In short: Babylon (2022)

One of the very first shots in Damien Chazelle’s is of an elephant endlessly projectile crapping into (and over, and around, and probably under) the camera, so you really can’t blame the movie for not being honest about itself, and not just about its preoccupation with bodily fluids.

Supposedly, this follows the travails of three characters – played by Diego Calva, Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt – through the decadent early years of Hollywood and portrays the way anarchy turned into just another business In theory it also says some stuff about the perniciousness of institutional racism. In practice, this is either filmic diarrhoea or a director incessantly masturbating into your eyes.

I am generally perfectly fine with showy direction, and have rather a lot of favourite directors who follow the rule of style as substance, but there’s a difference between focussing on style and showing off so much, a film’s sheer excess becomes so huge, it actually starts to feel lifeless through it, something Chazelle achieves here in a series of never-ending, over-edited, over-scored, over-planned, and over-staged sequences. There’s really not a single second of this damn thing that leaves room for any idea or performance to breathe. It’s all just shouting, blaring, stupid edits, and the least interesting idea of decadence and excess spat into endless, never-ending, really never, never ending scenes of a length you usually only find in backyard horror movies. Makers of those of course have the excuse of not having directed a pretty great Academy Award winning musical, among other things. This thing just makes Michael Bay look restrained.

Given its three hour (though it rather feels like three days) length, it’s pretty astonishing how little Babylon actually has to say about its characters or early Hollywood. All of its self-referentiality never rises about the quality of mediocre in-jokes, so much so that I now find some of my criticism towards Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood rather crude, for Tarantino’s film has life and interest in its characters as human beings, and fulfils ambitions beyond shouting in your face for three hours.

Babylon has Brad Pitt sleepwalking, Calva making googly eyes at Robbie, and Robbie doing Harley Quinn with a different haircut while around them, an intensely loud amount of nothing screeches. At least, someone has finally found the perfect dictionary example for “overdirected”.

In short: Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

Following as it does that pretty dire Suicide Squad movie, I didn’t exactly go into Cathy Yan’s Harley Quinn solo movie disguised as a Birds of Prey outing with high expectations. Particularly when you add various comics nerd problems I have with the movie conceptually: that the Birds of Prey without Batgirl/Oracle never feel like the Birds of Prey to me; that Harley Quinn has become to DC what Wolverine was for Marvel in the late 90s and early 00s – so omni-present, it becomes rather difficult to care about her; that the film uses characters so far from any of their comic incarnations, I’m not sure why it does use the names from the comics at all (see Cassandra Cain).

However, as a wise writer once wrote: talk about what’s actually there, not your expectations, and approaching Harley Quinn this way, I found myself really rather enjoying the whole affair. For one, unlike the David Ayer Suicide Squad film this is closest to, Cathy Yan and writer Christina Hodson actually know the tone they are going for and are sticking with it, yet still find time to just go off into the direction of some goofy, fun, or interesting idea if they come upon it. Most of the jokes are even funny, and the film is stuffed full of hilariously little details it presents for its audience to get or not get without having to tell us every damn second that we are indeed supposed to laugh now.

For my taste, this one’s much better at the humorous ultra-violence than the much praised Deadpool (which I still loathe with surprising intensity); but then, this is more playful than cynical a film in character, even if some guy gets fed to a hyena, so I’m bound to enjoy it more. It’s also surprisingly good at the small-scale/street level superhero violence, taking quite a few choreography tricks from classic martial arts cinema, which is never not a good thing.


And best of all: EXXXtreme Joker is not actually in the movie in person but only as a symbol of really shitty men for the heroine to mentally break free from, while ranting asshole Joker never existed in this world.

In short: Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood (2019)

Despite my general enthusiasm for the works of Quentin Tarantino, I went into this expecting to hate it, for I have developed a bit of a distaste for films in which Hollywood people glorify Hollywood, usually leading to a level of intellectual and philosophical dishonesty even worse than what you’ll encounter in your typical Hollywood biopic, if you can imagine that.

However, that distaste was blown away rather quickly by the way Tarantino focuses on the has-beens and the never-quite-weres of that supposedly magical place, the dreams that never quite came true and the egos not only too big for their talents (because you can still go far without much talent but with a humongous ego in Hollywood, as certain careers alas prove all too well) but also too weird for a normal life. Not surprisingly, it’s the weirdoes Tarantino’s heart beats for here, though not the truly nasty ones; those get bloodily murdered.

Quentin’s kind of weirdoes are wonderfully embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt here. DiCaprio manages to turn his aging cowboy actor Rick Dalton at once pathetic, loveable, annoying, and very very funny; he also demonstrates a fine understanding of a very specific kind of brilliant acting only found in low budget movies, programmers and other despised corners of the land of movies, places I tend to call home. Whereas Pitt embodies an over-aged kind of cool that only barely hides a deep goofiness and a certain emotional helplessness (a contemporary term of description would probably be “manchild”, but to me, that’s always been the kind of phrase only a judgemental asshole should use) in such a lovely way, I’m even willing to forgive him his Prozac turn in Ad Astra.

This is of course not a film interested in tight plotting or other new-fangled nonsense of this kind, but rather about its two main characters ambling through their lives, having encounters and small adventures, and from time to time crossing ways with the Manson “Family” so Quentin can at least get a little of the old ultra violence in, and critics who like this sort of thing can nod sagely and talk about “the dark side of the Hollywood dream”.

Me, I would have been perfectly happy without the whole Manson business, and without the obligatory explosion of violence. That would also have helped to rid the film of its other problem: the scenes when it pops in with Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, who is rich, and beautiful, and so very very boring, doing nothing of interest whatsoever except breaking up our fun time with Leo and Brad while Tarantino’s camera leers so male-gazey on every single bit of her body, even I felt a little uncomfortable. I was also wishing for a female character with a personality in her stead.


Despite being structurally rather important for the movie as a whole (some might argue also for the point of it as a whole, but eh, points…), these pretty large flaws never feel too terrible while actually watching Once Upon a Time, never hindering me from being really damn charmed by most of the proceedings on screen.

In short: Suicide Squad (2016)

Like all DC superhero movies not directed by Christopher Nolan, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad is at times tough going, full of awkward tonal shifts, scenes that don’t serve any function beyond making the film longer (I shudder to think what the “extended cut” adds to a film that’s at least twenty minutes too long already), and featuring cameos from Affleck-Batman (which is to say, the Batman who is only not worse than the Clooney version because he’s not in Joel Schumacher films) and Jared Leto, the first movie Joker that can only be described as boring and would-be edgy.

There are numerous script problems. Namely, the first twenty minutes are a barrage of exposition and horrible dialogue, followed by ten minutes of posturing (the film’s pretty heavy on assumed coolness through posing anyway) before something akin to a plot evolves. And then there’s the sad fact that the thing clearly doesn’t know what to do with most of its characters (hint: copy more and better from Ostrander and Yale’s run on the comics next time), leaving the actors hanging – they might just as well have called the film “Deadshot & Harley & Some Other Guys”.

On the positive side, Will Smith is a much better Deadshot than I expected, even though I much prefer the suicidally depressed version of the character to the “killer who has a daughter and is therefore likeable” trope the film goes for, and Margot Robbie makes a fine Harley in search of a better Joker.

Generally, the film’s second hour works much better than first one, mostly because it finally stops with the introductions and the exposition and starts to show us the characters actually doing stuff instead of telling us that they are some day going to do stuff or once have done stuff. The action’s not particularly great or inventive going by superhero blockbuster standards but it’s also not the embarrassment of the action in Deadpool (which, unlike apparently everyone else, I loathed quite a bit) or the boring never-ending carnage of Dawn of the Justice League. And while the writing generally stays clichéd as all get-out (even for a genre that thrives on its clichés), it does at the very least hit the right clichés in the end. Why, there are even a handful of scenes that suggest a more interesting film about redemption and hitting monsters with baseball bats.

I don’t know how to call a film whose first hour is a tedious mess and whose second one is perfectly decent popcorn cinema, but Suicide Squad is that movie.

In short: The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

I appreciate that it’s rather difficult to attempt to update Edgar Rice Burroughs’s pulp stalwart Tarzan to modern times, seeing that there are quite a few things central to the character that many people today would call “problematic” (many of them even for good reason). As a pulp reader, I’m perfectly fine with a film making heavy changes to these characters if that’s needed to keep them palatable to a non-specialist audience – it’s not as if the process would make the original stories disappear, nor will I be sad to see their racist, sexist etc elements go.

So it’s not in its attempts at updating Tarzan that David Yates’s film fails for me, it’s in the way it fails to update the character to anything interesting. Because this is a major mainstream production, its courage fails the film regularly. While I certainly like the whole “colonialism bad” approach, choosing the Belgian Congo for the plot is ill-advised, because the film really can’t go into the true atrocities committed at that time and place without exchanging being an adventure movie for something much darker, and certainly not anything Tarzan belongs in. Consequently, Legend awkwardly stops somewhere halfway between pulp adventure and horrible truths - shoehorning Opar in for good measure - and just sort of shuffles its feet. And don’t even let me get started about a film that makes various gestures towards giving Jane (Margot Robbie) some agency of her own, only to then let her kidnapping be Tarzan’s main motivating factor.

For Alexander Skarsgard’s Tarzan, you see, is that least interesting kind of hero, a reluctant one who spends much of the first half hour throwing around tragically bored looks. Which is pretty much what I felt during that part of the film, too, what with there about five minutes of something of interest or relevance happening in it. Turns out, stuff actually happening is rather important in an adventure movie. Who knew? Most probably not David Yates, going by the blandly polite, generally uninvolving way he directs action sequences that show little creativity or sense of fun, the truly embarrassing CGI vine-swinging, and the ponderous pacing he gives a film that doesn’t have actually all that much to ponder, and which could use a good kick in the arse.

Keeping to that form, Skarsgard’s Tarzan and Christoph Waltz’s big bad Leon Rom mostly seem vaguely bored, going through the motions but leaving charisma – and seemingly interest in entertaining their audience – somewhere in a different movie. The only actors on screen actually alive are Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (or George Washington Williams, as the film curiously calls him) and Margot Robbie, but of course, the film doesn’t deign to give them much to do. I could go on here, complaining about a Tarzan film that seems embarrassed about the hero’s traditional dress, his comic relief chimp, and so on, but that would be nearly as tiresome as the film itself is.

The Legend of Tarzan is a mostly tedious slog that really demonstrates how good many of the low budget Tarzan movies were, what with them actually containing scenes of Tarzan having adventures.