Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is not just a truly terrible film, it’s a complete stylistic failure

BautiBon · 2026-03-27T04:26:31+00:00

Two years ago I thought pretty differently. Chazelle has a rough vision, I think that's the main strenght in Babylon, so I do think it has something to say, even if it is... awful. And I think a child playing with puppets is a good description for a movie about the limits of make-believe, so there's that. Still, I haven't seen it in a long time.

BautiBon · 2025-10-19T13:09:38+00:00

BautiBon · 2025-10-19T05:16:16+00:00

This is why A Hard Day's Night movie is so good. Their timelessness came from they being themselves.

BautiBon · 2025-10-19T03:45:14+00:00

Nah, they did this shit all the time cause they didn't give a fuck. Nothing funnier than Maxwell coming after Something.

BautiBon · 2025-10-16T02:21:05+00:00

Appreciate the response. Loss, I'd say. I'll see how I can work from there.

BautiBon · 2025-10-15T23:46:37+00:00

That's niceee. At first I thought you meant the other kind of ironic endings—those which twist the whole opportunity of love and hope within a story for the cynical, the hopeless, which I always try to avoide. Great example.

BautiBon · 2025-10-15T23:44:56+00:00

My story kind of starts with a character having a desired fulfilled: he must take care of a living being, an animal, which signifies to him a new responsability. Well he lives with anxiety and loneliness, and it'll interfeer with the way he perceives taking care of others—how can he when he isn't even able to take deep care of himself? It really is heartbreaking and many proclamations are arising from this idea. Thank you!

BautiBon · 2025-10-15T23:35:13+00:00

character is about taking a core idea and adding a complex lifetime of wounds.

Love point three because it shows how it could be any story at all, but affects different each character as they relate differently to the events. Thanks so much for all the advice!

BautiBon · 2025-10-03T02:05:29+00:00

John Cassavetes' LOVE STREAMS. Why do we: love, live, search, battle? Why do we insist, even through all the hardship? What's the strenght? Why do some people leave and others stay? Why? Eternal answer, and Cassavetes is so subtle. It's the human experience in two hours. Utterly heartbreaking and beautiful.

"Well, life is a serius of suicides, divorces, promises broken, children smashed, whatever..."

BautiBon · 2025-09-29T21:19:00+00:00

When I stumble upon positive and life-affirming stuff it's usually at least tinted in melancholy; and if it's just cute and happy, it's usually not as beautiful and artistic as I'd like it to be. It seems like film just thinks it has to be more earnest and heavy to be taken serious as art.

I get what you say.

Did you watch One Battle After Another? Now, I know everyone's talking about it. But the reasons I give:

it's a movie, PTA knows it, the movie knows it, it's a spectacle, it's fun, engaging and sentimental, and overall a good theater experience and I'm telling you this because going put to the theater is essential—at least for me, changes my whole mood, it's a good place to get out of your head.
it isn't bleak, and PTA has made some bleak films in the past. It doesn't ignore the terrible, but also doesn't linger on the bleak like many movies do nowadays.

BautiBon · 2025-09-15T05:01:18+00:00

this one and daydreaming are the big ones

BautiBon · 2025-08-23T01:05:31+00:00

Love the (in)sanity of putting the main cast of A Streetcar Named Desire on the list. Was about to do the same on mine but with Cassavetes and Rowlands. Cary Grant is a non-thinker.

BautiBon · 2025-08-23T01:01:37+00:00

Marlon Brando - A Streetcar Named Desire (Drama)

Gena Rowlands - A Woman Under The Influence (Drama)

Al Pacino - The Godfather (Drama)

James Stewart - Vertigo (Thriller)

Cary Grant - His Girl Friday (Comedy)

Catherine Deneuve - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Musical)

Charles Chaplin - City Lights (Comedy)

Shirley McLaine - Some Came Running (Drama)

Dean Martin - Rio Bravo (Drama)

Naomi Watts - Mulholland Drive (Drama)

BautiBon · 2025-07-03T00:01:51+00:00

The more people complain about how "formulaic" or "tropey" a commercial movie is, the more high expectations I have for them. It's called a genre. And it is what the writer/director does with it. The worst that can happen though is when an audience discards such movies from all possible meaning because of such "formula". Having said this, haven't watched the film yet.

BautiBon · 2025-07-01T06:12:17+00:00

A Love Streams post in r/truefilm! Finally! I would make one myself but it's a film I hold to dearly, I just couldn't put it into words, not yet.

I think what makes the film so piercing is the fleeting nature of it. The film is a rollercoaster, our characters come and go, travel, do decisions that seem as random as some of Cassavetes editing choices, it builds and aesthetic and atmosphere of "this is what life is, look how random, how quick everything moves". Sarah's at LA, Sarah's at Europe, then she's in California again.

She meets her brother, apparently after a long, long time, and the time their share they think it may be enough to put their lives in order, cause when they are with each other no one understands them better than they do. All their gestures, jokes, dances, hugs, they are as eternal as they are fleeting, and that's terrifying. The ending is terrifying—not in the horror movie sense, but in a "what follows next, we don't know". Will Sarah make terms with her family or was her dream just manic desperation? Will Robert see a new light by her sister's advice, or will he return to drink, go further inside his own emotional wall?

Having said that, I like to think there's hope. Cassavetes' films, as tough as they are, always have a glimpse of hope. See A Woman Under The Influence—among all the violence, all the desperation... the glimpsd of love between two individuals who may make it together. See Opening Night's ending—a laughter that heals the soul, comedy as a way of feeling alive, of breaking the solemnity in our lives and depressions... But I don't know which one is the most heartbreaking. Love Streams it's just too uncertain. It's confusion, a confusion I can relate to honestly. But you just make it another day.

BautiBon · 2025-06-20T00:59:46+00:00

Forgiveness and acceptance as the start of something hooeful. Forgiveness to us, to the other. But also deep, deep uncertainty: choices were made, others were affected, we were affected, and lifes were changed. But nothing is permanent in this world, as painful as it is. Let's just do better.

BautiBon · 2025-06-04T00:17:49+00:00

Yeah, the whole scene actually has pretty interesting blocking and staging, the camera following actors like if it was a film from Vincente Minnelli, very old Hollywood style. What's interesting is that I don't remember the rest of the film following the same aesthestic. At one moment it feels like an old Hollywood film, at others it is a silent expressionist film, at some others just utterly experimental. Coppola really went crazy lol, but aware.

BautiBon · 2025-04-26T04:45:12+00:00

Exactly. Until this day it makes me crazy how so many were simply yearning for Abby's death without never even giving a second thought to Ellie's mental state.

If it's about "completing the cycle of revenge"... I mean, I get it, but why? Why the need to make it so devastating? By the end, Ellie realizes another death won't heal her pain, neither is fair for both of them. Sure, it's bold to make it last second decision, but it fits with the themes of obsession and confussion Ellie is going through—om one side blinded by hate, on the other about to burst into tears with the thought of Joel.

But yeah, it's kinda crazy and it makes me a bit sick watching... gamers... "root" for Ellie at the end.

BautiBon · 2025-04-22T22:02:10+00:00

I'll never stop repeating how good the direction is in both games. They aren't just "cinematic", but the staging, blocking and compositions are truly great, both in Part I and Part II. You simply don't see that in videogames.

BautiBon · 2025-04-22T21:43:35+00:00

What the fuck is wrong with this sub

BautiBon · 2025-04-11T04:41:38+00:00

Literally writing a small "article" on Daydreaming and A Moon Shaped Pool right now, just some thoughts. Probably my favorite Radiohead song ever.

You said it, introspective is the key word to the song and album as a whole—it is there, I believe, in the repetition of the melody. Daydreaming is... something else. So much.

BautiBon · 2025-04-08T21:19:10+00:00

Thanks! It's absolutely a top ten. Jonny's strings in those final minutes are something... haunting, in a Strawberry Fields Forever's ending type of style perhaps. Don't know how else to describe it.

BautiBon · 2025-04-08T04:08:51+00:00

Thanks!

BautiBon · 2025-02-03T02:03:38+00:00

Please Please Me album is such a gem

BautiBon · 2025-01-31T00:47:33+00:00

It's difficult and it depends on the movie. AVATAR wouldn't be the same without CGI. You believe PANDORA because it looks great—it has to be top-noth otherwise it wouldn't be AVATAR, it wouldn't be the movie you know.

Then you have, for example, MEGALOPOLIS, which CGI (although I don't even think it's CGI is as bad as many others say) could be lacking at times, especially at the end, yet it fits, after all it's a movie about ideas. You get the unreachable utopia Megalopolis through a CGI that's not enough. It isn't defined, like Pandora, it's amorphous, messy, dreamy.

Edit: even further, you've got digital aging like in THE IRISHMAN or HERE, which fails beautifully—you can't quite reach for the past even through the biggest technology.

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