Babylon Revisited
After two days of raucous holiday festivities on the hilltop (22 in attendance on Christmas Eve and 14 in attendance on Christmas Day), by late afternoon we were ready to crash hard as the day wound down and the travelers hit the road for points known and unknown. We were left with Tom and Jenna and Kim and I with the added knowledge that Tom and Jenna would be leaving in the morning for the Temecula and Joshua Tree escape for a few days of alone time. The suggestions that were floated included spending the rest of the day in the warmth of the hot tub (a very Merry Hilltop kinda Christmas), ordering in Chinese food (a solid New York City tradition) or going to a movie.
The hot tub time machine is such that that was not an exclusionary option, and Tom took his needed soak while we sat around and yakked from the patio with him about this and that. The combination of Buddy the Elf food (a ziplock bag of spaghetti with maple syrup) and the normal array of Christmas cookies, made Chinese food seem highly redundant. So that left the movies. The whole movie experience has undergone a massive transformation for us and the world at large in the last three years. I once had a conversation with Ron Howard (yes, I just dropped that name on purpose and for real since he was a client of our asset management business) where I explained that living in NYC I could easily see two or three new movie releases in a week without interrupting my work schedule. That impressed him since he said he, as a movie professional, could not do that where he lived in Connecticut. I suspect that Ron Howard can get any new release he wants on DVD the instant it comes out of the the editing room, but that says more about the humility of the man than about the nature of the movie-going universe. Nevertheless, such was the movie-going ease of living in The City That Never Sleeps, where the range of first run, last run and art films abound.
Before COVID, about 800 movies were released formally in the United States in a year. COVID has cut that in half, and most of us would say that is probably an appropriate thing, given the amount of utter crap that was being released in the hey day. One might have been wise to think that movie releases increased during COVID since everyone was at home in their sweatpants looking for new content. But I think the truth lay elsewhere with the surge in TV Series production and the degree of difficulty of getting cast and crew gatherings together during a pandemic. I am unclear as to whether the reduction in movie production created any better quality content or just a proportionate decrease in good and bad movies. Given the subjective nature of movie quality ratings, I’m simply not sure that an answer to such a question is even possible. One man’s Citizen Kane is another man’s Dumb and Dumber.
The net result on this extreme movie-loving family has been that we go to many fewer movies than before. Part of that is about living on the hilltop and being more like Ron Howard without the industry pull that he enjoys. It is about six miles to the nearest movie theater whereas in NYC we had probably 50 theaters within a six mile radius of where we lived, no matter which venue in the Boroughs we may have been in at the moment. Another part was that the realization that our 83-inch monster flat screen with HDTV and amazingly good quality graphics really was a fine substitute for the big screen for most of the movies I wanted to watch and streaming services will deliver about anything I want for a few bucks to my visual doorstep. Those are good reasons alone for the past three years for spending less on movie tickets than ever before in my life.
The other big change is in the movie theaters themselves. Even before COVID, there was a natural trend heading in the direction of making movie theaters more upscale. First and foremost there was the vast improvement in movie seats. Sticky fold-down seat chairs in faux velvet have been largely replaced by sticky over-stuffed electronic Barcaloungers that allow you to recline during the show while still having a slightly sticky swing-away table for your popcorn and soda. That physical (but note…still sticky…and probably still germy) set-up was only part of the new regime. The rest of the upscaling was by virtue of the online ticketing with reserved seating (there goes the old Dad joke of “picking your seat”) and the fantasy world adoption of fine dining that would go way beyond the popcorn and soda program of yesteryear. I say fantasy because I have yet to see that food service program work. It fails because it is either egregiously over-priced for mediocre food quality (the movie business cannot easily balance its mass marketing approach with its exclusive upscale approach) or the late-stage COVID lack of low-wage workers willing to wipe stickiness off movie-going surfaces is such that staffing problems make the only reasonable approach to be selling expensive and unhealthy (but quite yummy) yellow buttered popcorn and what I will call Bloomberg-Huge drinks from a multi-spigot dispenser that offers flavor additives to any and every soda known to man. This all makes sitting at home in front of the 83-inch HDTV all the more attractive as an alternative…and you can watch while eating Grubhub or DoorDash Chinese food from the comfort of your not-so-sticky sofa.
Nevertheless, the thought of getting out of the house after two days of Christmas extravaganzas at home was appealing to us all so we looked at the offering at the nearby Angelika Theater in Carmel Mountain. This is in no way the closest theater, but we simply don’t go to the Regal or AMC theaters anymore…ever, for some reason. I suspect it has mostly to do with the seats since yellow popcorn and soda are the same the world over. COVID has made us movie-going snobs, I guess. The good news is that Angelika has stepped up its movie roster game and is well beyond the second-string art film listings of its past years and is now pretty much a high-quality first-run movie venue. Tom had seen the new James Cameron Avatar, The Way of Water movie so we took that off the list. That left The Whale, Brendan Fraser’s reentry vehicle in a fat suit, and Babylon, Brad Pitt’s yet-again take on Hollywood of old. We decided that if we were going to return to Babylon, we should just go to see Babylon.
I wish someone had warned me that Damien Chazelle wants to be the next Federico Fellini, because I could have just stayed on my sofa and found another WWII movie to watch instead of suffering the grotesque modern version of Satyricon. This film had absolutely nothing in it for me beyond the opening vision of the BelAir chaparral landscape of 1926 (always cool to think that LA wasn’t always the sprawl of LA and the Hollywood hillside was not always so populated). That opening landscape was very quickly recast as the setting for the spectacle that was to follow when the elephant being hauled up the hillside shits all over the guy pushing the elephant cart. And this was no simple elephant poop affair. This was a full-on elephant diarrhea experience with several waves of digestive angst to add a touch of too-real realism.
I’m sorry, but I just don’t need to see bodily expulsions and rats being eaten alive (yes, the movie has that segment in some sub-basement of an East LA Speakeasy). Tobey Maguire’s red-ringed eyes, highlighted by his yellow patina teeth, somehow thought this movie deserved his Executive Producer interest. This movie made The Cider House Rules look like a Holiday Rom-Com, so maybe Tobey was just confused…or maybe he is as sick a fuck as Damien Chazelle seems to be. Whatever the case, I wish they had both slept in rather than decided to revisit Babylon with the eponymous label implying an attempt by modern-day Mesopotamians to reach the heavens by building the tower of Hollywood on a foundation of decadence. This one is a sure miss for the Holidays.