February 23, 2003
I just saw a movie
I just saw a movie entitled Baraka. It's difficult to describe; it's kind of about everything. There are no actors, no lines; just images and a soundtrack. The movie shows a little bit of all aspects of human life and the planet we live on. How we pray, how we eat, how we wage war. A bit of focus on usually-ignored consequences of certain things. It imparts a sense of proportion; we live in this little corner of the world and all our friends lead lives more or less like our own (even the ones that we think of as completely different). But in the grand scheme of things, there's a lot of diversity on the planet, and this movie shows it off. You might think of it as giving time to peoples according to their size: American scenes made up just a few minutes of the movie, while scenes of India and China took perhaps fifteen minutes each. The range of topics it hits is huge.
While it occasionally starts to drag here and there (especially at the end), this movie is surprisingly riveting. This is one of the few movies I've seen where I wish they'd made it for IMAX---and actually, the credits said (part of?) it was filmed in 70mm, so it's not even impossible that they could make an IMAX version. In any case, IMAX or not, seek this movie out. It's worth seeing.
"I'm told that I should never attribute to malice what incompetence will
explain, but I'm fairly sure that both are in great supply at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue these days." --Michael Kimmitt
Posted
by blahedo
at 2:03am
on 23 Feb 2003
