Awards season 2023.
Tonight, I’m watching the Screen Actors Guild Awards screener of Babylon from Paramount. I’m about three-quarters of the way into this 3+ hour waste of film stock (the first cut was over 4 hours long), and I’m weary. This would-be epic is a cartoonish, bromidic, insipid misuse of talent, and Damien Chazelle’s self-indulgence is clichéd and platitudinous—another $78 million production budget bites the dust.
My review: If you enjoy an elephant shitting directly into the camera lens (it happens before the main title), you might find some value in this piece; if you think that a movie needs a story or a point of view, you won’t.
