“At this point in the narrative the ’24 Trump candidacy totally self-defeats its own purpose.” —Jake LaMotta.

A friend is feeling depressed about the GenZ effect upon films. Their demand that POCS graced with presentism have to be featured in everything. If this doesn’t happen GenZ will destroy, attack and reject the film in question. We’re living through a 21st Century version of China’s Great Cultural Revolution in the ’60s. The idea that admirable non-white characters always have to be prominent no matter what, and that they have to be portrayed as “good” while white people are only allowed to be complex failures. By friendo’s estimation there have only been three 2022 films that haven’t been inclusivity-stamped to a fare-thee-well — Top Gun: Maverick, The Fablemans and The Banshees of inisherin. Any others that friendo is forgetting about?

From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety riff on Daniel Craig’s dancing-around-Paris Belvedere spot: “If the new Belvedere Vodka commercial, starring Daniel Craig and directed by Taika Waititi, were a scene out of Craig’s latest film, it would be the best scene in the movie, or at least the one that everyone’s talking about. Then again, no one would mistake it for a movie scene.

“The commercial has a postmodern strike-a-pose viral aesthetic — it‘s two minutes of bliss frozen in time. As Craig saunters and dances through a swank hotel in Paris, it becomes the rare commercial in which a movie star isn’t being used to sell a product so much as he’s using the commercial to sell a shift in his own image.

“Yes, the extended spot is hawking vodka, and Craig probably got a paycheck that leaves most movie-star paychecks in the dust. Yet that’s all kind of beside the point. The commercial is Craig’s way of announcing who he is, or might be, now that he’s done with the role of James Bond.”

HE to Gleiberman: “Your Daniel Craig riff is very good. The ad is an inspired image makeover.

But it was a SERIOUS MISTAKE, I feel, for director Taika Waititi to send Craig into the interior of a glitzy-ass Kardashian Paris hotel. Because once inside that golden dungeon the endless organic glories and intrigues of Paris disappear. Because glitzy Kardashian hotels are the same boorishly vapid experience the world over…Paris, Milan, Moscow, NYC, Berlin, London, Seoul, Los Angeles, Dubai, Barcelona, Stockholm…exactly the same damn experience and atmosphere.

“And so the Belvedere ad fails in terms of spirit and imagination. And this failure, I regret to say, rubs off on Craig a little bit. It’s good but it could and should have been a lot better if it had been about silky Craig-as-Fat Boy Slim Chris Walken dancing and shuffling around several Paris nabes, it could have been ten or fifteen times better.”

I was told several months ago that Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon is a highly energetic, epic-sized smorgasbord (188 minutes!) in which the excesses of The Wolf of Wall Street serve the basic story template of Singin’ in the Rain (i.e., Hollywood transitioning from silents to sound).

Other influences, according to one who saw a rough cut last spring, were John Schlesinger‘s The Day of the Locust, the orgy sequence from Eyes Wide Shut, and maybe a dash or two of Steven Spielberg’s 1941.

But in the wake of last night’s Academy screening, I’m hearing from one viewer that it’s basically a three-character Great Gatsby film (set primarily in the late 1920s) blended with a grotesque version of American Hustle. Brad Pitt, Diego Calva and Margot Robbie respectively play fading movie star Jack Conrad, ambitious industry climber Manny Torres and the Clara Bow-like Nellie LaRoy — a trio analogous to Gatsby‘s Jay, Nick and Daisy. And it has a delightful ending, I’m told. And it’s true that sometimes a really good ending can save a film.

On the other hand Babylon is all woked up and seemingly angled at Zoomers, who all insist on angelic people of color (in this instance Jovan Adepo‘s trumpet-playing Sidney Palmer, Li Jun Li‘s Anna May Wong-inspired Lady Fay Zhu) being marginalized and pushed to the side by evil whites. The minorities are just their skin color and type because that is how we’re trained to see them now — “gay”, “Asian”, “Black”, “Mexican-American”…check check check.

“You don’t watch Babylon — you endure it,” says a friend. “Chazelle took a lot of risks…it’s such a daring film and Damien goes all the way with it, and one can’t help but be impressed by the end. But it’s really hard to watch…at times very gross, loud, shrill, too long…they all scream their lines. Pitt’s character is the only one you really feel for…Robbie may have pushed it too hard….Diego just stares.”