With all the Oscar buzz this time of the year I had to get in some films that I had the audacity to miss earlier in the year, first on the list was Babel (no. 2 is The Departed). Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams) this film like Children of Men is also about children in an around about way. It’s title however seems to be an even more dominant theme, miscommunication. This movie is plagued with miscommunication starting with an American man’s attempt to get his wife to a hospital after she has been shot in Morocco, to a deaf-mute Japanese girl’s failed attempts at teenage flirtation and finally between a Mexican nanny of two American children, her unstable nephew and an American border patrol agent. Caught in between all this miscommunication are children in a broken world. Two poor Moroccan goat-herding boys, the previously mentioned deaf-mute Japanese girl who’s mother has recently died and two very young American children raised by their Nanny who have an unintended adventure in the desert of Southern California near the Mexican border. If Children of Men gave us a vision of a world without children, Babel gives us a vision what some of the world’s children are going through today.