Babylon

By Joshua Xiang

Genre: Drama, Comedy, literary film

Overindulgence doesn't make a good movie!?

About: A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

Babylon is one of the most controversial movies. Many critics believe that the movie is filled with an excess of sex, drugs, violence, and human bodily fluids, which they think the director is "overindulgence". They criticize the endless characters with no real purpose for progressing the story and ridicule that this is a failure for Damien Chazelle. Seeing the flop of the movie's box office and the criticism probably many people also thought that this movie is just a joke. However, I have to say radical art pieces like this sometimes just can be appreciated by everyone, but on the other hand, people who like it love it.

Does a perfect literary film have to be a movie-like Wes Anderson's Budapest Hotel, with a great plot, awesome tableau-style compositions, sparse and deliberate color pallets, and fabulous camera shots? For me the way of how Damien Chazelle criticizes the "unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood" and provokes critics to say the movie is a joke already successfully conveys the message that he wants to share. The sense of restlessness with anxiety that the film gives to the audience makes many people dislike it, but this could also be an achievement for the director of how accurately and successfully the emotion that he wants to pass can spread. Additionally, critics mentioned the last hour of runtime really felt unnecessary, an entire plotline could have been removed without affecting the movie. Well, I actually think the odd scenes hit my mood, and give my emotion bigger changes from the start to the end. Moreover, people point out that some shoddy editing and camera shot are coming out of nowhere, for example, a bizarre movie montage at the end. I also disagree with that, for me this is a way to break the cliche, it gives you surprises and keeps letting you fail from your prediction of how his shot movement.

The casting is also awesome, the director really pick very iconic actors for every single characters. every member of the main cast did a fantastic job and it's a credit to them and Chazelle for getting the most out of his performers. Brad Pitt's the biggest name and I really enjoyed the work he put in as Jack Conrad. He's appropriately funny in Conrad's lush and over-the-top behavior but he garners some genuine sympathy for him when the world turns against him. Diego Calva also performs well on his powerless towards Nellie LaRoy's (Margot Robbie) behaviors. His accent and dialogue are also very particular. The oddest casting is Tobey Maguire as threatening mobster James McKay but Maguire's surprisingly good at being a creepy underworld figure.

A movie is an art piece, and not every artwork needs to be finalized, it can be bold, tentative, and just like an explosive mind map rather than the tenth draft of your thesis paper.