Babies #4

I will be using the documentary film BABIES by Thomas Balms:

Rotten Tomatoes had to say:~ David Denby
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/05/17/100517crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=2


      Thomas Balmes offered an adorable glimpse of the first year of life in his film following four newborn babies Ponijao, Bayar, Mari, and Hattie who were born in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan, and California. By capturing their earliest stage of development on camera, Balmes reveals just how much we all have in common, despite being born to different parents and raised in different cultures.The movie was shot with a high-definition digital camera set on a tripod, and the result was a series of exquisitely photographed portraits—ethnographic album-making. The filmmakers don’t make overt judgments, but they clearly want to open our eyes to the benefits of anxiety-free child-rearing in the rough.


Michael Dequina The movie report
http://mrbrownmovies.com/movierpt2010-05.html#babies


    The tagline "Everybody loves babies" may indeed be true, but if not falling head over heels for a film that is literally just 80 minutes of cute babies makes me a grump, so be it. But that's both the major appeal and major drawback here--Most of the time, however, this is just a patched-together series of moments designed to elicit steady cries of "aww, how cute" or any other equivalent statement. Yes, the babies are cute, but that's something that's already clear within the opening minute featuring two Namibian babies (which was used as the buzz-building opening for the film's trailer), and cuteness alone is not enough to sustain interest for 79 more.




Overall i think the fact that the documentary was not narrated made it much easier for the viewer to focus its attention on the film and the further meaning of the lives of the four babies. Denby is right who doesn't love babies and the point of the film was to open the eyes of other people of an anxiety free world for kids than filled with regulations and don't do this or that kind of things. The picture quality was great and interrupted of grown ups just baby footage and thats what made the film different from the rest of baby documentaries was no adult distractions and the babies were off on their own minds and actions.