Judging from the sprawl, spectacle, and general excess of Babylon, I can only assume that the success of Whiplash and La La Land earned director Damien Chazelle a blank check. More the pity that he spent it on this navel-gazing love letter to Hollywood, from Hollywood, as if anybody needed another one of those. Babylon is not very loving, as love letters go.
When you can see through the effluvia (human and animal) splattered across the screen, its thesis is punishingly obvious: Hollywood is a grotesque meat grinder that consumes and discards beautiful young people, while preserving them forever in celluloid amber. It’s a dream factory, vomiting and excreting fantasies that are ersatz, ephemeral, and as worthless as prop money that washes away in the rain. Yes, and? Tell us something we don’t know.
Extra credit to Chazelle for properly citing his sources in a pre-end-credits bibliographical appendix, even if it is in the form of a typical film geek’s YouTube supercut. Hey, maybe you’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? It’s pretty great, you should check it out!
After suffering through these three hours of torture, the Paramount+ algorithm recommended Wolf of Wall Street, which is (chef’s kiss) A+ if-you-liked-this-cocaine-movie-you-may-also-like-this-other-cocaine-movie pattern matching.
What is left for any new war film to say today, after landmarks like these:
The Deer Hunter and Platoon scratched open American society’s unhealed scabs over a pointless, unwinnable (indeed, lost) war.
Dark comedies like M*A*S*H, Catch-22, and Blackadder Goes Forth ruthlessly mocked clueless generals, while still being compassionate towards those that sacrificed themselves.
Saving Private Ryan permanently disrupted the war film formula, utilizing new storytelling techniques and filmmaking technology in service of empathy, viscerally placing the audience in the meat grinder that so many of the Greatest Generation were marched into.
More recently, 1917 and Dunkirk both employed formal experimentalism to tell war stories on an individual and geopolitical scale, simultaneously.
I know there are many other key highlights in the genre (I didn’t even mention one of my personal favorites, Paths of Glory), but you get the idea: the best war movies have opened eyes and shifted public opinion.
Edward Berger’s 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front seems rather quaint in comparison, perhaps negatively affected by being seen mostly on small screens, via Netflix. It’s comprised of a series of vignettes that bluntly illustrate the obvious truths that every sensible person with a conscience already knows: what we think of as “war” is mechanized, industrialized slaughter on an obscenely huge scale, with soldiers as game tokens pushed around a map by armchair generals far behind the front line. As Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey famously satirized, despite thousands of years of civilization, war is a ritualized version of clans of cavemen having it out with clubs and rocks, for temporary control of a fetid pond, at least until the next famine, drought, or wildfire.
But then again, recent history has seen corrupt warmongers like George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin stage costly invasions for power and profit. So maybe every new generation of moviegoers does occasionally need new war films to rub their faces in the ugliness and brutality of war. But is All Quiet on the Western Front going to pierce the propaganda bubble in, say, Russia? And even if it did, would it change any minds that haven’t already been made up?
It would have been more fun to watch this hot mess earlier, during the miniature cultural moment that briefly dominated social media discourse. It seems that the juicy, gossipy disasters must have occurred mostly behind the camera, for the actual film itself isn’t a total fiasco. I’ve unfortunately seen the not-dissimilar Serenity (2019), and I’m here to tell you that Don’t Worry Darling is a five-star, 100% fresh tomato, two-thumbs-way-up masterpiece in comparison.
For audiences conditioned by Black Mirror, the only real suspense is waiting to see if the inevitable twist will be more Westworld– or Matrix-flavored. In other words: is our hero Flo trapped in a Stepford robot body or an Oculus Rift prison?
But take a step back and consider the core premise: does anybody think that if toxic incel/misogynist/extremely-online/gamergate types were to have the opportunity to construct a virtual fantasy world, that it would amount to mere Leave it to Beaver cosplay? (but TBH, featuring a Dita Von Teese NPC is understandable; I’m only human)
In its final moments, Olivia Wilde’s film does make a fitful attempt at adding complexity: we learn at least one woman has consciously elected to live in this man’s world. It’s too much, too late, and yet not enough.
Based on the book of the same name by Lizzy Goodman, Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom surveys the early-oughts music scene in New York City, particularly The Moldy Peaches, The Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, and TV on the Radio. For the health and hygiene of all involved, I hope the titular bathroom was not the one in the Mercury Lounge.
I don’t know if you knew this, but people tend to have strong opinions about music, and it’s difficult to find two people that share the same set. A quick skim through the Letterboxd reviews displays a wide array of stances, ranging from (paraphrasing) “it was all noisy garbage until James Murphy tried ecstasy” to “Julian Casablancas is a delicate snowflake that must be protected at all costs”. But to be fair, there is common ground: most seem to acknowledge that gentrification sucks, 9/11 was traumatic, and Ryan Adams and Courtney Love were not good influences, to say the least.
The Strokes tear it up
Despite living in NYC at the time, being about the right age, and a big live music fan, I’m not a devotee of any of these bands in particular. There is one I actively dislike, one that I’ve never heard of, one that I’ve seen live, and the rest I enjoy to different degrees. OK, I’ll name names: The Strokes always sounded to me like a bunch of annoying drunks just thrashing around, The Rapture somehow never crossed my radar, and I’ve seen TV on the Radio (albeit after they made it big).
There’s an astonishing amount of footage available, considering it all dates from a point in time right before everybody started carrying cameras around in their pockets. But it’s a pity the new voiceover interviews are awkwardly delivered in the present tense, redundantly narrating exactly what you’re seeing, just like a reality TV show. There were numerous fascinating individuals and stories in this milieu, and it should have all added up to more than a feature-length episode of Behind the Music.
The dapper gents of Interpol
In retrospect, the ’90s were a golden age for female-led bands (see Garbage, Curve, Belly, The Breeders, and countless more), but in the early 2000s, it seems that Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs stood nearly alone. The latter speaks very movingly about the sexism she encountered, primarily from the music press. Her exuberant stage persona sadly descended into a form of self-flagellation, a hole she had to dig herself out of.
Karen O is not the only fragile soul depicted as driven to express herself in public despite deep insecurity, shyness, and various economic and political headwinds. Coming across as the most well-adjusted are TV on the Radio and the very dapper Interpol. The only figures that seemed to roll with the punches and just have fun are Adam Green and Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches. Certainly, none of them responded well to being asked idiotic, insulting questions by VJs, over and over and over; one exchange that stood out to me was Casablancas bemoaning his belated realization that the music biz is… a biz.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
As naive as he sounds now, it is true that nascent file sharing tools stalled these bands’ momentum (sales of a critical Interpol album were killed by it leaking online far ahead of release, and DJs like Murphy saw the value of their meticulously curated LP collections suddenly evaporate as any kid with a laptop and modem could cue anything up on demand), gentrification pushed everyone out of Williamsburg and Dumbo, and of course 9/11 changed everything.
As a New Yorker since 1996, the inclusion of explicit 9/11 footage struck me as tasteless, something that even Michael Moore had the decency to exclude from Fahrenheit 9/11. But upon reflection, I think it might be useful to occasionally illustrate what it was like to live through it, for those elsewhere who may admonish New Yorkers to “never forget” but don’t truly understand what they think we don’t remember. Particularly memorable is footage of members of The Strokes picking through the detritus-strewn streets, before it occurred to anyone that the ash was carcinogens and incinerated bodies.
Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam is an appalling fiasco, easily one of the worst, most ill-conceived movies of 2022. Like the lightning bolt that adorns the titular character’s unitard, it points straight down — down to the bottom of the year’s most painful time-wasters, among bad company like Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore and Uncharted.
If the notoriously shelved Batgirl movie was worse than this, it must have been a truly historic boondoggle. I don’t think it takes too much imagination to suspect that Batgirl was merely mediocre, but Black Adam was too expensive — and too beholden to its star The Rock — to let lie. If Black Adam was deemed suitable for release, any garbage is worthy of a tile on the HBO Max app.
There can’t be many comic book villains that are genuine household names, familiar outside of fandom circles. Maybe Lex Luthor and perhaps Dr. Doom, the latter by sight if not by name? I myself have read a lot of comics, but had never heard of Black Adam. So, consulting Wikipedia for help in understanding this nonsense, I was surprised to learn it’s a supporting character from the 1940s Captain Marvel comics (a property now known as Shazam, thanks to obvious legal snafus), and only intermittently employed since. The film opens with seven full minutes of narration to explain this tediously backstory, which is somehow simultaneously complex and childishly simplistic. Seven minutes! I counted!
The choice to create an entire mass-market movie around a deep-cut comic book character doesn’t strike me as good business sense. It barely alludes to the ostensibly related Shazam movie, and relegates more familiar superfriends like Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan) and Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) to supporting roles. Utterly mystifying.
Marvel has had this formula figured out for years: first, gain a foothold with well-known goodies like Spider-Man, before giving starring roles to baddies like Venom. They also typically remember to make their movies at least a little fun, and encourage their stars to flex their movie-star charisma. The Rock was reportedly keen on playing this character, but you’d never know it from his dour, bored performance.
I worked at Warner Bros. throughout the original run of Harry Potter movies. In case that sounds exciting, I assure you it wasn’t; it was an extremely minor role in a vast corporation, that involved selling t-shirts, iPhone cases, and battery-powered toy wands online. But it was very easy for us all — a bunch of grown adults just working our jobs — to get swept up in the genuine cultural phenomenon that Harry Potter was at the time.
So I may not have the same emotional attachment to Potter as someone who grew up with it. But I do feel it’s a pity that something that delighted a whole generation has since been forever spoiled by creator J.K. Rowling leaning in hard on her bizarre transphobic fixation — indeed, torching her entire legacy. To a lesser extent, the goodwill that the Harry Potter books and films earned has been further curdled by the dreadful, tedious, pointless Fantastic Beast prequels. And it certainly doesn’t help that the franchise has been burdened with Ezra Miller and Johnny Depp, two other figures busy publicly torching their own reputations.
David Yates’ The Secrets of Dumbledore may be the worst of the bunch. Since all the Dumblesnore, Dumblebore, and Dumbledamn jokes have been made already, all I can add is that it’s joyless and almost unwatchable. I defy anyone over the age of eight to explain the extensive wizard lore to me, or feign any interest in it. The plot seems vaguely inspired by recent anti-democratic movements worldwide, but it’s difficult to parse the moral of the story: is Rowling’s ideal world democratic or authoritarian? Everything certainly seems to revolve around an elite minority born into power.
And why does every actor perform as if they’re heavily drugged on NyQuil? I blame uninspiring material, and poor direction.
Genuine props to Katherine Waterston for gracefully sidestepping this fiasco, on principle against Rowling’s bigotry, while retaining prominent billing.
