First biscotti I’ve baked in many many long months are ready. Time to head out to deliver them. Or not. I’m feeling sessile, again again. As soon as I stopped baking them the stove threw an F1 error so I guess the stove has quit (it’s either a control board or a door sensor.)
Got an hour into Babylon (2022) and realized I literally could not sit through it in a theatre; my viewing habits are so fussy I’m thinking it should have been a mini series so you didn’t get more than an hour of it at a time. Margot Robbie is, as always, eye-popping. I learned from her wikipedia article that she extemporaneously slapped Leo DiCaprio as part of her audition for ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and I AM SO HERE FOR THAT FACTOID. Anyhoo…
I committed many voracious re-reads of (the almost totally fictional, thoroughly and salaciously scandalous and culturally influential Kenneth Anger book) ‘Hollywood Babylon’ as a youngster, so I know ‘how this story ends’ (please see my song “Slimfast and Methadone” for my reaction to this story line which I wrote almost fifteen years ago); and I can’t *feel* anything about it that the moviemakers might intend; not a good way to watch a movie. Knowing the source material too well is cloying; we’ve known young good-looking people are just meatpuppets for the rich for HOW LONG? NOW?
This is now the fourth or fifth full length movie I haven’t been able to finish in the last month. I blame the pandemic. It’s me. I know it. Is Babylon technically deft and scathingly funny? Yeah, very much so. I’m just a lump of melted down critique rn. So my review is of me. Allegra is having a little moment of wondering when I stopped being able to sit through a two hour film. In my defence, ‘Babylon’ (2022) is three hours long. Apart from more inclusion of Black, Asian and gay characters, the novelty of wretched excess in the service of entertainment for the masses has kinda worn off for me. So it’s not really a review, like I said, and it’s very very funny in spots. I just…. can’t. I’m tired of this story.
I think I need to get back to work on my own stories. I spend a lot of time thinking about Totally Boned. The whole point of it is two broken people find each other and start healing, and since neither of them are conventionally attractive men, it’s not something that would ever get adapted as a script or screenplay. (Plus in my universe if you kill someone, even to protect loved ones, you don’t get to Jack Ryan your way out of it thinking that ‘they had it coming.’ Two mothers are now grieving dead sons, even if they were total assholes, they probably got mom flowers.) Brad and Omar would both get ‘glowups’. Remember the white man laughing at the warthogs getting frisky and the Black man who was acting as his guide remonstrating with him, “They are beautiful to each other.” That doesn’t fly in visual media….