Babylon

"Ain't life grand?" Oh my god I hate myself for deciding not to go to see this in the cinema in 2022 because it only had a 7 on IMDb 😭 I swear, all those self proclaimed cinephiles over there are a bunch of larpers who don't have anything better to do than masturbating to Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and spending the rest of their day circle jerking over each other's reviews on some other boring ass Japanese golden age movie because it makes them look like an intellectual with refined taste. But when Damien Chazelle produces a 3 hour masterpiece that is a lot less boring and better on literally every aspect actually, it suddenly is not niche enough for their so called refined taste (I guess their brains are conditioned to only like boring movies). I fully disagree with those fake ass bitches, Babylon is one of those masterpieces like La La Land or Once upon a time in Hollywood that grip you from the beginning till the end, despite their long runtime. Funnily enough the movie explicitly criticizes that mainstream cinema is seen as low art, which is exactly what these IMDb larpers are doing. Seriously, if you are a fan of cinema, you are going to love this movie. I have seen people describe movies like Tarantino's Once upon a time in Hollywood as odes to cinema, but Babylon is actually the undisputed king of all those movies if you ask me. Especially the montage at the end is amazing if you have seen (some of) the classics, though that is just a nice bonus and not necessary at all. I think by now we can confidently state that Chazelle is a huge fan of, and takes a lot of inspiration from, Singing in the rain (which in its turn is heavily influenced by the plot of Sunset Boulevard, just two years older). Both La La Land and Babylon are heavily inspired by Singing in the rain, but neither fails to create their own identity. Where La La Land copies the audiovisual elements and the romance genre but switches up the plot, Babylon does the opposite: it copies parts of the plot from Singing in the Rain and the themes from Sunset Boulevard, but changes the audiovisual style. Man I love everything about this movie: how it looks and sounds, the pacing, the humour, the grandness of it all, and the melancholic/nostalgic ending. It really makes you think about all the people behind the older movies who have passed away a long time ago by now. They themselves have been eternalized on the screen, but I often wonder how much of their stories and their memories have actually gotten lost in time, like tears in rain... Only reason I don't rate it higher is because it should have been like 30 minutes shorter imo, though it wasn't boring at all.