Reviews

Damien Chazelle's BABYLON, with Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Jean Smart, etc, is an episodic story set in the Hollywood movie business from 1926 to 1935.

The characters are based on real people from the era: Pitt is John Gilbert, Jean Smart is Louella Parsons/Adela Rogers St. John, Robbie is Clara Bow/Joan Crawford, etc. Even Irving Thalberg makes an appearance.

At times, explaining the title, the film seems to be dramatizing Kenneth Anger's HOLLYWOOD BABYLON page by page, or redoing THE DAY OF THE LOCUST in more explicit and disgusting ways. It's probably worth seeing when you know the period but ...

THE DOWNSIDES: It's way too long, over 3 hours. The central Robbie character is so irresponsible, deceitful, selfish, manipulative and out of control, she arouses no empathy. Pitt is the sole sympathetic character, but he's sort of peripheral.

Chazelle gets the locations and the cars right, but the tone is all off. I never felt for a moment I was in the 1920s or 1930s. Every second word in the dialogue is f-- or motherf--, which I believe were not common swear words in that era. (People said g.d. A lot.) Robbie looks and acts strictly 21st century. Even her costumes are modern.

Saving the worst for last, Chazelle seems to have been stung by criticism that his LA LA LAND (which I enjoyed) was too sweet and sentimental a take on Hollywood. BABYLON overcorrects, to put it mildly.

The first third of the movie begins with an elephant spraying people with diarrhea, then centers on an orgiastic Hollywood party so spectacularly grotesque and disgusting, it makes Fellini's SATYRICON look like a nursery rhyme. It goes on and on: naked people grossly copulating, casual violence, overdose deaths, fat epicene producers having prostitutes urinate all over them, etc.

The best scenes are in the middle. The very best is when Diego Calva (who plays the audience POV character, like Nick Carraway in THE GREAT GATSBY or Todd in THE DAY OF THE LOCUST) finds a guy who can repay Robbie's huge gambling debts to a mobster who has threatened to have his guys throw acid on her face if she doesn't pay up.

They hand the bag of cash to the mob boss (Tobey Maguire) , who proceeds to regale them with his idiotic screenplay ideas. Diego is amazed his buddy could raise the money so quickly, so the guy whispers it was easy -- it's prop money from the studio!

There's no escape so the guys sit there sweating as the mobster drones on with the bag of phony money next to him. A suspense scene worthy of Hitchcock. The moment when the boss discovers the money is fake is well handled also.

But then the mob boss for no good reason leads the guys down into a horrifying, almost pitch dark sex club. They descend from level to level, like Dante's Inferno, with the activities getting more and more sickening and depraved. Chazelle seems to be commenting somehow on present day depravity, but the point isn't clear, and the viewer experience is like wading thru excrement.

If Chazelle wanted to prove he can be as revolting as Tarantino or DePalma, he succeeds, but after 3 hours I still didn't understand what he wants us to get out of this gruesome, repugnant cavalcade. Maybe he felt the shock scenes would stir controversy, sending people to theatres to see what all the fuss was about. He miscalculated. Audiences were turned off by all the grossness and the film totally flopped.

Chazelle is very talented. I hope now he's gotten this repellent nonsense out of his sytem, he'll make a much better movie next time.

No wonder Walter Murch was never allowed to direct another movie!

The producers and some commentors claim that RETURN TO OZ is "more faithful" to L.Frank Baum's immortal Oz books, but this is ridiculous to anyone who's actually read them. The beloved 1939 movie takes liberties, but it's more faithful in every way, both to the letter and the spirit of the books.

The only things in this movie that come from the books are the Wheelers, the Nome King, and Princess Langwidere, who is confusingly renamed Mombi. But even these elements are garbled, repurposed and made less effective.

In the book, Mombi is an evil old crone given a few magical powers in return for concealing the kidnapped true heir to the throne of Oz, Ozma. To hide the princess, Mombi has turned her into a boy named Pip, whom she treats like a slave. Pip is the hero of the second book who, in the final shocking twist, turns out to be Ozma. The third book brings back Dorothy and includes Langwidere, the Wheelers and the Nome King's collection of ornaments.

RTO awkwardly and confusingly jams bits and names from both books into a new story so bad everyone involved with it should have hung their heads in shame. It begins with a sequence so wrong-headed you have to laugh. Auntie Em delivers Dorothy to a mad doctor who straps the girl to a table so he and an evil nurse can lobotomize her with primitive shock treatments, while brain-damaged lunatics howl in agony throughout the building. No, this is not "faithful" to Baum. It made me think, did anyone at Disney read the script before greenlighting it?

But the fun is just beginning. Then Dorothy and the little girl who saved her from the mad doctor are swept away in a river. Dorothy survives by clinging to some flotsam, but the other girl apparently drowns -- a horrible death which seems to disturb Dorothy so little she doesn't even react to it.

Dorothy then happens upon her old friends, the Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion, distressingly turned to stone, but doesn't seem to care. Her new friends, like TikTok, are animated pretty well, but viewers can't emotionally invest in puppets or early CGI or whatever they are. The huge emotional impact of the 1939 classic is reduced to mild dismay in this one.

By turns morbid and inert, this movie deserved to bomb with audiences and critics. I give it two stars for Fairuza Balk, who does her best with what little she's given to do as Dorothy, and the sequence with Mombi's head collection, which -- unlike the rest of the movie -- is well-staged and shot.

It helps knowing Sternberg's previous films to appreciate this unique masterpiece, a strange and utterly original summation of the themes that obsessed him throughout his career.

Some posters here complain about the all-Japanese dialog not being subtitled and the constant narration undercutting suspense and making it hard to get "involved" in the story, as one expects to do with most films. This is perfectly understandable since what Sternberg is doing here is totally original, daring and unexpected.

These distancing tactics are deliberate artistic choices. Sternberg doesn't want us to be caught up in the story. He wants us to cooly observe the characters as the narrator does, the way a biologist might observe animals in a lab. He chooses the most foreign (to Western viewers) milieu, to show the universality of human desire, conflict and violence.

Everything adds to the sense of contemplation and detachment. Sternberg traveled halfway around the world only to shoot the film in a studio! Where he creates a jungle as stylized and surreal as you'd find in a Japanese woodcut, a claustrophobic world that traps his hapless characters. They crawl around like microbes in what resembles a giant brain.

It's as if we the viewers are space aliens being given a dispassionate guided tour of human behavior by the narrator, who speaks in first person as one of the survivors, but we never learn which one.

Having created some of the strangest, most surreal movies ever produced in Hollywood (THE SCARLET EMPRESS, THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN), Sternberg goes even more strange and surreal in this one, although the acting is more naturalistic than usual for him.

His Marlene Dietrich films center around a mysterious woman upon whom men project their desires for sex, love, violence and revenge. Here Keiko is the final mystic Sternberg temptress. Like Concha in THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, she watches, calmly bemused, as the men fight, kill, and die to possess her. Like all the classic Sternberg heroines, she is a free agent and a free spirit, using her sensuality to get her way at times, but never belonging to any one man any longer than she chooses.

I saw ANATAHAN many years ago and kind of liked it. Seeing it now in the restored Blu-ray, I'm convinced it's a masterpiece. Maybe it helps being older to relate to Sternberg's theme -- the futility of war, conflict, desire, sex, and most other human activities. This theme will never sell tickets or appeal to younger viewers who are still passionately caught up in all of this.

The ending is very moving to me now. The surviving men return to their families in a defeated but still okay Japan, realizing they wasted so much time defending a regime that hadn't even existed for years. Then we see Keiko's pretty but almost expressionless face as she sees the ghosts of the men that killed and died for her. What is she thinking? Does she feel guilty? Or a certain satisfaction over the power she had over them? That's for the viewer to decide.

Realize, if you see this film, it will deny you some of the usual satisfactions we expect from movie stories. But go with it and you will experience an artistic achievement that is unlike any other, a unique contemplation of human conflict that unfolds with a Zen-like calm. It's a fitting summation to Sternberg's strange and beautiful oeuvre.