Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures
Babylon boasts multiple sights that serve as metaphors for itself: an elephant showering an immigrant man with shit; a woman urinating all over the body and face of a wealthy paramour; a beauty projectile vomiting on a dapper gentleman; a burly psychopath chomping on a live rat; and a pitiful sad sack getting his head stuck in a toilet.
Chockablock with profanity, nudity, and all manner of demented degradation, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to First Man is a three-hour work of grand and grotesque excess that strives to celebrate the wondrous power of the movies. All it does, however, is crassly steal the magic of its superior ancestors, right up to a finale that parasitically pinches yesteryear’s classics for the pathos it can’t conjure on its own.
Chazelle’s lumpen, maudlin, misbegotten opus (which releases in theaters December 23) has almost too many illustrious forefathers to list, although Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese certainly have valid paternity claims on their hands, as does Paul Thomas Anderson, whose Boogie Nights is pilfered ad nauseum.