BABYLON
Added 2022-12-23 20:38:32 +0000 UTCWe have found the film to get Maggie out from the shadows and in front of the camera again for an impromptu Christmas review. Whether or not that's for good reason or for a bad reason....I will allow you all to guess. :)
Comments
That's basically how I felt. But for sure I cannot stop thinking about that film. It's lingered more than most for reasons that are very mixed. But yes, I agree that the trailer is very telling. It's a very bad and unfocused trailer, but when you see the film it kinda makes sense why. A lot of the film they really can't show, which makes the trailer a bit of a problem to make. But for sure, they needed to do better.
Deepfocuslens
2022-12-24 19:11:49 +0000 UTCI'll be interested to hear what you think.
Deepfocuslens
2022-12-24 19:07:51 +0000 UTCThat's my feeling too. I don't think it's a disaster in fact I think it works a lot better than it should for how bloated and excessive and indulgent it is but it's all of those things none the less. But give me something that's swinging for the fences but striking than a safe first base bunt any day.
Tyler Shobe
2022-12-24 01:36:44 +0000 UTCJust watched the review. As a Chazelle fan, I'm definitely looking forward to seeing his "anything goes" side since he's always struck me as a guy who loves his 1950s studio era movies (or as you put it "Mr. Straight-A Student")... Seriously never thought a movie like Mad God would get a mention here. But like you, disaster or not, I definitely prefer a movie that has ambition and personality than doesn't.
Stephen
2022-12-24 01:01:48 +0000 UTCgonna guess you think it’s not good but were entertained nonetheless? idk that’s just how i felt
Jared Angcanan
2022-12-24 00:32:48 +0000 UTCFrom what I'm hearing about it, which is not great, it's a damn shame because I'm such a fan of Damien Chazelle. Whiplash and La La Land were such meticulously and perfectly crafted works of art and you could clearly tell the dude loves film and wants to bring it back to the Golden Age of creativity. I guess every brilliant filmmaker has to have a few less than stellar works.
Wolfman Brandon
2022-12-24 00:18:25 +0000 UTCOh shit…we were just supposed to guess what Maggie thought of it. Completely misread the heading. Fuck it, I’m leaving my post up anyways. Good job on guessing right Tyler.👍
Bennett Oliver
2022-12-23 21:43:35 +0000 UTCOh interesting. Well looking forward to the video.
Tyler Shobe
2022-12-23 21:30:51 +0000 UTCI’m not usually one to just post a quote from another source to express my thoughts on a subject. I believe in formulating my own thoughts and putting them into my own words. But…when I watched the initial trailers for Babylon and saw the scale of the film, I couldn’t help but think of what Pauline Kael wrote about these huge, epic, artistically ambitious films made by major directors. I got the feeling from those trailers that Damien Chazelle has made his own film to join their ranks. Whether it measures up to those past films or not I do not know, but nevertheless, I think what Kael writes has to be considered when it comes to Babylon and the tradition it continues. Here is an excerpt of her review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 entitled “Hail, Folly!”: “At a certain point in their careers—generally right after an enormous popular success—most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies. They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world. Generally, they shoot this epic in what they believe is a state of super-enlightenment. They believe that with this film they’re literally going to bring mankind the word, and this euphoria conceals even their own artistic exhaustion. Afterward, in the editing rooms, when they look at the thousands upon thousands of feet of film they’ve shot, searching for ways to put it together, while the interest on the borrowed money rises and swells, and the businessmen or government representatives try to wrest control from them, their energy may flag and their confidence falter. Their euphoria had glossed over the initial compromises that now plague them—an unresolved, unfinished script, perhaps, or an international cast with no common language—and there is always the problem of excessive length. Griffith with Intolerance, von Stroheim with his ten-hour Greed, Abel Gance with his three-screen Napoleon, Eisenstein with his unfinished Ivan the Terrible trilogy, Bertolucci with 1900, perhaps Coppola with his Apocalypse Now still to come—no one has ever brought off one of these visionary epics so that it was a hit like the director’s preceding films that made it possible. Yet these legendary follies that break the artists’ backs are also among the great works of film history, transforming the medium, discarding dead forms, and carrying on an inspired, lunatic tradition that is quite probably integral to the nature of movies. Artists of an expansionist temperament are drawn to work in this medium, because movies are capable of being the closest thing there is to a total art. If success and personal acclaim win these artists their freedom, their love of the unexplored possibilities can’t be contained; it spills over into dream epics. In movies, sanity is too neat, too limiting. Huston, Riefenstahl, Pudovkin, Welles, Dreyer, Fritz Lang, Visconti, Dovzhenko, Pabst, Max Ophuls, Francesco Rosi, Fellini, Peckinpah, Bondarchuk, John Ford, Altman, Scorsese, Kurosawa, Pontecorvo—does anyone doubt the sell- destructive fulfillments that these artists would have reached out to if they’d had the chance? And isn’t it a tragedy for us all—and for those who come after us—that they haven’t? The calamity of movie history is not the follies that get made but the follies that don’t get made.” I get the feeling that Babylon will be a mixed bag—the folly of Chazelle’s career—but if it reaches the crazy cinematic heights that it wishes to touch if only for a few moments of its 3-plus hour length, I think I’ll be happy. Perfection is overrated anyway.
Bennett Oliver
2022-12-23 21:26:00 +0000 UTChm...cold
Deepfocuslens
2022-12-23 21:22:39 +0000 UTCYou're on fire!
Deepfocuslens
2022-12-23 21:22:31 +0000 UTCI'm definitely saying 80% chance bad but I had a really good time with it.
Tyler Shobe
2022-12-23 20:47:14 +0000 UTCI’m gonna guess bad? The trailer gave me weird tonal shifts
Jackson Littlewood
2022-12-23 20:42:22 +0000 UTC
