Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from March, 2011

Biutiful

"It gradually became clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been:  a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir."   By Friedrich Nietzsche's definition, filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu would seem to qualify as a great philosopher of the old school.   In Biutiful , the multiple storylines of his first three features - Amores Perros , 21 Grams and Babel - have essentially been pared down to one.  But the sprawl of events, the thematic weight, the length of those earlier films remains.   Determined though he may be to shine a light on lives in crisis, Mr. Inarritu is perhaps now indulging in some of that unconscious memoir, telling us more about himself than the sorry state of humanity.      In the case, the festivities take place in Barcelona, where a kind of benevolent human trafficker, Uxbal (Javaier Bardem), struggles to take care of his immigrant charges while tending to his children, the latt