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62 years Later , Jamie Lee Curtis Repeats Mother Janet Leigh's Best Supporting Actress Nomination

posted 2 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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The Oscar nominations are in, the televised ceremony will be on March 12th.

The Oscars remain "reduced" in the 21st Century -- few watch the show, few of the movies themselves are watched(though this year Top Gun 2, Avatar 2, and to a lesser extent, Elvis were PLENTY watched) but for the time being, they are not going away, and every year they stir a bit of press, a few stories here and there to keep the ol' grinder going.

And I dunno, didn't SOMETHING happen last year that put the ceremony back on the worldwide news press?

Going in, they've got a controversy going about how one Best Actress nominee got in, but the Academy refuses to rescind her nomination. They will "re-examine their policies." Fair enough.

So I'll pick this from out of this little Psycho corner of the world.

In 1960, Janet Leigh was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, in Psycho.

This was pretty historic for an actor in a Hitchcock movie. No actor in a Hitchcock movie had been nominated since 1946 -- Claude Rains, Supporting...Notorious. (But Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were ignored, Hitch actors were just not getting the respect, overall.)

Between Claude Rains in 1946 and Janet Leigh in 1960, the Academy "overlooked" such great Hitchcock performances as:

Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train (especially)
James Stewart, Rear Window
Raymond Burr, Rear Window(a sympathetic villain almost in pantomime)
Thelma Ritter, Rear Window
Doris Day , The Man Who Knew Too Much (especially)
Henry Fonda, The Wrong Man
Vera Miles, The Wrong Man
James Stewart, Vertigo (especially)
Kim Novak, Vertigo
Cary Grant, North by Northwest(especially: this should have been his Best Actor win --a "career summary role" like True Grit was for John Wayne)
James Mason, North by Northwest

and of course IN 1960, Leigh's nomination was gained alongside the greatest Hitchcock actor snub of all time: Anthony Perkins. (And Martin Balsam was snubbed, too, says I. And said Janet Leigh.)

Janet Leigh had also been nominated for a Golden Globe in the Supporting Actress category in 1960 (where Perkins and Balsam were yet again snubbed in a more minor arena). Surprise: Leigh won the Golden Globes. Hey, we say that's a big deal now. So OK...a big deal. (I might add that in the 70's, the Golden Globes found nominations for Frenzy and Family Plot where Oscar had none -- having those double "drama/comedy" categories increased chances.)

To win her Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, Leigh beat Shirley Jones, the sweet faced beauty of Oklahoma and Carousel, for her "abrupt about-face as a trollop"(the brilliant phrase of "Making of Psycho" author Stephen Rebello) in "Elmer Gantry."

Came the Oscars, Jones returned the favor and beat Leigh for the more important Oscar. That's show biz. Janet Leigh then obtained a new title: the FINAL Hitchcock actor ever nominated for an Oscar.

And this was also Janet Leigh's ONLY Oscar nomination.

The decades pass. The world turns. And a girl who was 2 years old when her mother was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Psycho -- Jamie Lee Curtis -- has finally scored her first Oscar nomination. In the same category as her mother: Best Supporting Actress. Janet Leigh was nominated at age 33(or maybe 32), Jamie Lee at age 64. A longer wait.

Jamie Lee Curtis retains the famous name of her OTHER movie star parent -- Tony Curtis -- and the years have found her personality a bit closer to his --rebellious, a little wacky, drug issues resolved or not -- than to her mother's. No matter. The lineage comes down in all ways and Jamie Lee has proved herself her own kind of star.

Its funny. Janet Leigh was bigger than Tony Curtis for awhile, then Tony Curtis was bigger than Janet Leigh. Then neither was really a big star anymore and played out their careers in TV movies and smaller films. But Jamie Lee Curtis -- never really a marquee star like Tony Curtis , maybe equal to Janet Leigh -- has probably ended up a much more RICH star than either of her parents.

The reason: a franchise. Halloween. Whether you like 'em or hate 'em -- and I know that Jamie Lee isn't in ALL of them -- she's been in a hell of a lot of them. She is the face of the franchise along with Michael Myers in his mask. And in modern day international Hollywood, that means that Jamie Lee Curtis is a "financial megastar" whether or not she's much of a "star star" at all.

As I recall, the maker of the Psycho sequels kept trying to shoehorn an older Janet Leigh into those sequels in a "new role"(like a psychiatrist or something), but Universal brass kept wisely saying "no." No such compunction with Jamie Lee and Halloween. After all, her character survived the first one and every time thereafter...it made sense, even if (and I only know this from the advertising) each new sequel promised "the final showdown between Laurie and Michael." I think they've had like...six final showdowns? Was this last one REALLY final?

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

So anyway, Jamie Lee Curtis is a franchise success and evidently still likes to work in other projects. Hey, for all I know, her Halloween franchise money isn't THAT big; living in Hollywood is expensive.

She was funny a few years ago in the first "Knives Out," and I noticed she went for her now permanent full gray hair(mother Janet kept her's fashionably white-blond to the end) with just enough sex appeal and edge to keep some of her parents' glow.

She doesn't look like she went for sex appeal in this movie she's nominated for: "Everything Everywhere All at Once." I haven't seen the movie yet(I will) but I've seen the trailer and still photos, and Ms. Curtis has clearly chosen to go "full frump" with this one -- going in , this looks like one of those "no vanity ugly makeover" Oscar roles -- courtesy of Curtis' own choice of "look" (from photos she was shown of real IRS workers -- no offense! no offense! not ALL IRS workers.) Hairdo, beer gut, overweight, no make-up. I'm sure she acts well, too -- but just her LOOK is a sales bid for Oscar.

Like her mom in 1960, Jamie Lee Curtis was also nominated at the Golden Globes for Best Supporting Actress for EEAAO."
But unlike her mom...she lost. To Angela Bassett, which could portend ill for Jamie Lee's Oscar chances. You've got an interesting situation: EEAAO is the frontrunner for Best Picture, Bassett is the front runner for the Black Panther sequel, will one overcome the other? (The only demerit points I think Bassett scored with her GG speech was a salute to God and prayer -- the Hollywood heathen aren't big on that. Travolta praised L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology in HIS GG win speech; no Oscar. Of course..different.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

So there... a nice little bit of "movie history from 1960 to 2022" in the mother/daughter nominations across the decades; perhaps a bit of "competitive spirit" for the Curtis versus Bassett "contest" at the Oscars (for those who dig that.) I no longer require myself to watch all Oscar contender movies, not enough time or interest. I can say that I would watch EEAAO and Black Panther 2 to compare the performances of Curtis and Bassett...but really, what does THAT matter? I'm sure both performances are fine. I will see both movies on general principles.

PS. The 1960 Oscar ceremony is on YouTube. Pretty much all of it, in segments. After the premlinaries with Bob Hope ("Mothers everywhere are trying to get their kids to take showers...and Hitchcock makes Psycho.") , the first presenters are the "great star couple," Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. As Jamie Lee noted, Curtis and Leigh as a COUPLE were a bigger star than individually -- mobbed internationally. And 1960 was a peak year for both of them -- Leigh with Psycho; Curtis(cross-dressing like Tony Perkins) in Some Like it Hot the year before, and appearing in the epic Spartacus this year. As perfect a marriage as stars could have.

And two years later in 1962, Tony Curtis left Janet Leigh for his 17-year old(!) co-star in Taras Bulba. The first of MANY more ex-wives after Leigh. Leigh, however, married a Beverly Hills stockbroker and remained married to him to her death.

PPS. I read somewhere that in addition to Leigh and Curtis at the 1960 Golden Globes, Tony Perkins was there(perhaps hoping for an Oscar nom later.) Curtis yelled from the stage: "Stay out of my wife's shower, Tony Perkins!" I'm kind of glad I missed all that. I like the legend of Psycho(scary, important) as we have it.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

She doesn't look like she went for sex appeal in this movie she's nominated for: "Everything Everywhere All at Once." I haven't seen the movie yet(I will) but I've seen the trailer and still photos, and Ms. Curtis has clearly chosen to go "full frump" with this one

A lot of people have found EEAAO thrilling and touching throughout. I only occasionally found it so. The directors' previous film, Swiss Army Man, which has a similar 'no holds barred', manic magic-trick, fast-forward energy, was only intermittently impressive to me too. For me, a little of the Daniels goes a long way. After about 20 minutes I start to get bored/exhausted, start thinking ''Do we really need all this guff?" and then start rewriting the movie in my head, de-mashing it up. Eventually I check mentally back into the movie, only to get frustrated after about another 20 minutes and the whole cycle restarts. Curtis is as good as everyone else in EEAA0 - it got 4 acting noms! - but everyone in the film is 'at 11' or 'on full ham' so I personally find these performances hard to judge. Don't know that I could vote for any of them.

I'm glad I saw EEAAO but it's just not quite my sort of thing. I honestly would have preferred to watch the Asian Immigrant Family Drama it kind of buries in multiverse shenanigans and martial arts.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

Here are some online film-nerdery pieces with the Directors of EEAAO. They are characters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5U-8v_NMr0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl9BTHGGz9s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpZXgO_3vN4

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

Curtis is as good as everyone else in EEAA0 - it got 4 acting noms! - but everyone in the film is 'at 11' or 'on full ham'

Speaking of performances 'at 11'- Babylon. Everybody screams *all the time* and almost every scene has exaggeration as its metier. (It's not a million miles away from Baz Luhrmann, and I hate his movies, although honestly I think that Luhrmann has more of a basic feel for music and dance than Chazelle does.) I didn't believe any of Babylon. It felt like one long lurching, howling, shrieking acting-exercise and exercise in bogus history- and thesis-mongering. One mega-error especially aggravated me: Babylon insists that silent films were literally projected silently, without scores, accompaniment, and the like. But that's absolutely false. The film even has Irving Thalberg (one of the film's few real world characters) express his initial skepticism about sound film by saying something like, "People go to movies not to listen to the noise." This is nuts. Silent film palaces were noisy raucous spaces with lots of music not sanctuaries from city racket on any level.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

There *are* a couple of nice supporting performances in Babylon. Jean Smart and (new to me) Jovan Adepo have good scenes in the second half of the film that blow the rest of the movie away. And some of the musical cues in the film are daring and even great - it could win Best Score for those.

Demerit points for a lengthy sequence of a highly anachronistic journey into a gay S&M wonderland that starts like something out of David Lynch (with a bit of Boogie Nights mixed in) but ends up *directly* restaging/stealing the first scene of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2004). I have no idea why this was in an already long, already full of excess movie.

Oh, and we get half a second of Psycho (a dark Mother lunges though the shower curtains) immediately cut together with the eye-slitting from Un Chien Andalou and a couple of other films I couldn't identify in the This-Is-Cinema montage that ends the film.

Final comment: somehow a 3 hour+ movie set over the period 1926-1934 never manages to mention the Roaring 20sWall St Boom then Crash, The Great Depression, FDR. Also, The Code is never mentioned and the only real movie from the period that's discussed is The Jazz Singer. Bizarre.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I'm glad I saw EEAAO

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..promising..

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but it's just not quite my sort of thing.

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Well, you are a tough audience and that's a good thing. Just on general principles it LOOKS like the front runner (and how funny that megahits Top Gun and Avatar 2 -- its own kind of multiverse media movie--well ONE multiverse place, hah -- aren't really even allowed to win.) The "10 choices" Best Picture ballot has rather further diluted the field, it seems to me, you can win with fewer votes and you aren't that "special" to begin with.

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You also threw in a Babylon review. Nice. I haven't found it on streaming yet. To me the interesting thing there is the way it proves -- TA DA -- the actual current value of Quentin Tarantino in today's movie culture, love him or hate him(I don't love him, but I respect his ability to consistently DELIVER.) See, Brad Pitt is a pretty damn great movie star "on paper" but actually appears in a lot of flops. Margot Robbie became the next "it girl" some time ago with the combination of The Wolf of Wall Street("She arrives! She's for Scorsese! She's naked!") and I. Tonya(She can act!) but...in this movie here, Pitt and Robbie together did bupkus box office. With Tarantino, in his great script and their great roles(yes, her's too) and a great co-star in Leo with great support...they were in a great big hit that will last and last. Babylon...not so much.

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CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I honestly would have preferred to watch the Asian Immigrant Family Drama it kind of buries in multiverse shenanigans and martial arts.

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Well, there you go. Multiverse shenanigans and martial arts don't much draw me anymore either...ESPECIALLY multiverse stuff.

Back in the day I caught those Charlie Kaufman movies "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" and I was impressed and they were brain twisters and I think I GOT it but...do I want to go back to them?

I have enjoyed Kung Fu films all the way back to my youth and "Enter the Dragon" (from that magical year of 1973 and I think I've forgotten to mention that among my male friends, THAT was the gigantic event movie of THAT year, forget about The Exorcist or The Sting or little bitty Charley Varrick.) "Dragon" was the Warner Brothers almost A version of a lot of much cheaper China product(Fists of Fury) that we did at the drive-in. Flash forward to the 2000s...I saw that one "Kung Fu Hustle" that went different places with the genre(I was much more adventurous at the movies then, got out more.)

So I have some personal history with this genre but I'm not sure if EEAAO is gonna be my cup of tea either.

Back to Jamie Lee Curtis.

I researched her dad's Oscar record: one nomination, Best Actor 1958, for The Defiant Ones, in which one reason Tony Curtis got respect for the role was that he TOOK it. Bigger stars like Brando and Kirk Douglas turned down the chance to be chained to Sidney Poitier for a movie.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

So Tony, Janet and Jamie Lee have each gotten an Oscar "at bat." Let's see if Jamie Lee wins.

A flashback: Motion Picture Academy Museum August 1999, Los Angeles. i am in the audience at an "Alfred Hitchcock Centennial Evening" hosted by Peter Bogdanovich on Hitch's 100th. Janet Leigh got to speak. At one point she spoke warmly about daughter Jamie Lee but then said, "You must remember that I have ANOTHER daughter in acting and I think she's just as great!" And that daughter was THERE: Kelly Curtis(older than Jamie Lee) and quite pretty in that same tomboy manner(its hard to say who was prettier, Tony or Janet, but they ended up with boyish girls.) Janet Leigh brought Kelly up on stage with her briefly. Good mom. (Hey, Joe Stefano was there too. At least I got to thank him for his work. )

By the way, this Oscar glow for Jamie Lee hit amongst two other stories in the press: "Psycho" taking Number One movie of all time in Variety's poll and Jamie Lee being noted as a key example of "nepo babies" in Hollywood.

On the Psycho thing, Jamie Lee sent out a statement. You can read it somewhere and I may be wrong in my assessment, but I felt she felt bugged that, even as SHE was getting this EEAAO attention, she STILL had to bow to her mother's ultra-famous work. The statement shifts from praising her mother to wishing her mother were alive to see Jamie Lee's wonderful family all grown up. A nice sentiment but it felt like "ENOUGH about Psycho."

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

On the nepo babie thing. I think that one has been asked and answered in different ways for years now:

Yeah. So what?
Every industry has nepotism power. The Kennedys. The Bushes. The Clintons. The Trumps.

But in Hollywood, this is very interesting to me:

SOME actors childrens become very big stars: Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas. And family connections got roles FROM Francis Coppola for his relatives Talia Shire(his sister) and Nicholas Cage(his nephew.)

But a whole lot of movie star kids act and don't become stars at all. Remember how the movie Cocoon(1985) had Raquel Welch's daughter and Tyrone Power's son? Remember Robert Walker JR(he lived twice as long as his famous dad but wasn't very big as an actor.

Here's one: Jeff Bridges became a bigger star than his father, Lloyd Bridges(more of a TV guy and then a comedy movie guy). But before Jeff Bridges got HIS push, older brother Beau Bridges got his push -- and was actually a star for a few years himself(Gaily Gaily, The Landlord.) And then Jeff outpaced Beau -- Jeff simply had more "star quality." It can be rough on star siblings.

Anyway, Jamie Lee Curtis survived that world(her sister Kelly never became a star.) And it may just bug Jamie Lee a little that she got Halloween PRECISELY BECAUSE her mother was in Psycho. I remember an AP wire photo story of 1978 that put two photos side by side: Janet screaming in the shower in Psycho and Jamie screaming in the closet in Halloween. Hollywood has breaks both good and bad, eh?

Anyway, to me, the nepotism angle on Hollywood doesn't quite work -- with actors at least -- because once you are in the mix, its hard to become a big star. Tom Hanks son Colin is now a pretty respected character guy in movies and TV(Mad Men) but he's not..Tom Hanks.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Demerit points for a lengthy sequence of a highly anachronistic journey into a gay S&M wonderland that starts like something out of David Lynch (with a bit of Boogie Nights mixed in)

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I"ve read of this -- especially the Boogie Nights riff

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Oh, and we get half a second of Psycho (a dark Mother lunges though the shower curtains) immediately cut together with the eye-slitting from Un Chien Andalou and a couple of other films I couldn't identify in the This-Is-Cinema montage that ends the film.

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The "This is Cinema" montage has rather drawn me to see the movie, which is funny because you can find 100s of This is Cinema montages all over YouTube for free. Still, I'm a sucker for movie history. Psycho being linked to Un Chien Andalou is not terribly new. I saw Un Chen Andalou in college and man, I will NEVER forget that eye-slitting, almost threw up -- THATS visceral violence. That eye-slitting has been linked to the Dali sequence in Spellbound(where cartoon eyes are cut with big scissors as symbols of ...what?) and to all the eyes in Psycho...Norman at the peephole, Marion on the bathroom floor...Arbogast's bugged out eyes on the stairs(one critic suggests that the knife slashes Arbogast's eye, but no I think some blood spilled in there, is all.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Final comment: somehow a 3 hour+ movie set over the period 1926-1934 never manages to mention the Roaring 20sWall St Boom then Crash, The Great Depression, FDR. Also, The Code is never mentioned and the only real movie from the period that's discussed is The Jazz Singer. Bizarre.

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It sounds like this Chazelle fellow has taken a bit of a big fall with this one after making his big splash with La La Land (which famously did NOT win Best Picture in its year.) I wasn't all that impressed with La La Land.

And I had this self-loathing issue with it at the end (SPOILERS): As I recall, the story started with Emma Stone as a lowly barista serving rich Hollywood people and being ignored or insulted. By the end of the movie, Emma Stone has become a big giant movie star and gets coffee where she worked ...and treats the staff with respect. But it felt kind of empty: in Hollywood, you can rise from being a nobody to being so MUCH of a somebody that...nobody much can connect with you as a human being anymore. You've left the earth and become a one percenter. A happy ending with a kind of "survivor's mentality" ("I made it! GOODBYE poor friends of my past!)

I can't say I've much liked the Best Pictures of the past 10 years. I haven't even seen all of them. I'm at an age where I generally follow my taste for entertainment...or I watch another old movie.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

And I had this self-loathing issue with it at the end (SPOILERS): As I recall, the story started with Emma Stone as a lowly barista serving rich Hollywood people and being ignored or insulted. By the end of the movie, Emma Stone has become a big giant movie star and gets coffee where she worked ...and treats the staff with respect. But it felt kind of empty

There are a whole bunch of ambivalences and maybe phoninesses expressed at the end of Babylon. And all character arc endings felt arbitrary but also largely cribbed from lots of better movies. It just didn't feel like the film knew what it was saying, or, more positively, that it was the sort of film which spent most of their time on staging big overblown set-pieces and not on what it was that they wanted to say overall. They found *something* in the edit suite which is what we see, but finally nothing stuck that satisfies. One big problem with Babylon is that it doesn't seem that interested in actual silent films (and maddeningly falsifies them as literally silent!). Only their production craziness/dangerousness and the excessive parties that went on behind the scenes really interests the film (Chazelle is evidently much more turned on by, what we might call, later color-excessivists like Fosse, Fellini, Pasolini, Russell, Lynch, PTA, Luhrmann, and Noe). But then when the film wants to get *sort* of elegaic for a 'lost world of silent film' it simply doesn't convince (and when a few frames each of various great silents crop up in the big montage they seem to have come from a different, much less bacchanalian world, literally France and Germany in many cases, than everything Babylon has been obsessed with bringing to us). Babylon can't solve any of its problems without becoming a completely different film, and seems to be aware of that fact by the end. Audiences tend to hate that sort of stuff: 'Don't hint that you know you made a bad movie. Just make a better movie, sheesh!'

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

One source of puzzles about Babylon is that anyone who knows anything about the Silent Film Era can always carp and write alternative scripts in their head all the way through. Margot Robbie's character is based mostly and in details on Clara Bow's real and rumored life. But, among other things, Bow had one of the last really big silent era hits in 1927 with Wings (the first Best Picture winner, smashingly directed by William Wellman, a proto-Hawks director who made a very smooth transition to sound, working with Stanwyck and so on). But Chazelle can't get into all this because there's absolutely *no way* a film as complex as Wings can be made the way Chazelle depicts silents as being made: all outdoors, all at the same time, and mostly in pure one-take, run-and-gun high-energy chaos (Wellman also would have fired Bow if she really was as big a screw-up as Robbie's Bow-figure is). But when you look back over the silent era it's clear that lots of the very biggest silent films from Chaplin and Keaton and Lloyd (think The Gold Rush, The General, Sherlock Jr, and Safety Last) could not have been made the run-and-gun way Chazelle romantically depicts. All the greats' physical comedy required lots of planning and preparation and blocking and detailed set-building to avoid the star being injured or killed, and also takes galore for their performances between the stunts esp. in closeups with their romantic interests. That's to say that the exacting movie-making of Chaplin, Keaton etc.looked a lot more like what movie-making would *generally* become *after* sound (not to mention that in lots of the world movie-making with sound didn't change much about production at all because all dialogue was post-recorded.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

Pitt and Robbie together... With Tarantino, in his great script and their great roles(yes, her's too) and a great co-star in Leo with great support...they were in a great big hit that will last and last. Babylon...not so much.

OUATIH and Bab. do seem destined to be compared both as (i) Pitt/Robbie vehicles and as (ii) relatively big-budget ($80-100 million each) writer-director-auteur pieces the like of which Hollywood doesn't make much these days, and arguably never *did* outside of a brief period in the '70s [I haven't been able to find a budget figure for Day of the Locust (1975) but I'd guess that it was pretty expensive for the time so at least $10 million. That's $50+ million adjusted for inflation, so I'd count it as a comparable-to-Babylon/OUATIH size auterish gamble by a studio. Such gambles have always been rare. Moreover, DotL is a super-downer about not just the losers around Hollywood's studio system in the '30s but all the unhealthy affects of that era of Hollywood on the culture and psychologies of the time, ultimately arguing, possibly facilely, that it's helping create the mad populisms that'll erupt into WW2. Unsuprisingly, it lost a ton of money!]

QT's films with all their genre-deliciouness have *always* made money. Chazelle who (at age 32 IIRC) got the Best Director Oscar QT and Hitchcock never did, appears to be going down the riskier, John Schlesinger-like path of only occasionally making money. To keep playing with studio money, he'll have to do something more commercial and certainly cheaper soon (his Marathon Man perhaps). Anyhow, there are literally dozens of points of comparison between OUATIH and Bab, not least that Bab flat out assaults the viewer whereas OUATIH is a nostalgic, slow-paced, warm bath of a hang out. If you want to make money...

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

SPOILERS FOR BABYLON

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I have now seen Babylon. It was a streaming rental with a two-day maximum. So I watched it all the way through(a LONG way) on Day One and then watched it again on Day Two fast-forwarding through less interesting material to focus a second time(and sometimes third) on the scenes I did like.

Ahem.

I wanna say this first:

Though the reviews had prepared me for the scene I was TOTALLY taken by surprise(quite literally) by the close up of the quivering elephants anal area and sudden explosive diarrhea outwards towards me (you'd think 3-D was INVENTED for this effect, at least with Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and selected John Waters' films.) Anyway, I thought the elephant was going to do his explosive duty AT the decadent opening party. As it turns out, he exploded BEFORE he reached the party, on a long uphill drag on a chain, and upon his keeper(thoroughly drenched) and (less so) upon our dewy eyed Mexican American co-protagonist.

But I further fooled myself. Having read the review wrong, I was DETERMINED that the elephant would yet, AGAIN, explode his bowels AT the party itself -- which indeeds go on and on and decadently on -- and he is brought into the room of guests at a crucial time and...no, he does nothing.

I haven't so stupidly misread a movie since I eagerly anticipated a character to show up for a big showdown at the end of No Country for Old Men and...when the movie ended and he was nowhere to be seen -- I learned that he had been killed a half hour earlier and I had not even known he was KILLED.

Boy did I blow that movie.

Here in 2023(with a 2022 movie) it wasn't such a movie -ruining misread -- but rather the Elephant Took Me By Surprise and -- yecch.

I mean Chazelle makes his statement rather early on -- "I aim to shock and repulse you" and then carries it forth to a golden shower sequence during the Hollywood party(which at least makes sense on its own terms -- of COURSE they did this then, they still do.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

That said, after these initial bouts of bodily fluids, Chazelle actually calms down a bit to cover less repulsive and more familiar ground on 20's Hollywood. There's a lot of sexual innuendo but -- very 2023 -- little to no sex. The whole movie coasts on "feeling."

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OUATIH and Bab. do seem destined to be compared both as (i) Pitt/Robbie vehicles

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Thanks to COVID delays, Chazelle had had a chance to see QATIAH and it seems specific scenes are "homages" to the eariler movie:

For instance, here as in QUAITH, Margot Robbie tries to get into a movie by saying "What if I'm in the movie?" As Sharon Tate, she said the words with a coquettish ultra-innocence, so sweet, so HOPEFUL that this will get her in the movie. As this new dame("Nellie LaRoy"), she's harder edged about it -- "Whattify I'm INNNN the movie?" and then uses a paid shill to help push her in. But its the same basic scene, with the same basic line and I sense: homage.

With more nuance, Brad Pitt transfers almost exactly the fatherly, comforting voice he used to buck up neurotic has been star Leo DiCaprio to HERE keep comforting a sad sack (his first agent?) who keeps getting dumped women. Its like Cliff Booth 2, how nice and supportive and reassuring Pitt is to Rick Dalton 2 ("Hey, this one who just dumped you? She's a lesbian. That was always going to be an uphill battle.")

Honestly, same voice, same accent, same "comforting friend tone," its as if Pitt liked Cliff Booth so much he decided to move him into this new role.

I have read that Leo and Brad both received their pitch copies of the script of "Babylon" while working on QATIH together. I wonder how THAT went:

Brad: So...uh...I see you got that Babylon script.
Leo: Yeah, I did.
Brad: Well, it just so happens they gave me a copy too. Through my agent.
Leo: Like I did.
Brad: You, uh...read it?
Leo: Enough of it.
Brad: You, uh...liked it?
Leo: Enough. What about you? You read it?
Brad: Just started it. Pretty good.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

If Leo and Brad BOTH went for the "Jack Conrad" silent star role, I suppose it came down to agents and price and schedule.

But I will guess that Leo passed because Jack Conrad is yet ANOTHER Hollywood has been in the making and...why do it twice?

Besides, Brad PITT'S Hollywood hasbeen in the making does it much more suave and lighthearted and thoughtful. Its a light performance pretty much to the end.

CONT

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

HERE keep comforting a sad sack (his first agent?) who keeps getting dumped women.

That's George Munn, who's supposed to be an old producer & friend of Jack's. I think we're led to believe that Munn was a creative guy and that he did a lot of what we'd now think of as directing on those older pictures too. IIRC it was Irving Thalberg (whom we meet in the picture) who pioneered and codified the more hands-off, more director-inflating, role for producers that then became standard as Director status and power grew and grew throughout the studio period.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

I have now seen Babylon. It was a streaming rental with a two-day maximum. So I watched it all the way through(a LONG way) on Day One and then watched it again on Day Two fast-forwarding through less interesting material to focus a second time(and sometimes third) on the scenes I did like.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

One way in which Babylon and OUATIH, not to mention a lot of PTA movies, are very comparable: they're both quite episodic, and both virtually invite at home viewer to create their own cuts of the film by omitting certain episodes (more languid or more excessive eps to taste).

---

Its indeed funny how episodic a LOT of movies are these days. Thanks to YouTube, individual scenes can be cut up into "segment" and take on a life of their own.

Speaking of episodic: both North by Northwest and Psycho are episodic journey films puntucated by major set-piece episodes(action, murders) and episodes WITHOUT action or murder. Psycho especially. Marion talks to Norman in the parlor. Marion gets murdered in the shower. Arbogast talks to Norman in the office and on the porch. Arbogast gets murdered on the stairs -- the "talk" episodes FEED the murder episodes.

---

I know I've only seen either OUATIH or Licorice Pizza once all the way through, and ever since I've been very selective.

---

I was very serious in my own "code" when I gave The Irishman and QUATIH a "tie" as my favorite movies of 2019, because each one was a little bit flawed to me, neither of them was quite perfect enough to rise above the other. With The Irishman, it doesn't really kick in until Pacino's Hoffa arrives about an hour in. With QUAITH, Tarantino felt a little too self indulgent with the overlong and undercooked scenes on the Lancer set(for Leo) and in Westwood's movie district(for Margot.) All of Brad's scenes were perfect however -- which was the case, I might add in "Inglorious Basterds." That movie only hits on all cylinders when Brad is on screen...which is surprisingly not a lot.

---

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Funny thing about my new favorite Licorice Pizza and me. I've mentioned how I put in The Trouble with Harry from time to time just to watch and listen to the opening, soothing shots and music that introduce us to the "Vermont Brigadoon" countryside and town. I pull the DVD when Jerry Mathers arrives.

Well, with Licorice Pizza, it is sort of "pre-set on streaming" and I STILL like to watch the first scenes up to a certain scene...and then turn it off. Just those first 20 minutes fill me with calm and nostalgia and a wonderful warm feeling that helps in these troubled times: The scenes, in order:

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

ONE: Opening "American Graffiiti" cherry bomb scene(I don't much like it, but it announces tone.)
TWO: Gary flirts with Alana on the photo line (PERFECTLY written and acted, beautifully shot, with that sweet love song "July Tree" on the soundtrack.)
THREE Gary takes care of his younger brother -- we see how they love each other and how good Gary is -- and announces "I've met the girl I'm going to marry today...and you're going to be my best man."
FOUR: Gary alone at the bar of Tail of the Cock. The SECOND the piano man starts the notes of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," Alana enters and you can FEEL Gary's elation...a miracle has just happened. But not an attainable one, yet ("Stop making googly eyes at me, please.")
FIVE: Gary and Alana on a "grown up" type date in the dining room...but both of them are kids, no matter the age difference. Charming. "I'm not going to forget you, and you're not going to forget me."
SIX: Their walk home in the dark. Perfect sweet and yearning music The struggle to get a phone number(she acts like she shouldn't but clearly WANTS him to have the number, wants to be with him.) She says "Look we're not girlfriend and boyfriend," but clearly she wants it to be. She trails off..."We're...you know..." Gary knows she loves him, its in his wise face. Charming.
SEVEN: Alana arrives at her house to be given heavy questioning by her heavily accented dad ("Whoa whoa whoa...where you been?") A 25 -year old woman treated like a teenage girl.
EIGHT: Alana enters the house, mother and sisters all failing to launch on the couch(Licorice Pizza played to full houses in Westwood Village for a month -- Haim fans -- I can only picture a standing ovation when the mom and sisters were shown.)
NINE: Alana falls down in frustration and anger on her little bed in her cell-like bedroom as older sister Este grills her ("Did you go on a date? Looks like it was a long date.") I think Alana knows she has fallen in love and wants this relationship...but knows she can't have it. Oh, the pain.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

And then I turn it off. The next scene is with the Japanese restaurant man, its not like I don't like the scene, but "Licorice Pizza" is now going to he a bit more "plot episodic."

I think the Trouble With Harry opening takes about three minutes. This stretch of Licorice Pizza is more like 20. But they both have the same effect on me: they make me feel GOOD, instantaneously.

That's a gift of the movies.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

One big problem with Babylon is that it doesn't seem that interested in actual silent films (and maddeningly falsifies them as literally silent!).

---

I'm not so sure about that. We know that Chazelle researched the silent era and read the seminal work "The Parade's Gone By." I don't think he is THAT dense.

Rather, I think in the key scene where Nellie first sees herself as a star on screen with a full house, Chazelle STYLIZES the silent movie as...totally SILENT. Nellie's visual power on screen -- her ability to cry and to smile and her offbeat beauty -- are totally SEPARATED OUT from ANY sound. On purpose. As a gimmick. And the crowd goes wild and "a star is born." But -- and I love this touch from the beginning, Nellie tells Manny, "I'm already a star" BEFORE she makes one movie. Its in her HEAD...she is ALREADY a star, all she needs to be discovered and she will take her rightful place in Hollywood. (I'll bet a LOT of stars felt that way about themselves -- I've read that Eddie Murphy always knew he'd be famous, for instance.)

---

Only their production craziness/dangerousness and the excessive parties that went on behind the scenes really interests the film

---

Well, I suppose it is the old "work hard/play hard" canard. These people go balls to the wall in EVERYTHING -- work and play, and moderation is verboten.

CONT

[–] ElizabethJoestar (946) 2 years ago

I plan on seeing Babylon eventually just because it gets such severe love or hate reactions from people, but oh my God, they seriously make it look like silent films didn't have musical accompaniment? That's like Silent Era 101 information-- and Chazelle claims he did so much research!!

I'm going to need so much alcohol to get through this. I can usually handle some levels of inaccuracy and anachronism, but this sounds and looks so bad that Singin in the Rain will look like a documentary by comparison.

Honestly, between the obnoxious trailers, the inaccuracies, and the fabled cinema montage at the end (a trope I dislike-- always feels manipulative and gooey), I'm going to have to try really hard not to go into this thing with a bad attitude.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

@Eliz. I look forward to hearing what you make of Babylon. I think it's a serious failure but it's also sort of fascinating at the same time (whereas, for example, both Elvis and Blonde this last year struck me as huge failures that also weren't the slightest bit interesting or worth rewatching).

I've just been thinking that another film Babylon reminds me of a bit is (bizarrely) Oliver Stone's JFK! JFK tries to overwhelm/overload its audience at almost every turn just as Babylon does, and Chazelle, who *knows* that Kenneth Anger's infamous book Hollywood Babylon is mostly BS nonetheless draws extensively on it (very hurtfully to Clara Bow's descendants and others I'd add). He defends his drawing on HB by saying that HB is a useful myth much the way Stone defended all his conspiracist nonsense at the time as being useful myth or counter-myth or whatever it was. Anyhow, I dare say that *both* JFK and Babylon probably benefit from an audience using a bit of alcohol or something to turn its rational side down for their duration.

[–] ElizabethJoestar (946) 2 years ago

Yeah, I've read that about Stone-- essentially to overlook his poor history and instead see his films as mythology, that which is not literally true but is true in a deeper sense.

I'm going to guess from what I've read BABYLON's myth is about Hollywood itself-- that the business is sleazy and dehumanizing and awful, but hey cinema is grand. I guess. I'll have to see. That sentiment reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki's THE WIND RISES, which also goes free and easy with historical fact to reach for myth instead-- there, the film is loosely about Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero plane. A lot of the film is made up whole cloth, but Miyazaki is most interested in questions about morality and art. Is the beauty of art justified if it must come from human suffering? It's an interesting film, one where I can overlook inaccuracies because it says so much about the human condition. Then again, the film doesn't involve an extended orgy scene (I sat through CALIGULA years ago and recall the big debauchery scenes were boring as hell-- I so expect the same from BABYLON) or an elephant spraying the camera with feces... THE WIND RISES is elegant and harrowing, but BABYLON just looks juvenile and shrill in its presentation.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I've just been thinking that another film Babylon reminds me of a bit is (bizarrely) Oliver Stone's JFK! JFK tries to overwhelm/overload its audience at almost every turn just as Babylon does,

---

Its a good analogy...both films clock in over three hours and just jam the senses with visuals and ideas(I don't know if it was the first time, and Natural Born Killers would do it again, but Stone in JFK intercut black and white footage with color footage with grainy footage with Panavision Perfect footage and gave us a visually conflicting vision even as we watched it. I think this may have been as much the auteurism of DP Robert Richardson as of Stone. BTW, Richardson works a lot for Tarantino and said "Tarantino is the greatest director I've ever worked with," which I saw as a dig at Stone. Who's kind of over, yes?

---

I'll note this: I have no problems with the length of Babylon and I would not cut a thing. That's the vision Chazelle chose to offer us, and that's the length it should be. Same with JFK (which as a "thriller" of limited truthful content, nonetheless moves like wildfire, three hours feel like two.)

---

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

and Chazelle, who *knows* that Kenneth Anger's infamous book Hollywood Babylon is mostly BS nonetheless draws extensively on it (very hurtfully to Clara Bow's descendants and others I'd add). He defends his drawing on HB by saying that HB is a useful myth much the way Stone defended all his conspiracist nonsense at the time as being useful myth or counter-myth or whatever it was.

---

When Stone announced his JFK as a "counter myth" to the myth of the murder itself, I sort of threw up my hands. About the only truth we know is that JFK was killed...and the movie JFK gives us that head exploding over and over and over again to "rub in" the horror and infamy of the murder -- all those millions of votes made moot by ...two?... bullets.

My take on JFK was always this: that one great expository scene (with great, portentous, scary John Williams music) where Donald Sutherland "explains" the conspiracy to Costner and all the things done to make sure the murder happened(security being pulled on the parade route, etc.) Was that talk TRUE? If so, conspirators killed JFK. If not...well, we just don't know.

---

Anyhow, I dare say that *both* JFK and Babylon probably benefit from an audience using a bit of alcohol or something to turn its rational side down for their duration.

---

I've always admired those who watch movies drunk or (evidently better for the senses) stoned. 2001 was famous as a movie to watch while on grass or acid (especially the final stargate sequence.)

But...I just can't get the dosage right. Example: I drank too much before seeing Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) with friends(I wasn't driving) and I was SO drunk that the movie seemed to last 10 minutes and was over. I said "what the hell? That movie was only 10 minutes long?" as it ended and I was told: "No, you fell asleep or were passed out for two hours." Oh. I went and saw it again, sober.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

[I haven't been able to find a budget figure for Day of the Locust (1975) but I'd guess that it was pretty expensive for the time so at least $10 million. That's $50+ million adjusted for inflation, so I'd count it as a comparable-to-Babylon/OUATIH size auterish gamble by a studio. Such gambles have always been rare.

--

Well , Schesinger parlayed his Midnight Cowboy Oscars into some real cred in the 70's. Sunday Bloody Sunday came later.

Day of the Locust came out in 1975, a year before Schesinger's all-star thriller Marathon Man. Both for Paramount. Perhaps to get him for Marathon Man, they had to indulge him for Day of the Locust?

Day of the Locust is a BIG influence on Babylon, you ask me. William Atherton's dewy-eyed unrequited crush on floozie-ish Karen Black in Locust here becomes the Mexican-American Manny's dewy-eyed crush on Nellie...and in both movies, the woman rather leads on the man and sees him more as a friend than a potential lover.

There are differences: Nellie really DOES become a star; it never happens -- was never GOING to happen -- for Karen Black. Moreover, doesn't DOTL take place in the SOUND era...the 30s or such?

Recall that I actually went on The Day of the Locust's biggest set -- the soundstage version of Grauman's Chinese Theater and Hollywood boulevard -- I was on the Rear Window soundstage 20years later!" I watched Schesinger direct. I had a vested interest in that movie and saw it opening night but -- its lost to the sands of time now. Not shown much. I guess I could order it from Amazon.

--

DotL is a super-downer about not just the losers around Hollywood's studio system in the '30s

--

Aha. The 30s!

---

but all the unhealthy affects of that era of Hollywood on the culture and psychologies of the time, ultimately arguing, possibly facilely, that it's helping create the mad populisms that'll erupt into WW2.

---

Interesting points.

---

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Unsuprisingly, it lost a ton of money!]

--

Well, I think Paramount had Oscar hopes for DOTL that didn't materialize. Interesting to me: Karen Black was never again "sold" as a major star as she was in DOTL. It was her big chance, and she went into Family Plot next BUT...she didn't seem like a very big star in Family Plot and within a few years her short-lived major star career was over. But she survived.

Note in passing: even though he gets her to agree to marry him, I don't think Manny ever consummates with Nellie in Babylon...nor did Atherton consummate with Karen Black in DOTL(she goes for a rough, earthy Mexican-American instead.) Both of these movies demonstrate the power that SOME women have over SOME men, who will put up with practically anything to try to "get out of the friend zone."

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

(Chazelle is evidently much more turned on by, what we might call, later color-excessivists like Fosse, Fellini, Pasolini, Russell, Lynch, PTA, Luhrmann, and Noe).

---

Yes, I expect with the now-famous elephant scene and the near-end descent into the decadent underground caves(with ever lower LEVELS), Chazelle is trying to "go big" for surrealism and disgust.

Fellini came up a lot in Babylon reviews. I mean, who the heck tries to copy FELLINI any more? (Fellini was pen pals with Hitchcock by the way, felt The Birds was very Fellini-esque.)

It reminds me how way back in my youth in 1970(I think) there was a coffee table book in book stores called "Fellini Satyricon" to promote his recent, gross film. The photos within rather repulsed me, but I knew this Fellini guy was a big deal. That whole "serious cinema" book craze of the 70's is lost now -- another one of my "I was so much older than, I'm younger than that now" experiences as I live in the teenagerish , safe Marvel era of today.

There is also a lot of Scorsese in Babylon -- fast moving camera movements intercut at superfast speed to music. I think more people copycat Scorsese these days than Hitchcock -- HIS copy cat period was the 60s/70s/80s.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Demerit points for a lengthy sequence of a highly anachronistic journey into a gay S&M wonderland that starts like something out of David Lynch (with a bit of Boogie Nights mixed in)

---

And -- apropos to this movie -- a GROSS copycatting of Boogie Nights. In Boogie Nights, our naïve heroes are stuck in a room with a drug-crazed gangster as a stoned Asian-American kid keeps setting off loud firecrackers that make us jump and hurt our ears.

In Babylon our naive heroes are stuck on a patio with a crazed(drug crazed) gangster zombie(Tobey Maguire) while his henchman, to coin a phrase -- keeps "hocking a loogie" out of his mouth outwards. MORE bodily fluids.

This tense sequence has a BRILLIANT twist which ups the suspense(I loved it) and I will SPOILER share it here.

Manny and some other Hollywood lower down have shown up with $85,000 in cash to pay the gambling debt of the hapless Nellie(truly a woman who cares nothing about herself or others.) Surrounded by dangerous, murderous men -- and en route to that dungeon of decadent doom -- Manny learns the the $85,000 his friend has procured is...fake movie set money! The suspense is palpable -- when will the bad guys discover the fake money? Will Manny and his friend escape before that moment? Great stuff, nice scripting.

---And ends up *directly* restaging/stealing the first scene of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible (2004).

--

I've seen Babylon so I must ask -- WHICH scene in the dungeon is that?

---

I have no idea why this was in an already long, already full of excess movie.

--

He must like the scene, I guess...this Noe fellow REALLY goes all the way in gross.
From what I've read.

---
CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Oh, and we get half a second of Psycho (a dark Mother lunges though the shower curtains) immediately cut together with the eye-slitting from Un Chien Andalou and a couple of other films I couldn't identify in the This-Is-Cinema montage that ends the film.

---

I was surprised by the comparative short shrift given to classic black and white movies in the movie-ending montage. Chazelle moves rather quickly to "modern day" color SciFi classics like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park (Spielberg gets TWO clips -- Jurassic Park and Raiders.) An Avatar clip is even in there!(Did Chazelle know he was going up against Avatoar 2?)

Psycho was lucky to make the cut at all but that shower scene IS iconic,and matching it up to Chien Andalou was pretty smart. Still, what a sparse truncated clips scene.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I find Babylon after La La Land rather analogous to how Michael Cimino followed the Best Picture Oscar winner The Deer Hunter with the all-time career killing fiasco Heaven's Gate. Its an old Hollywood story -- a director wins a bunch of Oscars and gets a hit and so the studio give him carte blanche and...he blows it.

I mean , there are TEN slots available for Best Picture, and Babylon couldn't get ANY of them(and look what DID make it.) Margot Robbie gives her emotional all here -- very impressive but -- bupkus. Brad Pitt recently got his Oscar so I suppose he wasn't looking to get noticed this time. But none of the other actors made it, either.

What I kept finding with Chazelle(who wrote the film too, right?) is that when he reached big speeches for characters -- particularly two for Brad Pitt(one in which he insults his snobbish new Broadway actress bride, the other in which he confronts harridan gossip columnist Jean Smart) -- he failed. He can't write at the level to which he aspires. He should have hired somebody else. Worse, Pitt's speeches -- and Smart's retort are...pretty standard stuff.

That said, Smart's speech is on the money to Pitt, along the lines of "Your time has passed as a star. It was great, but its over." Has been.

I"ve often felt that today's has been stars will never descend to poverty and ruin like the old silent stars and some Golden Age stars. Today's stars simply earn too much money AS stars, and remain marketable for straight-to-streaming fare, or streaming series. There is ALWAYS work for a "name."

Take Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was just plain lucky to hit in the 80's instead of the 60's. In the 60's he would have been stuck in gladiator movies and as "the muscleman" on a caper team.

But in the 80's, movies were like TV series, musclemen were worshiped, and a limited actor like Arnold could go "straight to the top"(James Cameron helped by putting him in two classics and a hit.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

But soon Arnold's carnival-barker self-promotion act ("Let's watch me become a superstar TOGETHER) looked tinny and desperate as Cameron abandoned him, he was removed from movies(Planet of the Apes, I Am Legend) and forced back down to lower budgets.

Has been.

But not for long. B-movies, indies, streaming...he came back in a "limited edition." And even became California Governor for awhile(a sneaky way to hide from his movie failures and keep up the self-promotion.)

The Jack Conrads and Nellies of Babylon had no such safety nets.

By the way, I had to freeze frame the movie to read Nellie's fate. I thought the gangsters gunned her down over her gambling debts but no -- a newspaper article says she died of an overdose in a cheap Hollywood hotel room. Did the gangsters do it? Or self-inflicted?

So Babylon is really about two characters (our leads, Brad and Margot) failing big...even as the diverse down-the-list characters survive.

---

It helped to read some of Chazelle's interviews about Babylon influences -- for instance, the helpful no-nonsense female director who helps guide Nellie through silent and sound is based on Dorothy Arzner -- who invented the boom mike to follow the actors around. We see the fictional Arzner fight the "fixed boom mike" and how it constrains Nellie from acting.

Chazelle also notes a short-lived series of "African American musiscal shorts" in the 30s. Our film's main black character -- a fine musician --is forced to wear BLACKFACE to look as dark as his fellow black musicians in one of those shorts. Otherwise the short won't sell. He does it -- but walks thereafter. (Interesting: it is Mexican-American Manny -- now a movie exec -- who cajoles the black musician into this humiliation -- "Your fellow musicians won't be able to feed their families if this short can't sell").

Anyway, it seems that Chazelle used his research either for "reality" or to ignore reality(the silent film that is totally SILENT in the theater.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Surprise...yes, I kind of think that Babylon is Chazelle's Heaven's Gate(and this is weird -- he uses some of the same music from La La Land here -- its like a sequel), but overall, I really liked it.

I like Brad PItt as a movie star and he "carried" the movie on his stardom all the way through even as all collapsed around him. Though his yelling at his Broadway snob bride played poorly to me. He doesn't have Leo's gift for screaming at the top of his lungs. Nice twist: the snob actress (played by Katherine Waterston) nonetheless stays with Pitt after the tirade...but ends up just one of his six or seven sequential brides. He gets married to one as soon as the divorce ink is dry from the earlier one.

As with Katherine Waterson, Babylon is filled with known people in bit parts ANOTHER Pitt wife is Olivia Wilde, seen yelling at him for about 30 seconds: "If you keep talking in Italian, I will divorce you!" He keeps talking in Italian -- shades of Inglorious Basterds -- and she DOES divorce him. Just like he wanted. There's this Eastern European woman he fancies, you see, for his NEXT bride(en route to the Broadway snob)...

And oh, that's none other than the daughter of Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon -- Jennifer Grant -- as a disconcertingly old dowager (Cary's daughter IS now old) insulted by Nellie (in another too-simple scene) right before Nellie throws up her entire meal on...William Randolph Heart? (MORE bodily fluids.)

I very much LIKED the scene where Nellie proves herself a great SILENT star as guided by the no-nonsense female director. I very much LIKED the scene where Nellie proves herself a SOUND star even as the no-nonsense female director ( and her foul-mouthed martinet male assistant) fight every technical glitch under the sun to get that sound take(killing a technican in a too-hot sound booth as a cost of doing business.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Yep, from ALL of Brad Pitt's story to MOST of Margot Robbie's story through ALL of the stories of the side characters(especially Jean Smart, who when called a cockroach by Pitt notes that cockroaches survive, movie stars don't), I was entertained by Babylon even as I watched a lot of it fail.

Tobey McGuire: now forever known as a real life poker room bully(as played by schmucky Michael Cera in my favorite movie of 2017, Molly's Game), McGuire here returns to the screen MILKING that villainy as a weird gangster type(with red circles around his eyes -- sleeplessness? Drugs?) who nonetheless pushes his mediocre movie ideas on the terrified movie exes with their fake money. (""So it turns out this supersmart kid was always s a 50-year old MAN!") And that descent into hell sequence amused me along the lines of "that's all they got? THAT's decadent? " How dull.)

One more thing(for now, I guess.) I love how the movie opens in "Bel Air, California" and we see open fields as far as the eye can see. I can attest by the 60's, Bel Air was filled with mansions and Alfred Hitchcock lived in one of them. The idea that Bel Air was once "wide open spaces" is perhaps one of the nastier jokes in Babylon and its the first joke on screen.

[–] swanstep (2715) 2 years ago

I was entertained by Babylon even as I watched a lot of it fail.

That's my reaction too at bottom. While many scenes rub me the wrong way or have some details in them that strike me as phoney or misconceived ("too much", '"too print-the-legend-y"), there is *something* to be said for pure giddiness/exhiliration/grandiosity and its entertainments. I know I'm going to be pulled back to rewatch Babylon a fair bit. In fact, for one thing, I'm looking forward to watching, e.g., just all of Robbie's scenes, just all of Pitt's scenes to see how they play/feel. And I want to watch all of the actual film-making scenes by themselves. First time through, for example, the first scene of film-making (in parallel, in a field) occurs almost as an extension of the big party the night before. I'd like to see it by itself to feel whether its own riotousness is earned.

I'm pretty sure I'm never going to rewatch Elvis or Blonde (two other big-budget over-the-top period pieces that struck me as disasters) in the same way. Note that in the grand scheme of things White Noise has been an even bigger bomb than Babylon. Netflix allegedly spent $100 million on it (a hell of a lot for an absurdist campus comedy set in the '80s - albeit one with a big action set-piece at its center that recently came true in Ohio! Possibly the most serendipitous real disaster for a movie since The China Syndrome with Three Mile Island!) but it got few kind reviews and no Oscar love whatsoever (not even a nom. for what was pretty clearly the movie original song and scene of the year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJblPY5hVHI ). Netflix is never doing that again... Noah Baumbach and Damian Chazelle are both going to have to find more commercial projects promptly to keep playing with studio $. Yet I really enjoyed White Noise. It's not a complete success by any means (and I could see how it would drive lots of people nuts) but I had a ball with it.