Am I the only one who loved this movie? Sure, it's not perfect. But it shoots for the moon and, in my opinion, mostly succeeds.

At this point, Damien Chazelle’s career trajectory is one of upping the amount of Oscar bait with every new project. And I get it, what happened with _La La Land_ at the Academy Awards was most unfortunate, but this film should even be lucky to get nominated, because it's not going to be remembered beyond that. It’s essentially an exhausting, empty, 3 hour mess that thinks it’s a lot deeper than it is. Lots of fancy camerawork, lots of showy acting, lots of coke and nudity, lots of scenes where it’s clearly trying to be _Boogie Nights_, but it does not stick the landing at all. Showing excess can be fun and interesting, but combined with the cocaine fueled, Michael Bay-esque editing style it ends up feeling more like Scorsese for the inattentive Tiktok generation. It also leaves you on a note that I thought was incredibly indulgent and pretentious, which soured me even more on the whole experience. It’s not even one of those films where you need to have a critical eye or a good understanding of cinema in order to get why it’s bad, it’s pretty upfront right from the start. It fails with a lot of the basics, such as plotting (which is incoherent), pacing (which is all over the place) and music (which is incredibly annoying). I wish I could at least praise the acting or characters, but it’s all so over the top in the most annoying, unfunny way. I like the cinematography and some individual moments, but that’s kinda it. The whole film starts with an elephant taking a shit into the camera, so at the very least Chazelle seems to self-aware about what he has delivered here; a massive turd that doesn’t play to his strengths as a filmmaker. 4/10

Am I the only one who loved this film ?? I want to thank the cinema gods for this film. It was awesome.

Babylon is just one of those movies that is too long for no good reason. It’s becoming a trend nowadays and I’m not happy about it. At first, Babylon comes out swinging. The beginning of the movie is chaotic and really fun. It reminded me of The Wolf of Wall Street in a way. Margot Robbie is fantastic and it promises you the world. Until the half way mark, the time flies by, but it goes south reeeaaaaallllyyy fast after that. The whole tone of the movie changes… The arcs felt forced and were not fun to watch after that. The fancy party (especially the vomit part) was bizarre. Manny’s sudden upswing in the world felt way too sudden. The ‘blackface scene’ was just there to upset the audience. We see way to little of Nellie’s gambling problem for it too come back in this big way. And the whole sequence in ‘the asshole of LA’ added nothing to the story and is just there to shock you one last time. It’s was bad choice after bad choice in the second half. I get that they wanted to show the whole old vs. new thing, the rise of cinema as we know it and the icons that get lost on the way to new things. But the first and the last part were way to different for it to be a coherent masterpiece. Honestly, I’m sad that it turned out this way. I was hoping for more and it looked like it was going that way at first. It’s super disappointing and I feel generous when I give it a 6/10. This could’ve been more.

Boogie Nights by way of Happy Madison productions. A monumental failure in every way.