Babylon

[ER]

I've certainly seen worse movies, and I've seen bigger movies, but I don't know that I've ever seen this big a movie be so....below average.

Still, it did hold my attention, and there were some good scenes, with Jean Smart's talk with Brad Pitt late in the film, and the last ten or so minutes rising above the rest of this epic disaster.

Grade? How about a C-?

[M.10rda]

Good to see someone else discussing what I feel would have been, in most other eras of cinema, a notoriously monumental catastrophe and potentially career-ending embarrassment to its writer-director. It did gross $61,000,000 worldwide - not bad in these dreadful days of theatrical grosses -  but only $15 mil in the US, and against a budget of $110 mil. Also, it is one of the most aggressively, willfully off-putting mainstream films in recent times. I feel like Aronofski's MOTHER! caught a much more vocal (also less justified) public shellacking when it was released five years back. But maybe many viewers have yet to catch up to BABYLON on streaming?

Besides the pervasive urination, scatologia,  sexual objectification, and blackface, I'd rate BABYLON at least a 4 out of 5... if the end credits rolled after the opening 70-90 minutes. The long opening party sequence and Diego Calva's manic trip to obtain an emergency Bell & Howell reflected some great filmmaking, and I also quite enjoyed the horrifying extended scene on the early sync sound set... absurd as it was, its frustrations rang true even to my 1990s film set experiences (minus the dead DP). At some point, though, I feel like Damien Chazelle loses the plot and loses interest in directing certain scenes: the whole Nellie barfing at the cocktail party sequence was extremely flat and emphasizes how Margot Robbie (excellent in the opening scenes) gets truly lost when denied any help from her director or his screenplay.

Chazelle also loses anything like his own auteurial voice - particularly by the point when Calva and the Count embark on the long crime subplot, which starts out as a fairly direct lift from BOOGIE NIGHTS or a Tarantino film yet quickly escalates into nightmarish David Lynch/Gaspar Noe surreal sadism. Glad to hear ER liked the last 10 minutes, but I admit I was nonplussed by Chazelle's insistence on elevating a screening of SINGING IN THE RAIN to a Dave Bowman-entering-the-Monolith level psychedelic freakout. What's it really all about, Damien?

All that said, there are three outstanding performances: Pitt (delivering what is expected, though masterfully), Jean Smart (predictably), and Olivia Hamilton (Chazelle's wife, superb as Robbie's tough female director, so at least we can't fault Chazelle for nepotism). Tobey Maguire covers Robert Blake's performance from LOST HIGHWAY (I guess), which is - something. And Robbie appears onscreen a couple times with Samara Weaving without a wormhole opening in our time-space continuum. If nothing else, I liked BABYLON more (or disliked it less) than similarly pointless exercises in extravagance like WOLF OF WALL STREET and SHORT CUTS.

Anyone else willing to offer a more enthusiastic defense...?

[ER]

If you've seen this movie, there is a sequences where film crews are out in a rural location and many movies are being filmed there at once. (An advantage of silent movies.) Is this set in a particular place that truly existed, somewhere germane to early film history in California, or was it supposed to be just some site? Was there like a ranch or park or something where many films were made then? And if so, what happened to it and what is there today? Is it marked for its role in history?

[M.10rda]

This was a good question, and after half-assing an answer based on little real knowledge, I Googled a little. Concisely and accurately, the answer is: Kinescope (the studio in BABYLON) was not real (but we knew that) but was an amalgamation of actual early studios and their practices. Silent films were made like we see them made in BABYLON, on "backlots" in wide open swaths of field or desert, before there were backlots... essentially like the later backlots, but smaller/simpler.

The scenes from BABYLON we're talking about were filmed at Blue Sky Ranch - the location that Jordan Peele used for NOPE! Read here:
https://www.timeout.com/news/how-babylon-filming-locations-recreated-hollywoods-hard-partying-20s-011823

Shooting on horse ranches is a Hollywood tradition. (Plenty of flexible real estate...) Lots of early cowboy films and (later, in the 60s) low-budget exploitation films (many by RCMerchant's fav filmmaker, Al Adamson) were shot @ Spahn Ranch. The Manson Family also hung out there, hence the suspenseful scenes in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.

I went to film school @ Ithaca College back in the 90s, and one of Ithaca, NY's claims to fame is that it was, briefly, a hub for similar silent film production at the beginning of the 20th century. Ithaca has lakes, rivers, cliffs, hills, forests, a waterfall, and lots and lots of big empty fields (particularly 100 years ago), so it was an ideal go-to for any location or for plentiful "backlot" space. Alas, like everywhere else in New York, Ithaca has no more than 4 consecutive months a year of warm, usually clear-to-sunny weather before it starts dumping hail and snow at any slight meteorological provocation. So Ithaca-based filmmakers took off for the West...

But uh, yeah. What we see in BABYLON is how they did it in Ithaca when they did it in Ithaca, and how they did it in early Hollywood.

[Criswell]

I liked the part with goblin syphilis Toby Maguire and a few other moments but overall it was pretty eh.