Joey’s Home Movies For the Week of March 20th – Party On with the Excesses of ‘Babylon’

Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, the wild excess of Babylon easily makes its claim as top pick. Joining that film among the new releases this week are M3GAN, as well as a juicy new Criterion selection. Read on for more…

Joey’s Top Pick

Babylon

Damien Chazelle went all out with Babylon, that’s for sure. Reactions were certainly split, but I very solidly came down on the positive side. It even made my year end top ten list. What can I say? I appreciate a big swing, and this movie is very much that. Plus, Margot Robbie is reliably excellent. I spoke to composer Justin Hurwitz about the flick here, while my thoughts on Babylon itself are here in my review, which includes the following:

When you think about Hollywood, you think about it being where movies are made. It’s a dream factory. That’s true, but especially a century ago, it was also an unabashed bacchanal. Sex and drugs flowed freely, in a manner that would put most modern folk to shame. It’s in that extreme playground that Babylon sets up shop, capturing the town and industry at the heights of debauchery, right before everything was set to change. It’s a big concept, but one that Damien Chazelle tackles head on, injecting all of the wildness into your cinematic veins. Subtle, it’s not, but fun? Now that it sure as hell is.

Babylon is a wild ride. The very first scene sets the tone and lets you know what you’re in for. It’s a bold gambit by Chazelle, since he runs the risk of turning audience members off early, but it’s a gamble that I felt pays off. If this is his version of something like The Wold of Wall Street, I’m quite compelled to see what else he’s got up his sleeve. Ambition is certainly something that the writer/director does not lack for.

Also Available This Week

Dragonslayer

Joyride

Left Behind: Rise of The Antichrist

M3GAN

Seriously Red

Star Trek Strange New Worlds: Season One (TV)

Criterion Corner

Inland Empire

From The Criterion Collection: ““Strange, what love does.” The role of a lifetime, a Hollywood mystery, a woman in trouble . . . David Lynch’s first digitally shot feature makes visionary use of the medium to weave a vast meditation on the enigmas of time, identity, and cinema itself. Featuring a tour de force performance from Laura Dern as an actor on the edge, this labyrinthine Dream Factory nightmare tumbles down an endless series of unfathomably interconnected rabbit holes as it takes viewers on a hallucinatory odyssey into the deepest realms of the unconscious mind.”

Stay tuned for more next week…