Babylon
Those first 30 minutes are insane, but it cannot sustain it for all the 180 minutes. The soundtrack is bitching, you gotta hand it to these musical fellows.
It’s an epic movie, not like the smaller scale films dealing with similar themes like Hail, Caesar!, Chaplin, The Cat’s Meow, L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia, The Aviator, or even King Kong. It goes straight to the big leagues: Cinema Paradisio, Singin’ in the Rain, Sunset Boulevard. Prestige Hollywood self-fellatio stories.
We follow the lowest of low, just another upstart willing to do anything to be in showbiz. Being a Chicano, he can only be behind the cameras, but shovelling elephant shit is acceptable. He meets his perdition, another upstart actress that gatecrashes the initial Roaring 20’s party, the place to be if she wants a bit part. And she’s got it!
The other main character, the hotshot actor that is permanently drunk and is this close to ruin everything, until the stars align, something clicks, and he’s a movie star once again.
The silent film “set” is an absurd chaos, it really feels like Tortuga on coke, up to eleven. Calling it a set is an abuse, it’s just some wooden planks in the middle of a big empty field, should have orange groves and the like.
The experience of watching a silent film in a big cinema is stark. 100 years ago, it’s like a whole different world.
The transition to talkies is the opposite: endless takes to film seconds, stupid technical issues, extremely hot studio lights, it gets extremely tech driven.
The upstart actress fuck up the big party by literally vomiting on the kind of upper class twattery that looks down on her for being uneducated. Eventually she is rubbed out by gambling debts to sociopathic mobsters, with massive house of pain: early century UFC, S&M under red lights, and even an outright crocodile protecting a geek! It’s not even “glamorous” like Nightmare Alley, just outright scary.
The hotshot actor turns into a washout, and gets a full on dress down / pep talk by the friendly critic. He sees his friends die, the studio sent him only to shit roles, while going through wives almost as fast as he goes through whisky bottles. After seeing mere inter-title painters turned actresses getting big, while we withers on the vine, life is not worth living.
There’s also a subplot about a trumpet player that seems to be moving up in life, until he has to interact with rich dudes, and paint his face like a minstrel. He goes back to Harlem after that.
Eventually the plot stops for a series of fast cuts, with a fast forward collage of all kinds of stuff, all the way from George Méliés, Un Chien Andalou, Psycho, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Ben-Hur, Terminator 2, Tron, Raiders of the Lost Ark, all the way to Avatar (not worth it to be mentioned in the same breath, in my opinion). 2001 is not just quoted, there’s a bunch of psychedelic primary colours, oil in water, the whole shebang.
Lady Fay Zhu is Ada May Wong, right? That’s about the only direct calque I got straight away.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.