Babylon
don't you love it when you end up loving a movie so much more than u expected?
i wasn't really planning on watching this (something about the colour palette of the poster just smells sleazy), but I'm so glad i did. between the two love letters to all of cinema released in the last ten years starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, this one easily blows Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood out of the water (sorry tarantino, but this one isn't even close my guy).
an elephant shits all over a guy's face in the first 5 minutes? check. brad pitt speaks italian in his first lines. margot robbie fights a snake. an alligator is lurking in a seedy underground dungeon. a crazy guy eats live rats. evil tobey maguire jumpscare. singin in the rain is referenced heavily. a chinese lady sings about stroking pussies. someone vomits on a rug. someone very visibly pisses their pants. fake cum is squirted everywhere in a party.
i love this movie. it's absurd, it's outrageously hilarious, it's dumb, it's heartbreaking, it's poetic, and it's just so entertaining. Once upon a time felt like 3 hours because it wasn't very engaging; this felt like 3 hours because of how much of a rollercoaster ride it was. the picture it paints of Hollywood in these 3 hours is as vivid as a work capturing the grandiosity of Bablyon: all the sex, the debauchery, the drugs, the racism, the terrible working conditions, the competition, the public image; but also the magic, the satisfaction one feels when it all pieces together, the way cinema makes us feel something. all beautiful stuff, and it works so goddamn well I'm baffled.
this isn't a feel good comedy either. it's actually way darker and sadder than i expected. but that's what the best movies do, don't they? they make u feel things u didn't even know u could feel before. they catch u off guard, as though they knew that you thought you had the movie figured out, and then prove you wrong. i never knew i would cry in a movie where I'm supposed to take tobey maguire seriously as a terrifying mob boss.
the acting is phenomenal too. brad pitt is always a delight, but here he's doing something surprisingly more than the usual brad pitt role. he's way more vulnerable than in the other roles he plays, and for the first time i think i actually find a brad pitt character... relatable? I don't think I've seen diego calva in anywhere else, but he is a fantastic male lead too. and margot robbie is a blast, but that's to be expected. the actors just seem to really soak up everything around them, unlike once upon a time where i felt Tarantino was heavily underutilising their acting range.
watching singin in the rain just a few days before this, not even knowing this had anything to do with it, was just the perfect coincidence. because everything about that masterpiece complements this one. this is like the grittier older brother of singin in the rain, and every bit just as beautiful, just in a wholly different way.
and finally, can we just agree that this movie has the best ending scene of the decade so far? my face was genuinely like manuel in that scene. absolute cinema.