Babylon 2022

[nakanosunplaza]

This movie is out on or around the 23rd,with Brad Pitt and many others,it is based on the life of John Gilbert and several others during the transitional period of the sound era,it is a 3 hours plus movie,Brad Pitt is often implicated in interesting films,this is another one.

[CinemaInternational]

Stephanie Zacharek is not happy with Babylon: https://time.com/6241717/babylon-review/

I'll copy the article here since it's behind a partial paywall.....

In a moment of heedless generosity, you could almost commend Damien Chazelle for caring enough about the last days of the silent film era to make a movie about it—if he showed any evidence of caring at all. Babylon isn’t a film made with love, or even with any degree of exactitude; it pretends to be a movie about “loving movies,” but more than anything else, it seeks to reflect glory on its creator. It advertises its alleged extravagance and glamour, loud and hard, but only comes off looking tinny and cheap. Its central character is a narcissist with no complexity, no interior contradictions—not even Margot Robbie, among the most appealing performers we’ve got, can animate her. Writer-director Chazelle thinks he’s created a vision of 1920s Hollywood, but no matter how much research he may have done, he hasn’t listened at all to what these faces, these stories, have told him. He treats people of this lost era like primitive creatures who just didn’t know any better. He’s not capturing the past; he’s only condescending to it.

Chazelle is an ambitious filmmaker, and Babylon is an ambitious picture. It opens in 1926, as silent films and their stars were still going strong, and ends in the early 1930s, when many of the old players found themselves left behind by the talkies, a span of roughly five years that may as well have been an eon. That’s a good subject, as it was when Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, Betty Comden and Adolph Green mined it for Singin’ in the Rain, a movie Chazelle references frequently. But Babylon is less a shaped film than a big pile of movie. (It’s more than three hours long—three aggressively raucous, cheaply poignant hours.) You know what you’re in for during the movie’s first scene: an elephant being brought in for a Hollywood mogul’s big shindig squirts projectile poop right into the camera lens, like a kickoff toast: Here’s crap in your eye! The point, presumably, is that these early Hollywood types weren’t classy, well-mannered people; they were selfish, gauche and needlessly extravagant. We’re invited to party with them and look down on them at the same time—the best of both worlds.

Our guide to this seductive universe of debauchery is an outsider who desperately wants in, the movie’s most sympathetic character by design: Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is a longtime Los Angeleno who, like everybody else, wants to break into the business. He knows he’s got to start at the bottom, even if that means wrangling incontinent elephants. He leads us into the mogul’s mansion, where we witness all manner of semi-naked boys and girlies dancing with abandon and doing purportedly unspeakable things to one another, even though it’s all really rather decorous (and, for what it’s worth, numbingly straight, aside from some ho-hum girl-on-girl action). Streamers fly; champagne zings through the air; a jazz band of cool-looking Black musicians tootles the brassy, thumping notes of Justin Hurwitz’s feverish, droningly repetitive score. Chazelle and his cinematographer Linus Sandgren draw us into this party with one long, swooping take. This is where your date, if you’re with the wrong one, nudges you and says, “Look, this is a single take!” Say what you will about Chazelle and Sandgren, they’re fluent in the love language of the film bro.

At this party, love is in the air, and up people’s noses. As he’s trying to manage all the celebratory anarchy, Manny meets his dream girl, Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy, a firecracker of a woman with an unruly halo of hair and so much inner chaos that it spills out around her like glitter from a busted bottle. She’s dressed in what appears to be a length of silk wrapped around her torso a few times, her feet shod in old-fashioned lace-up boots. (Chazelle has stated that he didn’t want any boring 1920s clichés in his movie, and the result is a kind of willful inaccuracy that’s neither inventive nor evocative.) This star-in-her-own-mind talks her way into the party—the dazzled Manny helps out—and immediately makes for a big mountain of cocaine heaped on a silver platter, which Chazelle and Sandgren shoot in extreme closeup, a cartoon candy mountain of depravity. Nellie is a woman of strong appetites and gargantuan dreams, and Manny adores her immediately—because the manic pixie dream girl wasn’t invented yesterday, you know.

By this point in the movie, you may be looking at your watch, thinking, “Oh, good, it’s almost over.” How wrong you would be! There’s more, so much more, to come: Brad Pitt plays Jack Conrad, a rakish but principled silent-film superstar whose adoring audience rejects him once he’s required to speak on camera. He squints his way through the movie, courting pathos with a wry smirk, right to the inevitable end. There’s an interminable, show-offy section in which Nellie—who had proved to be a natural in the wild, wild west of silent filmmaking, capable of an unhinged earthiness that wowed her audiences—can’t manage to perform on a soundstage, given the myriad challenges of recording early sound. Manny, who has moved a few rungs up the movie-business ladder, thanks to his intelligence and charm, turns a charismatic Black bandleader, Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), into a star, but only temporarily. (One thing Chazelle does get right is the racism of early Hollywood.) And a powerful gossip reporter, Jean Smart’s Elinor St. John, swans through it all in a series of Norma Desmond headdresses, reflecting drily on the high jinks around her. At one point, she gives a rather depressed Jack Conrad a pep talk draped in tinsel, basically telling him that although his career is over, he has sealed his reputation in film history. In her silvery, trilling burr, she intones, “But in 100 years, when you and I are both long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of film through a sprocket, you’ll be alive again.”

That’s a “Gimme the Oscar!” speech if ever there were one, though it makes zero sense in the context of how film was treated in the days before we became hip to preservation. It’s estimated that some 75 percent of silent films, at minimum, have been lost or destroyed; at the time, many people making these films thought of them as throwaway entertainment, almost as ephemeral as theater. It’s unlikely that a real-life Elinor St. John (the character appears to be modeled on powerful gossipmongers like Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, though their careers came later) would have had any faith in the permanence of film, even if it makes for a pretty speech about Babylon’s overarching subject, which, in case you haven’t guessed, is the Power of Movies.


Meanwhile, Manny’s path crisscrosses only occasionally with Nelly’s. He gazes at her with lovesickness, selfless in his love for her, while she lives only for dancing and partying and gambling. She has no depth, only characteristics. Dozens of other characters meander through Babylon, many of them referencing real-life figures in vague or obvious ways. There’s a temperamental, bullying director most likely modeled on Erich von Stroheim; a grotesquely depicted actor who’s clearly intended to suggest poor Fatty Arbuckle, whose career was destroyed when he was falsely accused of the rape and murder of young aspiring actress Virginia Rappe, even though a jury acquitted him; a woman director, clad in boyish neck-scarfs and plus-fours, who’s probably modeled on Dorothy Arzner. The most captivating performance in Babylon comes from Li Jun Li, who plays a character named Lady Fay Zhu, an out-in-the-open lesbian and jill of all trades who makes a zowie entrance in a Marlene Dietrich-style tuxedo, singing a breezily off-color little ditty about a subject that rhymes with “kitty.” It’s too bad the whole movie couldn’t be about her.


Instead, Babylon is a manic sprawl that only pretends to celebrate cinema. It’s really about prurience, dumb sensation, self-congratulation and willful ignorance of history. Ambition in filmmakers is a good thing—there’s no forward movement without it, particularly as big-screen projects become harder and harder to mount. If Chazelle’s La La Land was sprawling and imperfect, it at least felt like something of an openhearted enterprise. And First Man, Chazelle’s biopic of notoriously private astronaut Neil Armstrong, may have clogged its own airspace with too much showy psychoanalysis, but it also tried to capture the sense of joy that can be found in science. Babylon is something else, and not a better something else. Its closing sequence features a rapid-fire R.E.M. selection of great images of cinema—Daffy Duck’s loopy visage, Chaplin’s expression of woebegone bewilderment, that lightning-strike of transcendence known as Falconetti—ultimately mingled with flashbacks from Babylon itself. Cinema! It’s wonderful, except when it’s terrible. Late in the film, a reptilian gangster played by Tobey Maguire beckons guests into a lair of iniquity with the words, “Welcome to the asshole of Los Angeles.” Considering where this movie began, we’ve already pretty much been there for the last three hours.

[nakanosunplaza]

Stephanie Zacharek is not happy with Babylon: https://time.com/6241717/babylon-review/

Well I like the subject anyway but I was not expecting a sort of comedy is it ? The critics do not influence me too much,for me it is a must - see film.

[CinemaInternational]

Stephanie Zacharek is not happy with Babylon: https://time.com/6241717/babylon-review/

Well I like the subject anyway but I was not expecting a sort of comedy is it ? The critics do not influence me too much,for me it is a must - see film.

I read the leaked draft script. If there are films its closest to, its the abandon of films like The Wolf of Wall Street and Boogie nights. The latter film it basicly copies the trajectory of, a raunchy if somewhat bubbly first half, capped by a shocking event (in this film's case, a scene where Margot Robbie's character almost dies after being bitten in the neck by a poisonous snake), then a whole lot of dark despair after that point.

[LawrenceA]

I read the leaked draft script.

I ask (nicely) that one would avoid spoilers for a movie that hasn't come out yet. I'm generally not an anti-spoiler absolutist, but for movies that haven't come out to the general public yet, it's just common courtesy. I recall someone watching a pirated copy of a big movie from a couple years back who then posted the ending of the movie on the TCM boards multiple times, all before the movie was largely available.

And I also have to ask, why would you read the script before watching the movie? Even if they adhere closely to it, seeing the visual presentation of the material can dramatically alter the perception.

I know you've had a target on this movie for a long time. You posted about it on the TCM boards a while back.

[CinemaInternational]

I read the leaked draft script.

I ask (nicely) that one would avoid spoilers for a movie that hasn't come out yet. I'm generally not an anti-spoiler absolutist, but for movies that haven't come out to the general public yet, it's just common courtesy. I recall someone watching a pirated copy of a big movie from a couple years back who then posted the ending of the movie on the TCM boards multiple times, all before the movie was largely available.

And I also have to ask, why would you read the script before watching the movie? Even if they adhere closely to it, seeing the visual presentation of the material can dramatically alter the perception.

I know you've had a target on this movie for a long time. You posted about it on the TCM boards a while back.

I read the script mainly out of curiosity. I had seen people praising it to the heavens, including an internet acquaintance (one of thim dubbed that it was one of the best scripts they had ever read) or two, so I decided to read the whole thing. It was a long, pretty detailed script (a little over 180 pages) with plenty of stage directions, so one could imagine at least some of the visuals that would be attached.

It's the second script I read before seeing the film, the earlier one being 2017's Lady Bird, which stuck very close to what was on the page.

As for Babylon, I guess I spoke because I was a little startled by some of the visuals intended for the film when I first heard about them, which is why I wrote something originally to alert some members who might have expected a slightly less cutting-edge film; having read the script, most of the spiciest moments are very fleetingly presented, mostly in the background, save for one showpiece love scene. The script to me was middling, not the worst, far better than say last year's BP nominee Don't look Up, but also not as cohesive as Boogie nights.

I'll avoid telling any more spoilers, although I will note that said snake made a cameo in the trailer already released.

[nakanosunplaza]

I have read like for all the films,there is a critic block until it is released officially on Jan 6,the december release is for Oscar eligibility .

[EP Millstone]

I saw Babylon, which I enjoyed. Clocking in at a tad over three hours, the pace of the movie and its story never really lagged for me. I thought that, stylistically and tonally, it evoked a heady Ken Russell parfait. The frenetic musical score by Justin Hurwitz, for me, significantly helped in overcoming the occasional longueurs.

During one sequence I thought that Margot Robbie was playing two roles and playing against herself. However, I subsequently learned that the actress playing diva Constance Moore was actually Samara Weaving. The physical resemblance between the two Australian actresses is uncanny!

According to the Internet Movie Database, the character Jack Conrad (portrayed by Brad Pitt) seems to have been based on -- or inspired by -- John Gilbert -- whose fate after the "Talkies" revolution, according to reports, was also the inspo for several moments in Singing in the Rain (scenes of which appear in Babylon).

The self-destructive, devil-may-care spitfire portrayed by Robbie is also reputed to initially have been based on a real-life actress: Clara Bow. I'm guessing that Anna May Wong was, partially, the model for the Asian lesbian Lady Fay Zhu. The scene in which Zhu performs a risqué song and then kisses a woman in the audience evoked Marlene Dietrich in Morocco. A volatile, martinet, Teutonic director evokes Erich Von Stroheim. The Fatty Arbuckle scandal is briefly referenced, and the gossip columnist played by Jean Smart may have been based on Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons or both quidnuncs. The scene in which columnist Elinor St. John (Smart) tells a despondent Conrad that, although his career is over, he will remain immortal ("You'll spend eternity with angels and ghosts") because of movies was a highlight for me.

For the references to "classic" Hollywood alone, cinephiles may, I think, find much in Babylon to savor and enjoy.

[Swithin]

I saw Babylon, which I enjoyed.
For the references to "classic" Hollywood alone, cinephiles may, I think, find much in Babylon to savor and enjoy.

I'm looking forward to Babylon.

One of my favorite films (and unjustly neglected) is John Schlesinger's masterful filming of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1975), which features a great ensemble, including Donald Sutherland's perhaps best performance (as Homer Simpson). I don't think there's a better film about early Hollywood, but we'll see how I feel about Babylon.

[EP Millstone]

One of my favorite films (and unjustly neglected) is John Schlesinger's masterful filming of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, (1975) which features a great ensemble, including Donald Sutherland's perhaps best performance (as Homer Simpson). I don't think there's a better film about early Hollywood, but we'll see how I feel about Babylon!

Cuthbert,

I agree! While I was watching Babylon, I was also reminded of The Day of the Locust, which, IMO, is the superior movie (because of John Schlesinger's direction, Waldo Salt's screenplay, Conrad Hall's cinematography, and, yes, Donald Sutherland's performance).

The movie poster is one of my prize possessions.

[CinemaInternational]

Addressing two things here....

First, yes, in the original script, Margot Robbie's character was indeed Clara Bow, and the character of Zhu was originally Anna May Wong. I assume the name changes were to avoid any possible lawsuits by their estates, especially since the draft script briefly brought up the long since debunked story from Hollywood Babylon concerning Clara and a football team. The Pitt character name was rhe same in the script though, likely a composite of Gilbert and several others. And, yes, even on the page, it could easily be seen that Jean Smart's big speech would be a highlight of the film, maybe even its best moment.


Second, The Day of the Locust is a fantastic film. In fact, it is the best film of 1975, and one of the very best films of the entire decade of the 1970s. I recall paying to see it several years ago from Amazon, and being absolutely riveted by it from beginning to end. The violent finale is absolutely unforgettable; the period detail exquisite, the performances all around are absolutely ideal. I guess its obscurity these days is due to it not selling many tickets back in 1975 coupled with rhe film probably taking many aback in Hollywood itself (which could explain why Karen Black missed a nomination in one of the thinnest years on record for leading actresses); admittedly, it is a very disturbing film, but that is the way some masterpieces are.

[Swithin]

Second, The Day of the Locust is a fantastic film. In fact, it is the best film of 1975, and one of the very best films of the entire decade of the 1970s. I recall paying to see it several years ago from Amazon, and being absolutely riveted by it from beginning to end. The violent finale is absolutely unforgettable; the period detail exquisite, the performances all around are absolutely ideal. I guess its obscurity these days is due to it not selling many tickets back in 1975 coupled with rhe film probably taking many aback in Hollywood itself (which could explain why Karen Black missed a nomination in one of the thinnest years on record for leading actresses); admittedly, it is a very disturbing film, but that is the way some masterpieces are.

I remember how I felt when I saw The Day of the Locust back in 1975. It was one of those films where you just sat there at the end, you couldn't even get up to leave the theater for a while. It was nominated for two Oscars: Burgess Meredith for Supporting Actor; and Conrad L. Hall for Cinematography. Karen Black was nominated for a Golden Globe. Ann Roth won a BAFTA for Best Costumes: the film is one of those rare films that actually looks the period it is depicting. The National Board of Review named it one of the year's ten best films. 1975 was the year that a film I did not like won too many awards: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The films I thought most worthy that year, in addition to The Day of the Locust, were Nashville, Barry Lyndon, and The Story of Adele H.

Nathanael West, the author of the novel (and of Miss Lonelyhearts), went to Hollywood in the 1930s to write screenplays and was inspired by his time and experiences there to write The Day of the Locust. He was married to Eileen McKenney, who had been the subject of Ruth McKenney's New Yorker stories My Sister Eileen. They were traveling back to LA from Mexico and were killed in a collision, a few days before they were to travel to New York for the Broadway premiere of My Sister Eileen.

[Hibi]

I saw Babylon, which I enjoyed.
For the references to "classic" Hollywood alone, cinephiles may, I think, find much in Babylon to savor and enjoy.

I'm looking forward to Babylon.

One of my favorite films (and unjustly neglected) is John Schlesinger's masterful filming of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1975), which features a great ensemble, including Donald Sutherland's perhaps best performance (as Homer Simpson). I don't think there's a better film about early Hollywood, but we'll see how I feel about Babylon.

AGREE. And still waiting to be shown on TCM.

[Hibi]

Second, The Day of the Locust is a fantastic film. In fact, it is the best film of 1975, and one of the very best films of the entire decade of the 1970s. I recall paying to see it several years ago from Amazon, and being absolutely riveted by it from beginning to end. The violent finale is absolutely unforgettable; the period detail exquisite, the performances all around are absolutely ideal. I guess its obscurity these days is due to it not selling many tickets back in 1975 coupled with rhe film probably taking many aback in Hollywood itself (which could explain why Karen Black missed a nomination in one of the thinnest years on record for leading actresses); admittedly, it is a very disturbing film, but that is the way some masterpieces are.

I remember how I felt when I saw The Day of the Locust back in 1975. It was one of those films where you just sat there at the end, you couldn't even get up to leave the theater for a while. It was nominated for two Oscars: Burgess Meredith for Supporting Actor; and Conrad L. Hall for Cinematography. Karen Black was nominated for a Golden Globe. Ann Roth won a BAFTA for Best Costumes: the film is one of those rare films that actually looks the period it is depicting. The National Board of Review named it one of the year's ten best films. 1975 was the year that a film I did not like won too many awards: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The films I thought most worthy that year, in addition to The Day of the Locust, were Nashville, Barry Lyndon, and The Story of Adele H.

Nathanael West, the author of the novel (and of Miss Lonelyhearts), went to Hollywood in the 1930s to write screenplays and was inspired by his time and experiences there to write The Day of the Locust. He was married to Eileen McKenney, who had been the subject of Ruth McKenney's New Yorker stories My Sister Eileen. They were traveling back to LA from Mexico and were killed in a collision, a few days before they were to travel to New York for the Broadway premiere of My Sister Eileen.

Karen Black should've been Oscar nominated. The film got shut out in many categories.