Wednesday, December 21, 2022

When it was announced, Babylon was assumed to be an Oscar contender.  A warning flag was that other studios had passed on the film.



A bigger problem is the film's box office. It doesn't help that it is up against the 2nd week of Avatar. 

For Brad, that comes after Bullet Train underperformed.  Unlike Those Who Wish Me Dead which was simultaneously released on HBOMax and which WB did not spend to promote, both Bullet Train and Babylon were heavily promoted.  But unlike Bullet Train for which he sat through a GQ interview and a photoshoot, there was no such for Babylon.  Despite all the recent hints he has given, he was not ready to talk about the incident before Babylon's release.


A joint status report with the DOJ-FBI on the FOIA case is due Jan. 6.  A response to Nouvel's cross complaint is due Jan 17.  The divorce case has been dormant since securing the release of info for the complaint vs. Stan Katz early this year.  I think all cases are treading water waiting for the FOIA to be completed.


The sale of Plan B and his previous statements to GQ about being on his last leg hint strongly that he's looking past Hollywood. 
“I consider myself on my last leg,” “this last semester or trimester. What is this section gonna be? And how do I wanna design that?”
A career and physical move with Seaward waiting in the wings. The grounds of Chateau Miraval are now partially open to the public thru Miraval Studios.  It no longer offers total privacy.


Both Plan B and Miraval's wine business are businesses he shepherded while handing day to day management to others.   The main value of both is in their name and reputation.  Both are arguably at the peak of their success.  Neither are businesses the children may be interested in taking over.  It's a good time to cash out and pursue other interests.  Something that he would be directly involved with and personally manage and that would better suit the children.  They hinted at this in the purported letter from Angelina.
"What might be best for our whole family would be an outright sale. I would completely support you in seeking to sell the company and move away from this hard and painful chapter in our lives."
I think that is exactly what they did.

Nouvel's cross complaint stated:
Its trademarks, linked to leading celebrities Pitt and Jolie and to its award-winning rosé wine, became its most valuable assets, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The value is not in Chateau Miraval's vineyards or even in Miraval Provence, it is in the trademarks which they are working to untangle in the shadow of the lawsuits. The goal is to return full ownership and control to Chateau Miraval and to them.  The Perrins presumably want compensation for their role in increasing the value of Miraval's name in the wine industry.

In order to enable Stoli to have part ownership of the trademarks only -- if that is indeed the deal -- they would need to execute a thorough restructuring and create a separate entity.  Mediawan said they had been in discussions to acquire Plan B for over a year.  The Stoli deal is far more complex and discussions probably stretched over several years -- probably since the time Stoli first approached them in 2016.

I suspect the sale to Stoli may be along the same lines as the sale of Plan B.  They sold part of their ownership share of Miraval's alcohol-related trademarks and have an option to sell the rest at a later date. 

The difference between Mediawan - Plan B and Stoli - Miraval is Stoli can have an immediate effect on sales and the bottom line with its broad distribution network.  It's mutually beneficial and there is a good chance that the rest of the company will sell for more.   I don't see anything similar for Mediawan - Plan B.  The main benefit is the cash payment to Brad, Gardner and Kleiner.  Mediawan gets prestige and a foot in the door.







Hollywood was born in sin: a spangled palm-tree Sodom where pretty young things sell their souls for a role, and vice and venality run free. Or at least that's the myth we've built since silent pictures, and one that director Damien Chazelle seems desperate to convey in Babylon, his frantic, antic, and frankly exhausting ode to the birth of the business they call show.

It's also pretty old news to anyone who's read stuff like Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, the seminal scandal bible published nearly 60 years ago (and subsequently banned for a decade) that notoriously exposed — a lot would say exploited — many of the Golden Age stories retold here. That book, proudly operating on the far-out fringes of decency and accountability, never really pretended to be anything but what it was: a wild stew of slander and calamity as delicious as it was questionably true.

Chazelle, who became the youngest Best Director Oscar winner in history at 32 for La La Land, seems equally enamored of the industry's seamiest tales, while also coming at it like a gee-whiz kid; he needs it all to mean something. And he has at his disposal things that underground figures like Anger never did: a pile of money and movie stars, plus the high-gloss veneer of prestige filmmaking. It's still three turgid, clattering hours of nudity, depravity, and mislaid alligators, but also, you know, art.

Margot Robbie's Nellie LaRoy enters the frontier-town Los Angeles of 1926 like a hurricane, a beautiful would-be starlet with a brassy New Jersey squawk, a gambling problem, and a tendency to turn every room she enters into a bar brawl. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, a much-married matinee idol sliding into middle age and ever-deeper vats of alcohol. They're both dazzling to Manuel "Manny" Torres (Narcos: Mexico's Diego Calva), an aspiring producer with a Valentino face and a head full of stardust. All Manny wants is to be part of the magic of movies, whether that means wrangling an incontinent elephant for an unhinged house party or dragging strung-out talent from their beds (or whoever's bed they're in) to set by call time.

Like many of the major players here, he is Chazelle's creation: Most characters fall somewhere between composite and pure fiction, including Jean Smart's gossip-peddling power player Elinor St. John, a ringer for real-life rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons; Li Jun Li as a stand-in for Anna May Wong, the first major Chinese-American actress; and Jovan Adepo's gifted Black bandleader Sidney Palmer, whose career path echoes the early arcs of Louis Armstrong and Stepin Fetchit.

They and a cast of what easily seems like thousands spend most of the next 186 minutes in a whirl of decadence and bad decisions, careening from one hectic misadventure to the next. Cocaine piles up like table salt, and sex is universal currency; death comes casually and frequently, as a gut punch or a punchline. In one Tarantino-esque interlude, an inebriated Nelly wrestles a rattlesnake to the death in the desert; in another, she vomits shellfish at a cocktail party in an Exorcist spray. By the time Tobey Maguire arrives in the third act as a giggling, consumptive gangster, huffing a cocktail of brandy and ether, the phrase "Jazz Age Boogie Nights" feels almost too apropos.

But Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real. (A brutal scene about blackface feels both as devastating as it's meant to be and oddly unearned.) There's also a sense that all this willful outrageousness just isn't his lane: The profanity is both relentless and numbing, and even the orgies look too clean. (Were people really waxing their personal bits circa Prohibition?)

It's all part of the film's panting need for provocation, along with its frequent, confounding anachronisms, from the hair and wardrobe down to the everyday slang. Yes, pre-Code Hollywood was a place for iconoclasts and outcasts, and in that sense could serve as a bubble of unlikely equality. But even a full-blown fantasy needs its own internal logic, a thing Babylon rarely gestures to or simply disregards completely. (What kind of unique challenges might a female director like the one Chazelle's real-life wife, Olivia Hamilton, portrays here so breezily have faced back in the day? You'll have to ask the ghost of Lois Weber. Race and class, too, don't seem to mean anything, until suddenly they do.)

The script still finds more than few bravura moments of absurd comedy, and the cast can't be faulted for committing. Pitt brings a boozy, unflappable charm and later, bewildered pathos; Robbie starts at 11 and never dials down. An acerbic Smart, vamping in a series of complicated hats, feels criminally underused, apart from one blistering speech she gives Pitt near the end. Even the cameos read like a red-carpet Rolodex on shuffle: Olivia Wilde, Eric Roberts, Katherine Waterston, Spike Jonze, Flea. Calva is naturally charismatic and lovely to look at, but the movie's supposed co-lead spends most of his time simply bearing witness — one more casualty in the frenzied, preposterous rush of Chazelle's Everything Hollywood All at Once. Grade: C–













SPOILERS SPOILERS
BY YOHANA DESTA
DECEMBER 23, 2022

At the start, Babylon is a wild tale about plucky nobodies trying to make it in Hollywood. There’s Manny (Diego Calva), the Mexican dreamer, inspired in part by Rene Cardona, a Cuban immigrant who became a successful writer, director, and producer and helped champion the golden age of Mexican cinema. Then there’s Nellie La Roy (Margot Robbie), an ambitious actress, inspired by Clara Bow, the original “It” girl. Along the way, we meet Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a fading silent film star; Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), an Anna Mae Wong-esque siren; and Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a Black jazz talent who finds a way onto the silver screen thanks to the advent of movie sound.

Though the film starts in the 1920s, when silent films are booming, the party quickly ends once sound becomes the new frontier. Conrad must navigate what he perceives to be corny new terrain when presented with a choreographed number to the hit song, “Singin’ in the Rain.” La Roy must learn her lines, hit her mark, and speak into the mic, a technical feat that's never been asked of her before. The mic scene is an expletive-laden homage to a similar scene in Singin’ in the Rain, in which silent film star Lina Lamont fails to speak directly into a planted mic.

The homage gets even more explicit later on after Manny climbs the ladder to become a studio exec and turns La Roy into his own personal Eliza Doolittle. In spite of her Jersey squawk, he casts in her posh roles, including one that’s a near-replica of Lamont’s, coaching her on how to say her lines and soften her vowels. At that point, if it isn’t already obvious, Babylon is a kind of brutal reimagining of Singin’ in the Rain, this time training the camera on the silent film stars whose careers were tragically cut short. (Chazelle, an Old Hollywood musical obsessive, is an avowed fan of the film, using it as inspiration for his 2016 musical La La Land and getting advice from Gene Kelly’s widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, who let the writer-director look at Kelly’s archived props from the film, as well as read his Singin’ script with handwritten notes.)

There are also other, more subtle references to the 1952 classic, including a scene where Jack Conrad argues with his wife Estelle (Katherine Waterston), a stage actor, because she looks down on movie acting. In Singin’ in the Rain, Don (Gene Kelly) has a similar argument with Kathy (Debbie Reynolds), who sneers that screen actors are “nothing but a shadow on film!” She also decries the diminishing morality of Hollywood. “Wild parties! Swimming pools!” she shouts. She’s like the Victorian child meme, except a single frame from Babylon would be her poison.

But the wild parties don’t go on forever. Toward the end of the film, Manny tries to clear up Nellie’s debts with a creepy gangster (Tobey Maguire in festering makeup) but ends up getting run out of town forever, Hollywood dreams eternally dashed. Conrad commits suicide in a hotel room. La Roy dies at 34, her obituary a blip below the fold. Lady Fay Zhu and Sidney, meanwhile, quietly exit stage left. Sidney, for his part, becomes disillusioned by the industry after Manny asks him to do blackface for a scene in a film. He acquiesces (and Adepo delivers a heartbreakingly good performance), then seemingly decides to leave Hollywood behind forever.

The epilogue brings us to 1952. Manny, who now lives in New York, returns to Los Angeles with his wife and daughter. He heads to the old Kinoscope studio, looking up at the gates and remembering his glory days. When his wife and daughter go back to the hotel, he goes to the theater to watch….what else? Singin’ in the Rain. But while the packed house is enjoying the movie, Manny is horrified. It’s essentially the story of his (past) life and the trauma he endured in the business, rewritten as a cheery comedy full of heroes. His beloved Nellie is the butt of the joke, whereas Gene Kelly’s Don gets to adjust and shine in the new world, finding love along the way. All the ghosts of his past are there on the screen, remnants of a dead era reminding him how it all could have gone.

But the movie doesn’t end there. The camera roves through the crowd, drifting past a mix of white, Latinx, and Black moviegoers enjoying the movie, presenting a vision of movie theaters as a welcoming, racially integrated space. (An example of the film’s scattershot approach to race, which doesn’t seem to matter—except for when it does, violently, like in the abrupt, unearned blackface scene.) Something shifts in Manny.

And then. The movie flies into a montage, set to Justin Hurwitz’s thumping score. It’s the kind of montage you might see at an awards season, a rush of clips from movies that span the entirety of film history, among them Un Chien Andalou, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Jurassic Park, and Avatar. It feels as wacky as it sounds, especially after spending the last three hours in celluloid la la land. All the while, it’s interspersed with flashes of color and inky dye clouds, celebrating the development process that shook color into the black-and-white era.

Chazelle, the nerdy patron saint of Hollywood and all the ghosts haunting its weathered white sign, is cheerleading the very concept of movies, reminding the audience in flashy, abrasive fashion, how far the industry and its technology have come. It’s all too excessive (for this writer, anyway) to land on the sweeping, emotional note he’s trying to strike. (And reminds me of an old Wong Kar Wai quote: “Seeing too much is seeing nothing.”)

It’s also a far cry from the restrained, original ending in the (alleged!) leaked script: Manny crying happy tears, smiling as hears Kelly perform “Singin’ in the Rain.” (Another nod to the meta ending of the 1952 film, which closes with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds’s characters starring in a movie called Singin’ in the Rain.)

But after the thunderous montage, the film does, thankfully, return to Manny. He’s watching in awe now, moved by the story playing out in front of him. The montage transmits something into Calva’s performance, as though Manny is somehow aware of the broader changes to come. A wordless scene that, finally, lets a little silence do all the talking.

Posted by at
Labels: