1000 Tiny Birds

Babylon (2022)

2023-01-23

I have long been of the opinion that most films don’t need to be longer than 100 minutes. The corollary to that, of course, is that some films do need to be. You can’t tell an epic in that time. If you’re going to make that, you might as well go the whole hog and make it three hours. Enter Damien Chazelle and Babylon. Once again, we find ourselves in La La Land, but long, long ago, charting the rise and fall of the early Hollywood movers and shakers, but with a loose focus on that transformative moment of the transition from silent pictures to the talkies. The whole thing is brazen and audacious and unrepentant. It doesn’t particularly care whether you like it or not, and honestly I think that’s admirable, but in any case - I loved it. Justin Hurwell needs to find some new melodic ideas, because this is three films in a row he’s basically used the same themes. I find it fascinating, as a brief ending tangent, that this really reframes First Man as the outlier in Chazelle’s oeuvre, settling oddly between Babylon and La La Land. This is true both in subject matter, of course, but also in warmth or coldness.