The Bible gives us the story of the tower of Babel, the magnificently tall structure whose height was deemed offensive and impertinent by God. To punish humanity for its architectural hubris, God then decided to drive a linguistic wedge between the nations of the world, who until then had spoken the same tongue. As fables go, this is a particularly effective one in that it both illustrates a moral — don’t think you’re better than God or you shall be struck down with all speed — and also provides a handy answer to those who wondered why there are so many different languages.

Blanchett plays Susan, a rich California tourist roaming around Morocco with her husband Richard (a pleasantly grizzled Brad Pitt). As their bus wends its way through the mountains, a pair of young shepherds are roaming above, testing a new rifle’s accuracy with the abandon of immature brothers. The tragedy of unintended consequences: in a scene that’s heartstopping for its matter-of-factness, a bullet smacks through the bus window, seriously wounding the sleeping Susan.

This accident ripples out through Babel’s ramshackle quartet of stories, serving as a loose and mostly ineffective linking device that becomes more strained the further the film goes. Richard struggles to find medical care in the remote region for the dying Susan. The shepherd boys are terrified to discover that the shooting has been classified as a terrorist attack by an overeager American embassy, and cops are fanning out through the mountains. Back in America, Richard and Susan’s maid, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), desperate to attend her son’s wedding in Mexico, even though Richard won’t give her time off, ends up taking the two blonde children in her charge (a shy pair played by Nathan Gamble and Dakota Fanning’s younger sister Elle) to the wedding in a car driven by her erratic nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal). And in the film’s most needless addition, set in Tokyo, deaf-mute teenage girl Chieko (the disarming Rinko Kikuchi), indulges in risky, rebellious acting-out while the police keep coming around asking where her father is.

Given the film’s title, language and cultural barriers make up most of its dramatic frisson, with unfortunate misunderstandings providing plenty of weighty tragedy. With all these stories happening more or less simultaneously (the timeline jumps back and forth, for no apparent reason), Iñárritu has a lot of balls to juggle; unfortunately he doesn’t seem to mind letting them fall. The editing has a jarring tendency to cut away from one story just as dramatic tension has begun to build, and so the film piles on incident after incident with little cohesive structure, turning to interminable mush not long after the midway point. Inarritu is more skilled than this — there are some wonderfully observed moments with the shepherds, and the Mexico wedding is just sheer exuberant delight. But these are exceptions, easily outweighed by the aimless drift of most of the film, especially the Tokyo sequence, which is awash in creepy voyeurism and drags on forever before finally clueing us in to how it’s connected to the shooting.

Babel has the material of greatness — vast scope, humane vision, fine actors — but sadly not the ability to make it all into something beyond mildly pretty and pretentious blather. In striving to recreate the chaotic din of a God-cursed global humanity, it succeeds only in making noise.

Arigato!

Tagged as: babel , movie

INDIA’S highest court yesterday demanded that Coca-Cola should reveal its secret formula for the first time in 120 years.
The Supreme Court ordered the US soft drinks maker, along with its rival PepsiCo, to supply details of the chemical composition and ingredients of their products after a study released this week claimed that they contained unacceptable levels of insecticides.
Justice S. B. Sinha and Justice Dalveer Bhandari directed the companies to file their replies within four weeks, the Press Trust of India reported. “If they don’t comply, then the court has the authority to suspend sales,” Shreyas Patel, a lawyer at Fox Mandal Little, India’s oldest law firm, said. “But no one is going to give away a 120-year-old secret, especially in a country like India. Someone would go and make it themselves.”
Coca-Cola’s original recipe, according to company policy, is kept in a bank vault in Atlanta where only two executives — banned from travelling on the same aircraft — know it.
The court order followed the release of a report by the Centre for Science and Environment, a non-government body, which contended that 11 brands sold by the two soft drinks makers contained high levels of pesticide residues. The organisation said that samples from 12 states showed that Pepsi products contained 30 times more pesticides than in 2003, when a similar study was conducted. Coke samples had 25 times the amount of pesticides as three years ago.
The report, published on Wednesday, caused a row in India’s lower house, where MPs from across the political spectrum brandished its findings as reason enough to ban the sale of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. “These companies are playing with the lives of millions and we can’t ignore such warnings any more,” said Vijay Kumar Malhotra, from the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which staged a walkout over the issue .
It is not the first time Coca-Cola and Pepsi have found themselves mired in controversy in India. They are regular whipping boys for politicians who regard Western food products as a threat to Indian heritage, although sceptics suggest that their opposition has more to do with the companies’ virtual monopoly of the market than genuinely held feelings of cultural protectionism.
The US companies joined forces through the Indian Soft Drink Manufacturers’ Association to reject the findings of the study. “Consumer safety is paramount to us,” they said. “The soft drinks manufactured in India comply with stringent international norms and all applicable national regulations.”
The Bureau of Indian Standards, the highest government body to maintain product quality certification, has set a pesticide standard for bottled water but not for soft drinks.
In 2003, at the time of the last report, pesticide claims provoked a backlash. Schools banned colas, and fruit juice sales boomed as yoga gurus reminded people of the value of healthy drinking. Coca-Cola’s sales dropped by as much as 11 per cent in the subsequent financial quarter.
Maybe India’s planning to create  a super cola thats why there harrassing this companies. Anyway those two giant companies are getting the whoop……….ass thingy.

Tagged as: coke , pepsi softdrink ,indian government