Review of Baraka (1992) by Sandip C — 25 Jan 2010

For me there's an air of hippie earnestness that threatens to spoil this, as well as a sense of the contrived : the twee pan pipes over kids in the street and the Japanese monk spring to mind; but perhaps that's just my prejudice because these sequences were actually made on the fly.

Then there is the 65 mm AWESOMENESS of the imagery. It's a practically a Blu Ray ad : That wise monkey, the endless detail of Everest, The Ganges, the slums of Rio, and the Highrises of Kowloon. How far indeed we travel in 100 minutes! The rhythms of the planet interweaving in a collage of location, portraiture and time-lapse to create a sort of mediation on Earth.

You can't fight forces as mighty as these, you have to go with the flow.