Babylon 4K 2022 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

Hollywood, 1926. At a raucous party at a producer's mansion, an aspiring actress, Nellie Laroy, and a catering guy, Manny Torres, meet. The event is not only fun, but also good for both: Nelly gets an invitation to a shoot, and Manny takes home a drunken silent film star Jack Conrad, who asks the guy to work for him as an assistant. So both get on a movie set and start making a career in film: Nellie as an actor and Manny as an assistant producer. In the meantime, progress continues, and sound films are gaining popularity.

Review 4K Movie

Delight. That's what I felt after watching the first ten minutes of the movie. Then, elation gave way to boredom, and for the last hour and a half, I looked at my watch more often than at the screen.

The beginning of the movie is a blast. As early as the second minute, a volley of elephant shit is shot in the viewer's face! Bingo! Immediately this is followed by a scene of a tempo party that seamlessly transitions into a bacchanalia. Bare breasts, glossy buttocks, proudly disheveled pubes, all swirling in a kind of macabre dance. Oh, my goodness, Chazelle! Elephant shit showers, pussy songs, golden showers (for a moment I thought I knew the answer to why the twenties were called the "Golden Age" of Hollywood) - Monsieur certainly knows a lot about perversion! The first hour of this marvelous movie passes, then the second, but the parties are still going on, and one can see the exhaustion of the screen debauchery, the lack of fire, the lack of spark. The actors are sluggishly shaking their unerected pricks. One has a feeling that they have been kicked out for a capitalist subbotnik, and three hundred takes have been filmed, but the director hasn't reached orgasm yet. Sorry for the distraction, it's just so trivial, honestly perverse.

The film was intended as an homage to those fabulous, magical times when Hollywood was the 'dream factory'. The transition from silent films to sound, the breaking of the old tradition, the rise and subsequent collapse of the careers of the main characters: Jack Conrad (Pitt). Nellie LaRoy (Robbie), Manny Torres (Calva), and Sidney Palmer (Adepo). All of them will be elevated to Mount Olympus by the will of the director, survive their five minutes of fame, and then be deeply dipped headfirst into the substance that powerfully erupted from -under the elephant's tail. Each of them would experience a moment of epiphany, enlightenment, what Buddhism calls 'bodhi. All this is fine, but what does the 'Golden Age' have to do with it? Was there one? Judging by the film, Hollywood is one incessant orgy, occasionally interrupted by uninteresting filming. Drunken and stoned actors (those holy people!) stoically endure the tortures of directors, cameras, heat, the need to play something, but it's all so - an annoying delay, an obstacle on the way to the real enjoyment.

Despite the pathos title, and the claim to universal scale, the movie turned out local. How? You don't know who John Gilbert is? And you don't know Clara Bow? That's right. Nobody knows them except Hollywood historians. Why do we need all this mothballing? Who's going to want to review their films? 'Babylon' is like an actor's cabaret - gathered together, played it off, remembered it, and... forgotten. Lots of noise, shouting, dancing, splashing colors, it all feels like a big, steamy, glossy pile of guano. There are a couple of gems to be found in that pile - the class-hate scene, chicly played by Robbie, and the moment with the shoehorn and trumpet player Sidney. Everything else is a catalog of unnecessary acting tales told over a mug of beer. Who slept with who, who drank too much, who snorted too much, who lost...

I seriously fear for Margot Robbie's acting career. It feels like she's acting under the influence of laxatives. Throughout the film, she balances between constipated, forced hilarity, and ostentatious, feigned hysteria. She's eerily overplayed, and constantly follows the 'teeth to inspection' command, displaying a piranha smile. I'd like to be wrong, but the roles of beautiful dorks seductively flapping their eyelashes is her repertoire for years to come. Brad Pitt is very organic in the roles of ragamuffins ('Fight Club', '12 Monkeys'), but in the moments when he should play the breed ('Troy'. Achilles - son of the goddess), Lieutenant Aldo Raine in the cinema, he comes off as a redneck, a kid from Oklahoma. Pitt's melancholy portrayal and trying to focus his gaze on the setting sun looks ridiculous. The ugly moustache and the smirk make him look like a pub crawler. Would you like some girls?

The flabby script, the preoccupation with form rather than content, the three-hour timing, the casting errors - these are the annoying little things that prevented Chazelle to repeat the success of the previous capustnik.