(You might start to notice a pattern with these new reviews, and you're probably right.  I've been gretting films from the library, and I'm pretty much just riding down the aisle.)


[img]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_(2022_film)#/media/File:Babylon_2022_poster.jpg[/img]

Not great!  I would normally expect this film to have been intended as some kind of portrait of the Hollywood "jazz" era of late silent cinema, since this is the era, we're told with much concern, this film has so meticulously incarnated.  But writer/director Damien Chazelle suffers from 'Tarantino Heel', where a creative filmmaker is about twice as clever as they are utterly witless, and Chazelle's version of 1920s Hollywood is a cynically fetishized fantasy rather than coherent history, filled with annoying anachronisms (post-bop jazz in the pre-bop era?  maybe JK Simmons had a point....) and abominably bad humor (did we have to have a close-up on the elephant anus?), plus Chazelle doesn't even know what pre-Scarface coke looked like.  It's all a silly and selfish endeavor for what amounts to silly and selfish characters whose stories say absolutely nothing substantial about the era, Hollywood culture, or the essence of film as a medium (in either silent or sound).  If Chazelle was hoping to seek scrutiny into the classic Hollywood Ego - the arrogance and hubris associated with glamourous decadence -  Chazelle has only managed to parody his own arrogance and hubris.  That 'vapidity follows vanity' is a lesson he should study.

5/10



[img]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Windmill#/media/File:The_Black_Windmill_(movie_poster).jpg[/img]

I noticed that I haven't seen this one from my 1974 thread, so I gave it a look.  A Don Siegel thriller, and his only film with Michael Caine, this film's main problem is most likely its source material (a novel) because it is particularly thrill-less, even when giving Caine a chance to chew the marks out from under Donald Pleasence.  The story, involving Shenanigans between the British MI5 and MI6 intelligence divisions, isn't nearly convoluted enough, but rather a typical extortion/set-up.  The (book) film had an opportunity to maybe even reference something like child trafficking - and it is never made clear what the bloody Black Windmill means, as a symbol, if it was intended to mean anything at all (the book has another title).  Unfortunately this film, while tepidly entertaining, is Siegel's weakest film of his otherwise excellent decade.

7/10




A more pleasant surprise.  I'd never heard of this film before, but saw it was on Criterion, and an independent NYC film about a hit man.  In 1961, this was not well-tread subject matter, and a good six years before Le Samourai.  Also in 1961, NYC independent filmmaking was largely dominated by the success of Cassavetes and Warhol, and this film, written and directed and starring Allen Baron, is maybe closer to a 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but it's compelling enough.  Baron himself has a distracting resemblance to John Belushi, and he plays his affect on his sleeve (the man who prefers to be alone is actually just a very lonely man).  As such, the film's legacy and historical significance outweighs the craft of the actual picture, but fuck it, it's Criterion, it's 77 minutes, and I'm glad to have seen it.  (Stick around for the bonus interview where Baron reveals his inadvertent but pitch-perfect Scorsese impression.)

8/10