It's unsurprising how many have compared "Babylon," director Damien Chazzelle's super-charged elegy for early Hollywood, to "Boogie Nights" and "Singin' in the Rain." In its tensions -- talent and luck, apocryphal myth-making and the lesser-known truths, moral incongruity and creative spunk, and the critique of an apathetic business that nonetheless creates empathetic works -- Chazelle's "Babylon" bears some lineage to both films.
If you only focus on those influences, however, you will miss the primary tension: The fight between identity and assimilation. These politics, as viewed through the film's protagonist, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), position Chazelle's behemoth vision closer to "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," "Medicine for Melancholy," and "Bamboozled" as an assimilation narrative affixed to a fable.
In Joe Talbot's "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," amid a gentrifying city selling the remnants of its Black heritage to the highest bidder, Jimmie Fails (played by...
If you only focus on those influences, however, you will miss the primary tension: The fight between identity and assimilation. These politics, as viewed through the film's protagonist, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), position Chazelle's behemoth vision closer to "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," "Medicine for Melancholy," and "Bamboozled" as an assimilation narrative affixed to a fable.
In Joe Talbot's "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," amid a gentrifying city selling the remnants of its Black heritage to the highest bidder, Jimmie Fails (played by...
- 12/29/2022
- by Robert Daniels
- Slash Film
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