Love it or hate it. There isn’t much middle ground or neutrality regarding Damien Chazelle’s (La La Land, First Man) divisive Babylon, a fantastical look at the debaucherous look at the rise and fall of the Hollywood movie industry during the 1920s. While some might believe its 56% /52 % scores on Rotten Tomatoes suggest it’s an ordinary movie, those average scores may result from people either loving or hating it. I enjoyed the movie. It is far from being in my top ten of the year. With only a couple of 2022 films left to watch, Babylon sits at #16 (out of the 74 2022-released films I’ve seen). It’s a fine film and one that is worth viewing.
Category Archives: Lukas Haas
Widows (2018)
After watching Widows, the best movie of 2018 that has been released before Thanksgiving) I can very confidently say that if you team up director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame) and writer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, HBO’s Sharp Objects), I’m going to have my butt in a theatre opening weekend. I’ve heard about Widows for months now but never actually saw the trailer until the day before I saw the movie. And I still haven’t seen the whole trailer. I needly only watch the first half of it to know that it was a movie that I wanted to see and that it was a movie I wanted to see right away. With all due respect to A Star Is Born, I think that its parade walk to 2018’s Best Picture just hit a major roadblock in McQueen’s masterpiece of a movie. The man who was narrowly beaten out for Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón – Gravity) hardly seemed upset when half an hour later, his 12 Years a Slave won topped Gravity (and others) for the Best Picture of 2013. He’s been off the grid for the last five years (save for a few shorts), but he is back with a movie that might be better than any of his previous three masterpieces (12 Years a Slave, Shame, Hunger Strike). The only thing missing is an appearance by Michael Fassbender, but you won’t even notice. Not only has McQueen delivered the best movie of 2018 (so far), but he’s brought the best ensemble of the year, one that will likely garner awards for a couple of people and a surefire one for the film’s protagonist Veronica (Viola Davis – Fences, The Help). And while some might think I’m crazy to suggest that her performance in Widows is better than her performances in Fences, The Help, or Doubt, I would counter that she led a star-studded cast in this movie. In contrast, while she was fantastic in her other three films, she wasn’t the center character. AND, I am still upset that she was put up for Best Supporting Actress in 2016 Fences, an award that she won) because that was a leading performance and would have won Best Lead Actress. She was not anymore a supporting character than Denzel Washington was. But I digress…
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First Man (2018)
It takes a long, long time to land on the moon. So much can be said for the research, development, and execution of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969. Much can also be said of Damien Chazelle’s (La La Land, Whiplash) lackluster First Man. Maybe Chazelle should go back to writing his own screenplays. After earning Oscar nominations (adapted for Whiplash, original for La La Land) for his first two directed movies, Chazelle picked up Josh Singer’s (Spotlight, The Post) for his third directorial effort. Unfortunately, the culmination likely didn’t do either man any favors. First Man seemed to lack want, energy, and originality and frequently veered into downright disinterest in its characters and outright boredom. While the film has resonated with critics (88%), there is a sharp dropoff in audience score (66%). While the accomplishment in First Man is an important story that needed to be told in this medium (particularly to those who weren’t even born when this achievement happened, I think it should have been spearheaded by a director who is more seasoned in the biopic genre or at least had directed a film outside of the music drama genre which has thus far defined his career.
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