Jackie Brown', Tarantino said that for a film to last beyond its theatrical run, its scenes need to have substance in themselves and can't only be about that specific film's plot, as you pretty much get that the first time around. He said people often wonder why 'Jackie' has so many 'hang-around' scenes, in which the characters just hang around and talk to each other - scenes about the characters, about great dialogue. He believes those are crucial in bringing people back to a film for the sixth, the seventh, the fiftieth times. What happens when Elle visits Budd when all seems to be finished? They hang out for a while. What basically happens for most of the Bride's stay at Bill's residence? They hang out.

In the last chapter the tone of the film changes from the grandiose, Tarantinian adventure of the first four chapters - in which almost godlike characters imprison, and barter, and betray, and apprentice, and battle each other, and do great deeds, and in which much depends on who possesses the Bride's unequalled Hanzo sword - and settles into an intimate dialogue between the story's two central characters (and one other, for a time), in which Quentin subtly and expertly simmers the tension and danger that exists between these two supremely deadly assassins. This section of the film is in keeping with an other trade-mark of Quentin's, that of inserting elements of simplest, uttermost reality into an over-the-top, epic story. With Quentin's help, David Carradine produced a deliriously great performance in this film, as a man who is possibly even more laid-back than Carradine was himself, but who can be deeply, genuinely menacing. In the last chapter, he delivers two of the movie's best speeches, one about the death of a goldfish, the other about his favorite superhero.

'Kill Bill Vol. 2' is the most joyful, the most exciting, the most glorious celebration of the cinema I've ever seen. It is Tarantino's deepest and most emotionally powerful film by far (and the often over-looked sequence of the Bride slowly preparing herself before leaving a bed-room to face Bill is one of the very best in the film) and during an autoexcavation it has one of the very best uses of music I've heard in a movie. The climax of the Bride's raggedly magnificent confrontation with her wicked rival Elle evokes in me the emotion of sheer love. And the scene of the Bride's triumph over the designs of Budd has become one of my central images of the cinema. This film is a human object and it radiates its director's signature passion and love of the movies. Roger Ebert once said that 'The Third Man' is 'the film that most perfectly embodies the romance of going to the movies', or it is for him at least. For me, it's this one.

Terrence Malick's fifth film is a grand victory of human awareness and stands among the broadest and greatest of all films. It explores human experience from the inside, from within its characters' thoughts and sensations. Malick identifies its protagonist as its viewer and assembles a multitude of brief impressions of astounding vividness to act as an analogue of our own collection of memories. Roger Ebert wrote of Charlie Kaufman's great 'Synecdoche New York',

'For thousands of years, fiction made no room for characters who changed. Men felt the need for an explanation of their baffling existence, created gods, and projected onto them the solutions for their enigmas. These gods of course had to be immutable, for they stood above the foibles of men. Zeus was Zeus and Apollo was Apollo and that was that. We envisioned them on mountaintops, where they were little given to introspection. We took the situation as given, did our best, created arts that were always abstractions in the sense that they existed outside ourselves. Harold Bloom believes Shakespeare introduced the human personality into fiction. When Richard III looked in the mirror and asked himself what role he should play, and Hamlet asked the fundamental question To be, or not to be, the first shoe was dropped, and "Synecdoche" and many other works have dropped the second shoe.'

'The Tree of Life' is an other of the greatest of these works. As the years pass, our films seem to be moving deeper and deeper inward. This film attempts to be a mirror. It shows us a life such as our own and asks us to discern what is important in a life, what is good, what is lasting; and what is meaningless noise, what does not last. Kaufman's film also explored the human experience in an unconventional way, but while it had very little compassion and was devoid of wonder, Malick's film possesses those qualities and others in rich abundance.

One the main objects of this film is to evoke the early experiences and impressions of a human life, spanning about a decade. And one of its most masterful sections is the one dealing with the first three years or so. The many brief images and events we see delineate a typical landscape of early memories; we're delighted by the colorful bubbles we blow. A child with a grotesque Halloween mask. Our mother dances with us and we love her. That chair just moved by itself, didn't it? A scary dog barks at us and we stay behind our mother. A new baby, what does it do? We dream of the strange triangular room in the attic we went up in once or twice. Night after night our mother kisses us and turns out the lamp and this is the way our life passes. A glow seems to surround all things. I don't doubt nearly all of us could construct a similar sequence from our own memories (Dressing me in the morning, my father says, 'Up-a-sky!', throwing his arms upward. I raise mine in response, beaming back at him with delight - his and mine - as my night-shirt is swished off me).

As we grow older and more aware, as the script says, 'Gradually, the subtle radiance passes from things, as though a layer of cloud had come up over the sun. Slowly as the dawn, the boy is growing up.' We begin to see bad things, sad things. Why does that man walk funny? Will our mother have to look as old as grandma does some day? Later, these things seem to be present in many places, or most. What did that man do to go to jail? Could it happen to us? Then we even find it in ourselves; we disobey our mother even though we love her, and we don't know why! We can't resist playing mean tricks on our little brother, dangerous dares. What did we do? Why aren't things the way they used to be? 'How do I get back?'

Malick had his current style of film-making basically set since his third film, 'The Thin Red Line', but there its greatness was constrained by particularities of the project: its protagonist's wonderings did not feel genuine, its original score was unsatisfactory (my advice to film-makers: Most, to nearly all of the time, use preexisting music, or don't use any), multiple tiny roles filled by distractingly famous actors, and other problems. In his next film, the excellent 'The New World', most of those problems were absent, although, like 'Thin Red Line', it still took place within a historical event it was constrained to tell and to serve. But here Malick has broken free of all that, has no one's story to tell but his own, and applies his poetic technique with complete freedom to the life of this common suburban family (and many other things). One of the most important parts of making books or movies is knowing your subject and its details cold. Setting 'Tree of Life' in the same environment and time Malick himself grew up in, he holds all the cards here too for the first time. He soars where before he could only leap.

I love, love, love the way Malick makes movies. He spurns artificial light, films his actors constantly (even when they don't know it), foreswears story-boards, always seeks to captivate fleeting, chance moments; a butterfly alighting on Mrs. O'Brien's hand, thunder flashing in the skies before Pocahontas, an inquisitive baby giving John Smith a kiss. He films and edits what ever and how ever he wants; what ever feels right, what ever is beautiful. He loves open fields, tall grass. He loves twilight and dusk. He loves water. He loves Sol, loves its light shining among plants, among people. He loves flocks of birds, hands holding hands, heads turned upward. He loves things that glow. He nearly always shoots manually; his camera is free. It swings and flutters about Smith and Pocahontas as they hold each other, smiling. It runs joyously through a forest, peering upward and making Sol beam and dance among the branches and leaves. I am so very grateful there exists such a film-maker as him.

Now, the degree to which there are 'good' actors and 'bad' actors is much exaggerated; actors are basically as good as the script is and the director allows or coaxes them to be. But there are actors who simply ARE the characters they play; who fit them like a glove. Brad Pitt has worked perfectly well in many roles; I should note he does not fit the over-bearing, mood-shifting Mr. O'Brien seamlessly. We're aware every moment that we're watching Brad Pitt playing this character. In a way, the softness his acting produces between himself and his often harsh character may be in keeping with the film's gentle feel. I don't know. I learn that Heath Ledger was originally intended to play the part. I think he would have been just about the perfect fit; not as bright-eyed a man as Pitt, excellent at conveying a certain muddle-mindedness. Look at his character in 'Brokeback Mountain', in which he had children too. Think of how he might have raised sons if he had been more of a family man and you pretty much have the character right there, accent and insufficient love for his wife and all. But so it goes.

Mr. O'Brien is a remnant of a past age in which men lived by their toughness, by their ability to control, to discipline, to command. He raises his sons the way his instincts dictate him to, the way his line has succeeded. But our genes can linger far longer than the conditions which bred them, and a boy need no longer be taught in such detail how best to fight back if he is hit. 'If he blinks, crack 'im!' This generates hype and a sense of moral importance on an event which will not likely ever come (and certainly their father's attempted training sessions only disturbs the boys). In the script, driving by a team of disheveled men digging a ditch in a poor part of the town, their father advises them: 'See those people. Somebody got the upper hand with them. Don't let it happen to you. You've got to get ahead of the other guy. He'll be doing all he can to do the same to you.' And later, 'If you're good, people take advantage of you. Think of yourself as someone caught behind enemy lines. Work! Fight! I see you wasting your time -- staring out the window -- playing! I make sacrifices for you. You honor those sacrifices by what you do. That's how a family works.' His mind is every where at once, among other, worse problems. Malick describes him early in the script: 'His boys regard him warily. His sharp, sarcastic words, and orders so irrational he hardly expects that they will be obeyed. He never asks what they did at school. He does not know the names of their friends. Were he to inquire, they would suspect it was a trap.' 'He has the unshakable belief that he must approve or modify everything the children do. He is full of petty and exasperating cautions.'

It's obvious (especially in the script) that this man grew up instilled with the sense that he would become a great leader of men, but as this didn't happen to much of a degree, he begins ventilating this life-long desire to command and discipline onto his family. Not smart. By making them tend the minutiae of the yard's crab grass and other botany, he seems to think he's cultivating a healthy, moral sense of obedience and diligence in them, when it serves only to alienate him from his sons and cause them hours of misery. For each ounce of obedience he gains from them, he loses a pound of their love. He endlessly goes over the fine points life, or at least his life; things that might have some meaning to men his age, but are little more than strange noise for his young boys. 'Twenty-seven patents, your father has. That means ownership. Ownership of ideas.' After R.L., the second son, asks if a friend can come over and his father turns him down, he explains in the script, 'Your mother's from a farm family. Irish. They had people down from Chicago every weekend. That's why they never got the weeds out of their fields. The Norwegians would drive by and laugh!' He also has a temper, and 'introspection' is a word entirely alien to him. But he's not quite all bad. Now and then he is at peace and plays his piano at home as well as in church, and his boys feel love for him and wonder at his unfixed personality. In one of the film's sweetest moments, R.L. joins in with his guitar while his father plays Couperin's 'Les Baricades Misterieuses' (surely one of the best songs ever composed, and which is used to devastating effect no less than thrice in the film). Malick knows this character so very thoroughly; was his own father such a man?

Oh dear. Sean Penn. Poor Sean Penn. He costarred in an other of the greatest films I've seen, Tim Robbins' 'Dead Man Walking', and was so perfect as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's 'Milk', that I have, at times, passed pictures of the real Harvey and temporarily failed to mentally differentiate between the two men. Penn called Malick's script the most magnificent one he'd ever read, but was disappointed and a bit confused by the filmed result, and that his own small role ended up being essentially one of a figure rather than a character (and alas for Penn, since his first film, 'Badlands', of nearly four decades before, Malick has not made actor's films). It's true that the script was clearer about several things, especially Penn's character's existence in the city: 'The others do not meet his eyes. Each makes his way alone, shut up within himself. None can be sure of the other. No tie is fixed or lasting.' 'The supreme misery:... to find oneself abandoned to the busy dance of things which pass away.' My guess is it's one of the best things ever written, and much less a movie script than a poetic story, stunningly beautiful, unbelievably vivid in its descriptions of places and experiences. But many of its ideas would be impossible to communicate in film, and ultimately the best medium for the script, as it was in that form, was the written word. I would console him by saying the film has a power very few have ever achieved, and an effect no other has.

With his use of Zbigniew Preisner's 'Lacrimosa', Malick has produced the modern answer to Kubrick's use of 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' in '2001' and, for my money, trumped it as an iconic stellar theme. Their effects are almost opposite: while Kubrick used Strauss' profound and rather simple theme to signify his (very, very far from humble) idea of humanity's ascension in the universe, Malick's use of Preisner's requiem of immense, tragic loveliness evokes the defeating vastness of the realms of fire and gas in size and in age and in beauty, and impresses on us that we and all the lives it holds are lost in it and obscured.

There doesn't seem to be any beginning or end of existence, nor a smallest scale of matter, or largest. Multitudes live among the immensity of a single leg of a mite, the keys I type these words on are uneven plateaus gigamiles across. A galaxy is a twisting amoebic mote, stars are searing subatomic particles and my neighbor's welcome mat is more vast than all the wastes of Mars. I set a glass of milk on a table, and there it will stay with all the worlds it contains for a million aeons before I pick it up again. In our search through the inward planes, we now find within the realm of orbiting spheres to exist a landscape of webbed and dancing strings. This will never end. And all the matter we have perceived is a little explosion whose trifling cause we can not see, whose flying sparks will in an instant fade and turn to lifeless smoke, perhaps to be dispersed by a wind or to sink into an earth, forgotten or unseen. It does not end, it only continues. We live in infinity and eternity. But the film shows us with humbling beauty what little we know of outward realms, and of the history of the continual rearrangement of matter, and gives context of the O'Brien family's existence; the cauldron that will become their world, the microbes they will descend from, the calamity that will allow their species to thrive and, later, the expansion of the star that will devour their planet in the unimaginable aeons to come.

A few silly people inform us that Malick's acceptance of scientific models of the formation of our universe, of Earth and its biology, conflicts with his at least semibiblical spirituality (he opens the film with scripture and refers to it a number of times, among other examples, and he is as interested in the birth of a soul as of a world), because it contradicts all that the creationists say. Malick, I'm sure, could scarcely care less about the current fancies of that endless debate. He knows that scientists do not spend their years making up malicious lies, and he also obviously feels a silent goodness in the universe. Says Jack the script: 'You whom we met in the woods and on the hills, whom first in her eyes we knew -- how shall I name you?' In 'The New World', Pocahontas speaks to it in the same fashion: 'Dear Mother, you fill the land with your beauty. You reach to the end of the world. How shall I seek you?' Around me I hear religious people confiding to each other that their god feels more present to them when they walk through woods, when they see and do beautiful things, than when reading their holy book. My mother tells me she felt this goodness touch her one night as she sat quietly holding one of her newly born children.

Those who search eventually find the word 'god' to be an ancient verb meaning 'to call out to'. This is exactly what Malick's characters do, although they never once use the word in direct address of the presence they speak to. Kneeling at the foot of his bed, young Jack goes through his prayers as he's been taught to, but we hear his true thoughts running underneath. 'I wanna see what you see.' Malick's main characters tend to have, deep down, the advantage of a rare freedom from established theology; a freedom to directly question their gods, not only request of or thank them (I must confess I lacked this freedom at his age and didn't look beyond my considered prayers). 'You let a boy die. You let any thing happen. Why should I be good if you're not?'

I suppose any established theistic religion tends to forget the idea of such questions, as they seem to go for ever unanswered, and focus on established assumptions. Malick, though, does a thing that few people have had the courage to do in perhaps a very, very long time by renewing those questions, insisting on them; by once more crying out to the powers that may or may not be. 'What are we to you? Answer me.' And perhaps, at times, answers are not wholely absent. Near the end of 'The New World', chasing her little son through a garden in England, feeling peace at last, Pocahontas seems to find one. 'Mother. Now I know where you live.'

Terrence Malick is the great poet of the cinema, and 'The Tree of Life' may remain his greatest poem. It is, among so many other things, the ultimate family movie. It radiates a holiness of family, draws us closer to those we love most. The over-arching tale of 'The Tree of Life' is simple: A man is lost amid a perplexing life lacking purpose and joy. The tale opens in brokenness as he and his mother and father mourn the loss of his younger brother, the kindest and gentlest of the three sons. Seeking a way from his meaningless toil, a way back to the Eden he once knew, he lays his hand on a tree and witnesses the past and future of himself and of all existence pass before him. Jack - and we, the viewers - begin a search for meaning, for that which is lasting, holy.

I am stunned to learn that Malick himself lost his own younger brother as a young man, for which he largely blames himself, and has borne that guilt and grief for the rest of his life. This explains so much about his films - this one above all - and the depth, meaning and power of it are made so much more profound by this knowledge. 'The Tree of Life' is the product of a tortured man, and what we see in it is not only his philosophical message, but is from his own wounded heart. His own pain is present. We are told artists must suffer for their art, and here Terrence Malick, in his anguish for his little brother he's carried since the late sixties, has made a film which stands among the greatest and most essential of all human art. Jack's vision of the after-life is also more clear in this light; what Malick shows us is not only his belief, but is deeply personally important to him. It is his consolation, his hope.

Above all, the film is wondrous. It instills us with its wonder, its awe of all things, and helps us to better appreciate beauty and goodness when it passes before us; to hold on to it, how ever small or brief. There's a moment in the film that moves me more than film has ever before moved me. One morning, when the boys wake to find their father has gone on a trip, and they're free to romp in the house and tease their mother with a lizard and for once life is as it ought be with them, they run outside laughing with her as 'Les Baricades Misterieuses' plays, and we hear the mother's prayer for her children - for all that live. 'Help each other. Love every one. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.'

Oh, there is so very much to be LEARNED from this film! Thomas Balmes' 'Babies' is a movie to sink our minds into, to conjure our oldest memories and recall the sensations of our earliest experiences and emotions. And all without the enormous distraction of superfluous commentary by any of the Famouser of the Famous And Exceedingly Well Established Celebrities With Voices Which Are Either British Or Deep Or Both. I will also go on record as saying it has the best and most refreshing genetic mix for a cast I've ever seen: Two parts Mongoloid (Bayarjargal of Mongolia and Mari of Japan), one part Marronoid (Ponijao of Namibia) and one part Claroid (Hattie, from the U.S.); Hollywood film-makers, for the love of all that is good and holy, take note of these exquisite proportions!

The film moves the way babies experience reality: No scene holds memory or flow from the one which precedes it, nor guesses any portent of its successor. Each scene is happening, then each following scene is happening. Just as each moment, each event, each new object or predicament is the whole of existence for an infant. Now Ponijoa's mother is covering his shaven head in red paint; now Bayarjargal is trying to grab onto those odd things at the ends of his legs; now his older brother of two or three years is accosting him with a small pastry, to his bewilderment and dismay. (This older brother, as we'll see, seems to have rather a tendency towards sadistic trouble-making; P.E.T.A. could go after the little guy if he doesn't mend his ways with cats.) Several such situations we see in the film reminded me of the bloody-mindedness we have in babyhood: 'Yes, I KNOW what I'm doing is making him upset, I KNOW what I'm doing is bad, but I AM going to keep doing it because I HAVE to know what'll happen if I do!' At that age, we have an instinctive need to know how far we can go before the big people interfere with our will.

Watching this movie, I have to keep reminding myself that cuteness is an emergent quality, not an absolute one; a thing to be perceived, even if it doesn't strictly exist. We think of babies as silly, adorable, cartoonish, free of reason, and as existing only in relation to those they depend on. When in reality these little people have brains in their heads that are as mercilessly logical as any robot, diligently at work establishing the boundaries, the textures, the possibilities, the behavior, the structure of their environment and all things in it, and the capabilities of these odd forms they control. When a small child retreats fearfully from an advancing duck to cling to its father, it is following strict logic; ducks could very well be the terrors of the earth for all the data the child has on them. When the excellent author and conservationist Douglas Adams visited apes in Africa, he saw two young children in a family dancing wildly on the branch of a tree several feet above the ground. He was sure there was no way they could keep that up for long, and sure enough, they both came tumbling down a moment later, wiser young apes now than they were. One of my very first memories is of the day I learned that if you ran at a glass door, it wouldn't shatter, but if you ran at a glass door HARD, it would. We see these four babies learn many things in this film.

Ponijao is in the most relaxed environment. He and the people surrounding him spend most of their time lounging in their huts or out on the ground, the women talking casually and easily with each other (I'm reminded that warm climates tend to loosen people up, their personalities relaxing along with their posture and accents, while people usually learn to chat no more than necessary in cold places), shaving their children's heads, painting them, braiding the hair of the older children, surrounded by flies that don't seem to bother them at all. He drinks from a stream just barely above the sand it runs along, in his hut at night he tries valiantly to stay awake for, apparently, only the principal of the thing. Yes, his entourage and he are very much at ease, but we don't see his father at all - or any of the men-folk - who are presumably quite busy out providing for them all. For that matter, only very briefly near the beginning do we see a young man who is probably Bayarjargal's father.

Roger Ebert, the best film critic, says, 'Two of the babies come from poor parts of the world, and two from rich. They seem equally happy and healthy.' Actually that's not quite right. Again, Ponijao is the most genial, and we almost never see him unhappy. And from the footage we see at least, Bayarjargal is by far the one about whose infancy Heaven lays most, surrounded by his family's cows and other ungulates, free to roam the idyllic and seemingly endless grass-land around his family's yurt, which is reached, of course, by motorcycle or by jeep in this blessed region devoid of roads. (Mongolia, we recall, is officially the Awesomest Country on the Planet. If you'd like to see more of this magnificent life-style, I recommend Sergei Dvortsevoy's excellent deadpan Kazakhstani comedy 'Tulpan', made the same time 'Babies' was.) And the two rural boys are well on their way to being much fitter, healthier and more active than the two city-girls. I also think we see a bit more footage from the two rural areas than we do from Tokyo and San Francisco, and although Tokyo is my favorite place in the universe, I guess it's too bad that the two little citizens don't seem to get into many adventures.

We are informed by the consensus at rottentomatoes.com that this film is 'loaded with adorable images, but lacks insight and depth.' I'm at rather a loss to know whether we're to understand from this that people are actually baffled by the behavior of these babies and want it explained to them fully, or whether the people at rottentomatoes.com have a particularly clear idea of what insight and depth would constitute in the case of a film like this. Raw information is beyond insight, wholely apart from depth or shallowness. If we had been told, as Bayarjargal tips over the stroller he's in, that 'Babies have accidents now and then', would the film have been better or worse for it? What words of revelation could possibly be added as we first see the babies stand? Now, Hattie eventually starts using the usual first few English words, and I caught Mari beginning to use fragments of Japanese. But if there are any remotely enlightening things to say about this development, they are best kept in lengthy neurological research lectures, not so much in movie theatres. An atrocious critic whom I'll do the immense and undeserved favor of not naming said of 'Babies', 'This isn't a movie. It's a screen[-]saver.' If this film's a screen-saver, then so is the entirety of existence.

By now I'm pretty convinced that, in all our lives, we never know joy and contentment as absolute, or terror, misery and sorrow as utter, as we do in our first few years. When we were happy, we had found a thing that we knew would continue making us happy for all eternity, and when we were miserable, we knew the universe had gone horribly wrong and would never, ever be fixed. There's a scene where it dawns on Mari, amid playing with her toys, that they've lost their magic and will never, ever again make her happy, nor will any thing else. She weeps and tosses the useless things away, then commences writhing on the floor in unquenchable despair. She spots a children's book and calms herself briefly, remembering the magic it had before, but as soon as she opens it, she sees the sacred flame has forsaken its pages as well, and throws herself to the floor again, trapped in a world now devoid of any further wonder, and all the universe exists in vain. This is one experience that doesn't quite disappear no matter how old we get. We can have all the things we could ever want, and then still abruptly find our cup quite empty. 'The truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies'.

Watching all the shots of the babies nursing their mothers, I'm ever surer of my theory that one of the fundamental reasons we all need some body to love is that we need one whose face and form we can know as intimately as we did our mother's (and our father's, to a lesser degree). One we can embrace and hold as we did our mother, our uttermost home, in whose arms we turned inward from the bewildering outer world and rested, and had all we needed. We knew our mother as a form to hold and take our sustenance from before we knew her as a person. We learned her shape with our arms and hands before we learned it with our eyes. And when we are older and hold one we love, we close our eyes and forget for a moment it is a person we hold, and cling only to that form once again, and speak gently. Again we take refuge from the churning uncertainties that surround us, and have all we need.

This film is really as much about these different societies as it is about babies, and our crud-filled theatres could do with any number of sequels. My suggestions for 'More Babies': Finland, India, Argentina, Egypt.