Babylon (Damien Chazelle, 2022)

[Aspect]

I recently watched it too and was similarly stunned by how much Chazelle outright stole from Boogie Nights. Apart from that, I was also surprised at how inauthentic it felt. Nothing in it truly felt like the 1920s. The diegetic music felt like the twenties filtered through a lens from 100 years later - there was no actual period music from what I could tell. The dancing couldn't have been more anachronistic, especially Margot Robbie's modern club girl moves, dancing on countertops (even during the shooting of a silent film!) like a bridesmaid at a bachelorette party. Additionally, the dialogue featured no period slang; everyone (especially Margot Robbie) talked and cursed like the Jersey Shore crew.

Worst of all, the silent movies weren't shot like silent movies! The framing was too close and Chazelle didn't even present them at silent film speeds. There's a supposedly important moment (not a spoiler) where Brad Pitt embraces a woman and kisses her long and passionately that couldn't be less like a silent movie kiss. Absolutely everything is wrong. It's incredible. When they move into the sound era, it's similarly wrong. The scene that Robbie shoots is like a high school play. I'm always amazed at how quickly Hollywood got the hang of sound filmmaking with all the great films that came out in the early 1930s, but you get no sense of that here. I don't think Chazelle's seen a silent film or an early talkie in his life.

Regarding the ending,

Spoiler

Chazelle goes for the kind of nauseating "power of cinema" effect we've seen all too much lately, but he doesn't earn it at all and it becomes laughable. It makes no sense because the movie industry is shown as nothing if not insane and soul-destroying. There was no sense during the whole silent film-centric first half of the beauty of silent film. No sense that art was being created. Where were the Sjostroms, Keatons, Chaplins, Griffiths, Vidors, hell, even Brownings? Nowhere. Just crazy people on irresponsible sets making tripe.

What a misjudged failure on every level.

Edit: did anyone else think it was strange that during the move to sound, everyone (I'm thinking in particular of the guys she overheard at the party) described Robbie's voice as terrible and sounding like a donkey during the filming of her sound scene? She sounded like...Margot Robbie. She never had a squeaky voice like the actress in Singing in the Rain. The quality of her voice would not have been her undoing. It wasn't her accent either because in the sound-shooting scene, she wasn't speaking with an accent. Wasn't this a discussion they had on set? That this important moment made no sense at all? Baffling.

[Monterey Jack]

So much of this movie was taken directly from Boogie Nights, by rights PTA should have a case for plagiarism. The scene of the girl OD-ing at the party, the camera drifting around the pool at the party, the whip-pans in the scenes where they're making movies, Margot Robbie's endless "Jack? I can do it again" moments in those scenes, and finally, Maguire literally just doing the Alfred Molina scene from Boogie Nights.

Even the gross spitting of Maguire's henchman consistently punctuating the dialogue was a knockoff of the kid setting off firecrackers in the Molina scene in Boogie Nights. it was completely and utterly shameless. For all the criticism Brian De Palma had gotten over the decades for "ripping off" various Hitchcock films, it was never as blatant as this.

[therewillbeblus]

I feel like De Palma's approach to including the viewer into character surrogate engagement is far more synonymous to Hitchcock's modus operandi than what Chazelle is doing here with Boogie Nights. I can see the comparisons you're making and they're definitely there, but Chazelle's film is so messy and sidelining of his 'characters' in favor of capturing the chaotic energy of the time that this Higher Power of a Vibe becomes his primary interest that we're engaging with, and those comparisons to PTA's characters and plot pieces are peripheral borrowings to color in his picture. But the tone is more consistent with De Palma and Hitchcock than here- the comic set pieces Chazelle crafts don't match PTA's style of comedy, and PTA's characters really are characters. As eclectic and overlapping as Boogie Nights's narrative is, and as much as it retains a flowing eye interested in the era's vibe, the film is always more interested and grounded in character and narrative than the spirit. I don't think Chazelle is nearly as interested in these things, and it's partly why his film suffers - Robbie's character is rather empty, as is Manny who comes in and out and we're never really 'with' him on a journey. Pitt is great, but his character partly works by reflexively fitting into Chazelle's rug-ripping focus: His character just can't keep up with the pace, or comprehend the changes often occurring in the elisions Chazelle omits from his narrative - and so he's lost a bit like us, and his suffering is a bit like ours. I think he's as close as we get to a surrogate but mostly because an offbeat approach to film grammar obfuscates our preference for engaging in cinema just as it obfuscates Pitt's sense of security to a reality he's known, revealed as artificial to all. I liked this film a lot, but it seems I also think its ambitions are way different than a lot of you

[Aspect]

Manny is clearly intended to be the audience surrogate, but his character’s goals are so undefined and nebulous as to be non-existent, similar to the film’s goals. He’s along for the ride, just as the audience is. His purpose, like the audience’s, is to marvel at the depravity on display and be simultaneously enthralled and repulsed by it. Then, at the end, say, wasn’t it glorious? No, not the anachronistic way Chazelle presented it. It was a horror show without beauty or purpose. What beauty could have been there was shunted aside for crass and juvenile pandering. How do I make the twenties cool to a modern audience? Make it nothing like the twenties.

[therewillbeblus]

I think it's much more complex than that, as I outlined on the previous page (and Never Cursed's reading of the ending and Chazelle's reflexive relationship to it is very interesting), but whether or not it 'earns' a complex reading from the viewer is certainly debatable. I don't think Manny is clearly intended as "the" surrogate, even if he opens and closes the film. His absence from a bulk of the narrative, including his own development, doesn't allow for that - and again, I think the film is 'clearly' far less interested in banding its audience behind a surrogate character like PTA's films (or Hitchcock's or De Palma's) than it is in banding us to the evolution of the milieu through temporal and zeitgeist shifts. What I find most interesting is that Chazelle is breaking so many 'rules' to create something novel under the guise of a film bombastically aping influences, and part of his 'point', I think, is to hold these together and muse on if the spectacle is more significant than depth of character or emotional weight - which is a rather depressing thematically strategy to milk in such full-measures as these. I'm not sure if it's a failing of the film's for trying to do this if the audience doesn't care about the characters and only balks at the thin spectacle, because that seems to be part of the participatory text, and a foreseeable outcome of an experiment that tests us using our own cultural and structural familiarities from the medium. But again, that doesn't make it a "good" movie, and it also doesn't mean that anyone 'passes' or 'fails' the test by reading the film a certain way. It's just that tinkering with things this way at all incites risk bound to alienate some audiences, especially when the borrowings are loud and the investment in mining for depth is intentionally hidden and empty. That emptiness is a key theme though, and it's a sad one if we care enough to read why.

[Aspect]

I think you’re giving Chazelle way too much credit here because I really don’t see how he’s breaking any narrative rules. This is about as basic as three-act structures get. As you’ve admitted, he fails to base it in character, but I don’t think that’s for lack of trying in lieu of inventing an experimental structure of the kind you seem to be supposing.

He simply couldn’t get his characters to come alive, likely because he wanted “types” to represent key aspects of Hollywood during the era. That he couldn’t shade them in enough is simply a matter of screenwriting skill. And even great actors like he has can only do so much with thin characterization.

He knew where his story wanted to go from the beginning and fit his characters into that structure rather than allowing them the freedom to surprise him and us. It’s what novice writers typically do before they learn to trust their creations.

[therewillbeblus]

I'm not denying that, and part of my reading is in agreement- that he is concocting a giant piece of Hollywoodized 'spectacle' rather than a transparently rule-breaking machine, but that's the only way the experiment works. I feel like I outlined my points already on the last page and will leave them there rather than retread old waters, but he's playing in the sandbox of the familiar and depriving us of something that the characters themselves are searching for, and in the process coming up with some pretty depressing information about existential merit. I wouldn't be so inclined to dig into it if I didn't think it worked so well with the text and is already established thematic interests for Chazelle in Whiplash and La La Land's explorations of the human struggle for control, forced 'acceptance of what 'is'', and ultimate cynicism soaked in spectacle disguised as success - holding that compromise as gently optimistic but only under painful conditions, and strongly acknowledging those conditions. The latter film in particular deprived characterization in favor of spectacle and choice moments, but it worked because it was all happening under the umbrella of the "Hollywood Musical" - and Chazelle was clearly aware of that. And so here we have Babylon, a deconstructed self-reflexive film about moviemaking and mythmaking and it's doing the same thing, only it's superficially 'about' the world of The Movies, and really about a universal experience of feeling swallowed up and deprived of personality or potentially even negating the value of personality because the world doesn't care. I don't think it's a failure of Chazelle for being 'inept' after being self-aware in previous pictures. It's a statement. The delivery of that statement might be a failure though

[feihong]

Apart from that, I was also surprised at how inauthentic it felt. Nothing in it truly felt like the 1920s. The diegetic music felt like the twenties filtered through a lens from 100 years later - there was no actual period music from what I could tell. The dancing couldn't have been more anachronistic, especially Margot Robbie's modern club girl moves, dancing on countertops (even during the shooting of a silent film!) like a bridesmaid at a bachelorette party. Additionally, the dialogue featured no period slang; everyone (especially Margot Robbie) talked and cursed like the Jersey Shore crew.

Worst of all, the silent movies weren't shot like silent movies! The framing was too close and Chazelle didn't even present them at silent film speeds. There's a supposedly important moment (not a spoiler) where Brad Pitt embraces a woman and kisses her long and passionately that couldn't be less like a silent movie kiss. Absolutely everything is wrong. It's incredible. When they move into the sound era, it's similarly wrong. The scene that Robbie shoots is like a high school play. I'm always amazed at how quickly Hollywood got the hang of sound filmmaking with all the great films that came out in the early 1930s, but you get no sense of that here. I don't think Chazelle's seen a silent film or an early talkie in his life.

Regarding the ending,

Spoiler

Chazelle goes for the kind of nauseating "power of cinema" effect we've seen all too much lately, but he doesn't earn it at all and it becomes laughable. It makes no sense because the movie industry is shown as nothing if not insane and soul-destroying. There was no sense during the whole silent film-centric first half of the beauty of silent film. No sense that art was being created. Where were the Sjostroms, Keatons, Chaplins, Griffiths, Vidors, hell, even Brownings? Nowhere. Just crazy people on irresponsible sets making tripe.

This really irked me as the film went on, also. I couldn't really see a worthwhile point to making the picture so anachronistic––the film doesn't hit me like the Alex Cox film, Walker, where the anachronisms are meant to show that the imperialism of Walker's era was alive and well in modern America. Here, the goal seemed to be to make the silent film era seem as hip and happening as our wildest dreams of the modern day. I'm not sure I really buy that, pre- or post-production code––any more than I buy that things are this hip and happening today, anyway. Rather than having a style that underlines purposeful anachronism, the tone of Babylon feels a little too self-conscious, desperate to achieve this level of fun and have the audience really feel it––when what I felt was the effort to make me feel it (the roller-coaster ride of 100 years of film Manny experiences at the end of the film was the apotheosis of this self-conscious pose, a frustrating scramble to make us feel, dammit––feel! In spite of any reasonable objection. For me it was like being at one of those televangelist's shows, where they "blow" the power of the holy spirit on people, and the grateful audience member collapses––putting themselves through ecstasies, not because anything is happening to them, but because they so badly want something to be happening to them (or they are told before they come up to the dais that the script says they should be overcome). I found the anachronism in this case so insincere. I've avoided Damien Chazelle's other pictures after people described them to me, because they mostly sounded like a very prissy white boy's inauthentic idea of what's cool about jazz (something I, as a hopefully slightly-less prissy white boy who loves jazz, just didn't care to see), and what I felt in Babylon was a filmmaker who wanted me to feel like the silent movie era was really cool––but not on it's own terms. Instead, it's the "jazz in the conservatory" approach to silent movies, and it needs extra juice to make it seem cool. I'm not saying silent films are necessarily square, but it's historically impossible for them to hit as hard as the filmmaker wants them to––every convulsive movement in film afterwards was a reaction to them. As progenitor of film, they don't really get to be the hip improvement Chazelle needs them to be, and it seems really fake when he tries to make them that way.

[Aspect]

Well said. He figured he needed to make the twenties seem cooler than now for his manufactured nostalgia to hit, so he tried (way too hard) for cooler than cool and ended up with an anachronistic hodgepodge fantasy without accurate historical referent. The thing is, he didn’t need to try so hard. If he had sacrificed a whip-pan (or ten) for a few moments of actual silent film creation and appreciation, the art would have spoken for itself.

[feihong]

The one thing I appreciated was the way the directors in the silent movie scenes could scream at the actors and crew while working, and they could film 3 movies at once in the same place, because no one needed to be quiet when they were filming. There's supposed to be the sense that it gives extra energy to the silent movies the sound movies lack, and...I get it...I do...but, I don't know. I feel like this is more meaningful in more recent eras of films without synch sound––a la Hong Kong through the 90s, Italy through the 70s, etc. Those films seem to move palpably faster as a result of the pell-mell energy, the fact that you could be hammering away, building other sets while you filmed on these ones, etc. The silent films...they just clearly don't most faster than later sound films. It just doesn't quite wash for me––though I appreciate the gesture towards this.

This discussion has inspired me to see Whiplash and Lalaland, though. I aspire to see if I can make it through them.

[Aspect]

I appreciated Whiplash when I saw it nine years ago. It felt like a genuinely authentic and personal expression to me. La La Land is almost criminally indebted to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in the way Babylon is criminally indebted to Boogie Nights. If you’ve seen the former classic, this will likely bug you as it did me, but I felt the movie also lacked many other qualities, most notably a fully realized screenplay.

This brings me to a view I’ve begun to hold regarding many so-called American auteurs. They need to curb the ego and tackle material written by others, or at least collaborate with other writers. Scorsese, like Chazelle, made his intense, youthful personal statement with Mean Streets, but then found superlative writers that shared his sensibilities to collaborate with on subsequent films. They allowed him to grow and open up to material he would not have generated on his own.

Chazelle can direct. I’ll grant him that, but he needs material that suits him. Granted, he didn’t write First Man (at least he’s not credited), but that movie was so ponderous and enervating that it didn’t suit his flair for intensity and rhythm. Like Rian Johnson, JJ Abrams, Shyamalan, and others, I’m beginning to think his directorial skill has surpassed his writing ability.* I’d love to see him grow directorially in collaboration with writers that share his sensibilities. This might also curb his worst instincts as a director and allow his best instincts to flourish. The Italians (Fellini, Antonioni, Scola, etc.) collaborated with multiple writers routinely. Imagine Bunuel’s later years without Carriere!

I blame the widespread misinterpretation of the auteur theory that made all these directors think they need to write everything by themselves.

*In the category of directors who still write really well but could at times use another writer or two to focus their ideas, I would place Nolan and PTA. Writer/Directors who should never collaborate on scripts include those rare ones with inimitable writing voices like Tarantino and Woody Allen. However, since Jackie Brown is probably Tarantino’s best, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t adapt again some day.

[knives]

Just going to step aside from the PTA convo and say that I loved this. I’ve been lukewarm on Chazelle the director with First Man in particular as a boring low. This film, after the glitter explosion wears off, shows itself to be a relative of La La Land, but with a grown character to elevate the whole thing. Pitt’s Conrad shares the yearning for greatness beholden by human needs of Gosling in the prior picture. The difference being that he is standing from the mountain top and realizes there is still more to strive for. His close up during the hilarious snake scene full of disappointment at the chaos is not only some of the best acting of the year, but also a beautiful summation of Chazelle’s narrative preoccupations.

[Walter Kurtz]

Caught this on Par+ for free and I didn't get up to pee for over three hours and I didn’t interrupt the movie to make a comment to my wife. So that says something.

Merely Good after all is the enemy of Interesting.

* Chazelle is a bit of an idiot savant. Savant in micro (details, bits, etc) and idiot in macro (putting the whole enchilada together).

* The opening party should have been cut 50-65% in length. Way too long. This looked like Baz Luhrmann’s version of Eyes Wide Shut.

* I liked the Once in Hollywood homage/self-parody where Robbie gets all googly-eyed looking at herself onscreen. Good job by QT guest-directing and doing a silent movie almots-shot-for-shot of his Hollywood opus.

* I loved the blood red tint in one scene and don't recall ever seeing that shade in any silent. Has anyone ever seen that particular shade of red before?

* I liked when Chazelle cut the sound during an argument for a few seconds (to mimic silent film.) I thought he even cut (or didn’t mix in) presence.

Question to other filmmakers: was there presence in those few seconds? If not… it is a genius little bit. If there is presence… it’s a nice bit… but could have been better. (Silent films didn’t have presence.) I’m a bit deaf so I couldn’t tell in those brief few seconds but it did sound dead to me.

This is what I know: Filmmakers rate this film a bit more highly than critics do.
Prognostication: In twenty years critics will think more highly of this film than they do now.

Good is the enemy of interesting.

[AidanKing]

A letter in the latest issue of 'Sight and Sound' compares 'Babylon' to Ken Russell, which I thought didn't make much sense until I remembered 'Valentino'.

Shame some enterprising distributor hasn't managed to make the Tavianis' 'Good Morning, Babylon' available but I imagine the rights situation is probably too knotty.

[MichaelB]

My DVD is courtesy of MK2 in France, but I daresay it’s long OOP. Still, it’s better than nothing.

(I’d love to work on more Taviani releases, but if their best-known films struggle on Blu-ray, I’m not optimistic. But a properly curated box set of the pre-1977 stuff would be fascinating.)

[ntnon]

(I’d love to work on more Taviani releases, but if their best-known films struggle on Blu-ray, I’m not optimistic. But a properly curated box set of the pre-1977 stuff would be fascinating.)

If only there were any companies who could make that happen.

[jazzo]

Many of these thoughts have been articulated in this forum already, but having just seen it, here are my thoughts:

If anyone was to rant to me how much they hated this frenetic, bombastic beast of a picture, I would completely understand, but I just couldn't. It is a long (and maybe, it could be argued, pointless) exercise in self-indulgence by someone who has clearly allowed his ego to inflate over the last few years, but it was made with absolute commitment by all involved, including Chazelle, and crafted far too skillfully for hatred.

Performances are at heightened, operatic, levels for more than three hours, which can certainly be off-putting. And yet despite being a film of near constant dialogue, and an excessive length, you somehow still don't really have any real notion of who these people are, other than they have a voraciously harmful (and self-harmful) need to be famous or powerful (or both). Most of the time, they are caricatures or cyphers of real-life golden age personalities than they are human beings, and the film relies upon you to either know that insider-baseball stuff and fill in the blanks, or simply doesn't care and demands the viewer just accept the cartoonish behaviours and figures as presented, if they can stick around for the entirety of the picture.

Most characters only get one or two big scenes before disappearing, which doesn't seem like it should be possible in a 190 minute film, but somehow is.

The score berates you, and also feels like leftovers from La-La Land.

The film is mostly told through montages of physical or chemical addictive behaviours.

Speaking of which, none of the sex is even remotely erotic. It's transactional and actually quite chaste in nature; mostly just naked flesh on anonymous parts of either really cut or really flabby extras, writhing and jiggling in that same awkward and unrealistic way that people in movies only seem to have sex. And with the picture's browns, oranges and golds, it really feels like you're watching a less sexually charged version of Christina Aguilera's "Dirty" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rg3sAb8Id8 video or Hiro Murai's video for the Chet Faker song, "Gold" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi4pzKvuEQM, which are two videos I unconditionally love, though they have different energies, because they are exactly what it wants to be; fucking sexy.

But Chazelle doesn't want sexy sex, and that's fine. It's his prerogative, and it's not the type of story he's trying to tell.

The sex was a lot like the sex in Eyes Wide Shut or Wolf of Wall Street, both of which use a disconnected tone in their "orgy" scenes to illustrate and dissect that horrible need men of power have to voraciously commodify, consume evacuate vice and woman when they're through, without any perceived consequences, except, of course, for the cost of their own humanity, and all of the lives that they obliterate in the process.

This one does it less successfully, mostly because it never feels like we're seeing anything that hasn't already been said more honestly and succinctly by Kubrick or Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson in modern western cinema, or Fellini or Pasolini or Yasuzo Masumura (a delightful new discovery for me over the last few years), and some scenes feel like they're lifted, beat for beat, right out of films by those filmmakers.

But...

It is gorgeous to look at and it does have an energy that's undeniable.

You simply can't turn away, which, given its length, is nothing to turn your nose up at, especially if you have an interest in the subject matter (which I think we all do).

There is a shot of Margot Robbie disappearing into the shadows of an unlit LA side-street towards the film's end that simply took my breath away.

Lead, Diego Calva, is very handsome and, I found, very magnetic.

Robbie is fearless, and though she chews scenery that's already been chewed and regurgitated by everyone else around her, you also can't stop watching her when she's onscreen.

Jean Smart's presence does seem trivial and wasted, especially considering how great she's been in this late career resurgence she's had over the last decade.

Brad Pitt is the most nuanced of the film's characters, and his performance feels the most successful because of that grounding. Whether this is by-product of his age compared to everyone else sharing space with him, or the history we, as viewers, bring to the table, having had a cinematic relationship with him over the last three decades, his character is the only one that feels properly lived in.

That’s actually, now that I think about it, a huge criticism of Chazelle's writing, because you shouldn't be wondering who these people really are after spending three hours with them.

I suppose what I'm saying, though, is that I actually do recommend Babylon, but only if you taper your expectations and steel yourself for a tsunami of empty excess by someone who may just think he's the saviour of cinema (and I am a fan of his other work), but who also clearly loves movies and moviemaking, warts and all (and there are a lot of fucking warts), a great deal. I respected it more than liked it, but do think it is worth a viewer's time.

[domino harvey]

Caught up with this and I mostly agree with the detractors. I get what Chazelle was attempting with the opening orgy in terms of realizing the public’s worst nightmares of Hollywood’s debauchery, but something happens when you make real a fantasy of this nature and the resultant “shocks” feel hopelessly outre and silly in this Hard R middleground of tastelessness (though certainly I did not expect to see a guy get a champagne bottle shoved up his ass in Paramount’s big 2022 prestige film). I could not help but think once more that the soft core porn adaptation of Hollywood Babylon from the 70s remains the gold standard of this kind of legit trash depiction of imagined Tinseltown Terrors.

An even bigger problem here is the intentional idiosyncrasies. I gather Chazelle is trying to bridge an audience’s familiarity with the Disco era’s excesses to these older extremes, but all it does is invite Boogie Nights comparisons that this wannabe film cannot withstand. I also can’t fathom someone with Chazelle’s film knowledge letting those “silent” clips stand as they are… I hate the “Oh yeah?” critical approach to someone emulating period filmmaking, but Chazelle hasn’t even done that here.

I think the Adepo storyline also betrays a pointlessly modern sensibility in its trajectory (blackface had a very different connotation in this period, and I doubt someone as savvy as Adepo’s character would be so naïf), which is a shame because I loved seeing a period Hollywood film that actually addressed the studios’ awareness of minority audience appeals being a source of revenue and I thought this was one of the few new contributions made by this very familiar material. (I also liked Taylor Nichols’ cameo as the suffocating liberal white fan, another strong idea Chazelle does nothing with)

The constant modern swearing also serves as a pointless (and inadvertent, I believe) distancing activity (and as far as I recall, no one uttered “goddamn,” the most prevalent curse of the period)

Robbie gets as much mileage as she can out of being attractive, but her Clara Bow as Porn Star Slut trajectory is doomed from the outset, and I resented the Mulholland Drive-esque reveal that she’s brilliantly talented as an actress at the drop of a hat. Calva is the clear highlight here, though I have doubts that he can turn this film bombing into a larger career. I also really enjoyed Olivia Hamilton’s Dorothy Aznar standin and didn’t learn until after watching that she is Chazelle’s wife

Overall, I found the film an essentially pointless retread of similar A Star is Born trajectories mixed with the usual studio era focuses plus Singin in the Rain (and when that’s even made explicit, hoo boy…). Chazelle’s frantic machinations here are exhausting and technically proficient but not exciting or entertaining in the slightest. I have no idea what to even make of him as a director anymore after these last two failures, and I probably have one more length of rope left to unspool out for him after these missteps. I’m tempted to say he could probably make a good screwball comedy that leaned into his chaotic tendencies, but his attempts at humor here are regrettably childish and unfunny, so I wouldn’t want to see one he wrote. Maybe he could do a small scale but dynamic Godard/Karina-type project with Hamilton?

[hearthesilence]

I've actually met a couple of unrelated people who worked on this - not surprising considering how many people were likely employed on the production, you can probably drop a water balloon into L.A. and hit someone involved with it. They clearly worked their hearts out and were very proud of what they've done, so my negative feelings towards this is centered around my frustrations with Chazelle, and I think it's a running thread in all of his work. His depiction of artists, or why creative individuals do what they do, has grown more and more distasteful and repulsive, and it feels very shallow and cynical in a very cheap and falsely modest way. It's been too long since I've seen this to have a razor sharp memory about it, but I just remember thinking over and over again, "is this how he thinks of most people who go into creative endeavors?" Obviously the exceptions are the woe-is-me heroes who would like to do better and are capable of it, but I've never found any of them convincing as full-blooded personalities.

[The Curious Sofa]

There has been a recent reevaluation of Babylon as an undervalued masterpiece/future classic, which finally prompted me to watch it. I had originally stayed away, Margot Robbie’s terrible costumes and styling alone was off-putting enough to me in the publicity, and since Whiplash, I haven't found Damien Chazelle’s work particularly compelling. Unfortunately, I can only echo the negative assessments here. Babylon is awful, a lazy retread of the sordid Hollywood mythmaking Kenneth Anger engaged in decades ago. Chazelle’s use of anachronism isn't innovative either. We've seen this stylized, modernized approach to period settings, especially this era, before in films and TV series like Chicago, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, and Babylon Berlin. At this point, it's more cliché than bold. It's the worst type of period piece, where the past is made "relatable" by pandering to modern sensibilities without offering anything new or valuable to say about the transition from silent to talking pictures. Whereas the flash-forward to the future of an art form was beautifully executed in the recent Sinners, the cinematic equivalent falls flat here.

[Zot!]

There has been a recent reevaluation of Babylon as an undervalued masterpiece/future classic

Reevaluation?! It’s barely three years old!

[beamish14]

It pissed me off in 2022, and I detested La La Land as well

[domino harvey]

There has been a recent reevaluation of Babylon as an undervalued masterpiece/future classic

Reevaluation?! It’s barely three years old!

I’ve seen it going around, there really is a contingent trying to rehab this as a masterpiece lately. People who further these sort of takes don’t have the attention span to put work into films much older than that these days anyways

[beamish14]

There has been a recent reevaluation of Babylon as an undervalued masterpiece/future classic

Reevaluation?! It’s barely three years old!

I’ve seen it going around, there really is a contingent trying to rehab this as a masterpiece lately. People who further these sort of takes don’t have the attention span to put work into films much older than that these days anyways

It is getting revival screenings in part due to the availability of 70mm prints and a renewed interest in said format. Then again, there was a small fanbase determined to make the absolute garbage that is Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe a cult film as well after it failed at the box office.

[Murdoch]

I loved the movie but admit it's a big mess. However I'd put it above any of the other Chazelle films I've seen. The ending is, as others have mentioned, a pretty hollow power of cinema tribute but I liked it as a juxtaposition of the end product of filmmaking against the messy conglomeration of human error and sacrifice that goes into production. The film is certainly familiar ground and none of the characters are that interesting (Pitt's character especially is one-note), but I enjoyed it more for the on-set scenes about the various productions than anything about the different players.