![]() ![]() “All quiet on the set” was a challenge for the silent film community. And, bitingly, Margot Robbie delivers a line about latkes.Īnd then there’s this bit of circumcising dialogue, a scene depicting the inaugural day in shooting a talkie. Al Jolson, who starred in the first talkie, “The Jazz Singer,” is shown on screen, but we never learn that the character he plays in the movie only becomes a crooner after abandoning his earlier calling as a cantor.Ī female Jewish director occupies a minor role. “Babylon” is set during this time period, and yet there is no mention of the Jewish Hollywood moguls - except for Irving Thalberg, who was not a studio chief and is not identified as being Jewish. ![]() Not unlike the recent opening of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which somehow neglected to mention that five of the original seven studio heads were Jewish immigrants, “Babylon” went out of its way to foster inclusion for every category of identity except for the one responsible for moving the nascent industry to Los Angeles, erecting studios, sound stages and an entire city to support it - in what had been a barren wasteland.īoth the Jews of Israel and those of Hollywood made deserts bloom. That’s the object lesson in “Babylon” worth pondering. Perhaps its ambitions in scope were undermined by its misadventures in woke. Chazelle’s green light from the studio was more like a yahrzeit. Shouldn’t a movie about the wonder of moving pictures, and the pioneers who built Hollywood, be a box office draw? It is daring if not wholly debauched, with nearly all its characters inebriated or drug and gambling addicted. ![]() This is a sweeping film, lush in its cinematic landscape - deserts, hills, movie sets and mansions. The film is a valentine to the early days of Hollywood, circa 1928, right before the Golden Age of movies when films would become America’s most dominant cultural export, projecting to the world what America represented. One film that will not be walking away with a large Oscar haul is Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon.” (It is nominated for three awards, none in major categories.) That came as a surprise, given the box office and critical success of Chazelle’s last film, “La La Land,” the size of “Babylon’s” budget, and the appeal of its cast, which includes Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. ![]()
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