Knee-jerk review: "Babylon"

1. La La Land is one of our favorite movies, so we're interested in anything from writer-director Damien Chazelle.
2. This movie... is wild.  Some sequences (we count four or five) are brilliant gems of editing and pacing, others are shaggy go-nowhere tangents that probably should have been cut.
3. It's all way, way over the top and excessive.  That's not necessarily a criticism.  In a movie about the lawless, bacchanal vibe of early Hollywood, it makes sense to be extreme.
4. When the opening scene(!) involves an elephant's sloppy defecation on a minor character, you know you're in for a ride.
5. The most enduring impact of this movie perhaps is our interest in figuring out just how much dramatic license has been taken.  How much of this craziness really happened in 1920s Los Angeles?  What real-life Hollywood figures are these characters based on?
6. Naturally, it's the brash extrovert who gets the job, not the introverted guy who's actually doing all the work.
7. Brad Pitt is fun to watch, as usual.  He's a lot like Harrison Ford to us.  Not a lot of range.  He's just sort of always does Brad Pitt.  But it works.
8. Lot of Big Ideas here about art, especially the way popular entertainment (pop music, television, movies) is looked down upon by the "intellectuals" who prefer higher brow art.
9. There's also universally poignant moments for our characters sadly realizing they've been left behind in a changing world.  They naturally mourn for the good old days.
10. For us, it would have been stronger if it ended 15 minutes sooner.  There's a needless tag that just goes on and on, hitting the audience over the head to make a point the movie had already made in much more subtle ways.  It left a bad taste in our mouth.  Quit while you're ahead.
11. Margot Robbie is good, yes.  It's a perfect role for her.  She excels doing unhinged sexy.
12. But she's playing the most annoying movie character we've seen in a long time, a self-destructive crybaby who isn't content to just crash and burn on her own.  She makes awful choices that drag everyone else down with her.  We had a hard time with her.
13. The business with Tobey Maquire, the suitcase of cash, and a trip to that underground... whatever it was... a dungeon?... felt like it belonged in a whole other movie.  We get the need to dramatize one final scary descent into Hollywood sin, but that was a lot.
14. We've long understood that some silent movie stars couldn't make the transition to talking movies, but we never thought about the technical challenges of having to work out how capture audio.  That's the subject of one of the movie's more engaging sequences as the crew tries again and again to get through a single scene.
15. It is indeed a miraculous skill to be able to cry on cue over and over in front of dozens of bored film crew stagehands.
16. We didn't expect to see a rattlesnake.
17. It's definitely memorable.

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