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- Jan 9, 2013
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I watched all 189 minutes of director Damien Chazelle's BABYLON last night and frankly came away with a sense of awe unlike most movie critics who found Chazelle's excursion into early Hollywood movie making excessive and scattered!
The production design and principal [and even ancillary] actors were superb with a special shout out to Mexican actor Diego Calva who I felt was the heart and soul of Babylon.
I truly believe Chazelle captured the decadence of an era in pre~code Hollywood to a tee. The Roaring Twenties was aptly portrayed and the early days of silent cinema were anything but glamorous with dusty and dangeous shoots which often ended in chaos and even death!
And the transition to talkies which spelled doom and gloom for many of its acclaimed silent film stars was perfectly encapsulated.
Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are outstanding in their respective roles and in fact, all of Babylon's myriad of performers are likewise perfect with the sequences with a 'bizarre' Toby Maguire over the top.
If you have any love for early cinema and can commit three hours of your time, by all means 'experience' Damien Chazelle's BABYLON which I feel over time will demand reappraisal and become somewhat of a cult favorite because despite all of its excesses it captured a period in time when the nation itself was 'reeling' from a reckless abandonment of rationality after experiencing the ravages of World War I, a bird flu epidemic which wiped out a chunk of the world's then population with a nascent Hollywood USA beginning to find its legs!
Paramount's Native UHD4K disc is uniformly excellent and kudos to all involved in the making of this frenzy of a film ... and critics be damned!
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