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 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 worth viewing.
Category Archives: Genre
The Inspection (2022)
Heavy military boot camp movies cannot help but draw comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The groundbreaking drama showcased the lengths to which the United States Military Academies sometimes go to “break” their recruits. Another great example is the under-appreciated but long-remembered G.I. Jane. Both films featured recruits who were not wanted (Full Metal Jacket with the obese, dimwitted Leonard “aka Gomer Pyle” Lawrence, played fantastically by Vincent D’Onofrio, or Demi Moore as the lone trial candidate in a U.S. Navy female integration program in G.I. Jane). A similar example is Men of Honor, the story of Carl Brashear (Cuba Gooding Jr.), the first African-American U.S. Navy Diver.
Prey (2022)
For as impressive as Dan Trachtenberg’s (10 Cloverfield Lane) Prey, the origin story of the successful Predator franchise is, it’s a travesty that this movie did not receive a theatrical release. From Forbes.com about the movie’s release to Hulu/Disney+, over a theatrical run.
Since ‘Prey’ was a holdover before Disney bought Fox in 2019, the potential for post-theatrical streaming boosts was contractually limited. Had it been released in theaters, its post-theatrical afterlife would have begun not on Disney+ or Hulu but on HBO Max. However, if Disney wanted the film in theaters badly enough, they likely could have worked out a post-theatrical deal akin to ‘Death on the Nile,‘ which premiered at home after its theatrical run on both Hulu and HBO Max. It didn’t, so theatrical was never in the cards.
Close (2022)
While the lock for this year’s Best International Feature Film appears to be the fantastically made All Quiet on the Western Front (it’s the only international film nominated in the Best Picture category), 2022 has a slew of movies that may have had a chance to win the category in recent years. Most notable on the list are Argentina’s Argentina (1985), Ireland’s The Quiet Girl, and Belgium’s Close, director Lukas Dhont’s (Girl) on the loss of innocence.
The Son (2022)
Entering awards season two years removed from the success of his directorial debut, The Father, a film that was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning two, Florian Zeller’s follow-up, The Son, had some lofty, albeit slightly unrealistic expectations, if for no other reason than that some deemed it a continuation of the story. In contrast, others viewed its Christmas Day limited release as indicating that the production company believed the movie would likely receive the same critical acclaim (98% critics, 94% audience) as The Father and wanted to keep the film fresh in voters’ minds as much as possible. Sadly, the film failed to resonate with either group (a paltry 26% among critics and a lukewarm 67% among audiences). As a result, the film will fail to reach $1,000,000 at the box office despite a star-studded cast that flanked (and outmatched) the relatively unknown Zen McGrath (Dig), who played the title character.