There was a lot for me to like about the movie Babylon. And, as I’ve written before, there were times — especially early in the movie — when I was really digging it. It was giving off “Wolf of Wall Street” vibes, in a good way, and I was prepared to make it one of my favorite recent movies.
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy and Diego Calva plays Manny Torres in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
And….then….the movie’s plot became rather trite. How many times were we going to have to see Margot Robbie’s character screw up, only to get rescued? When the movie seemed to on course to replicate the famous fire cracker scene in Boogie Nights, I bounced out of the theatre.
But now that I’ve read on Wikipedia how the movie ended, I find myself wanting to “fix” it. And here’s what I’ve come up with.
Make the character arc of the Margot Robbie character one of redemption. Instead of time after time her screwing up and getting saved, why not use some of that time to prepare us for a redemption arc. In the end of the movie, she somehow straighten her life out and ends up living a long, long time.
In fact, maybe give her the last laugh with a faux documentary from the 1960s or something where she talks about the “good old days” and the transition from silent film to talkies.
Anyway, if nothing else, I was reminded by the movie the importance of strong character development.
In the name of forcing myself to go outside my information bubble ecosystem, I have started to listen to the “All-In” podcast as much as possible. I continue to get a chuckle out of how much of a cultural chip on his shoulder one of the podcast’s contributors has.
David Sacks is becoming my go-to guy for hot takes that are pretty much the summation of all the bullshit rolling around the MAGA bullshit generator. He also reminds me very much of my Traditionalist relatives in how much conflates the softpower of smug Twitter liberals with the hard power that MAGA craves so much.
Just because your quasi-fascist ideas are roundly panned by very online Twitter liberals and you get your fee-fees hurt, doesn’t give you the right to use the levers of power to end what’s left of American democracy. But, yet, here we are. Sacks and his ilk hate on the very liberal elites they demand the validation of.
While on one hand, they want to destroy Twitter liberals, on the other they seem to think that Twitter liberals are all powerful and the only way MAGA can get what it wants is to “own” them as much as possible. It’s a very unstable, convoluted situation for a variety of reasons.
You just can base your entire political movement on “owning the libs” before either you find yourself fading into irrelevance or you start to think seriously of figuring out how to have minority political rule.
Anyway, I know Sacks’ “type.” I am immediately related to one and every talking point that my relative uses, Sacks also uses. Both people also seem to seeth with a lot of cultural resentment over this or that slight.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that some of the “woke” bullshit I’ve begun to see on Tik-Tok really grinds my gears. And, yet, my own personal negative polarization is such that — like, what am I going to do? I hate MAGA and if my fate is to have to defend the absolutely most woke hot take simply because that person is also anti-MAGA, I’m cool with that.
I just want to live in a stable Western democracy, it really shouldn’t be so difficult.
Even though there were times as I watched “Babylon” that I thought it might the best movie of the year, it ultimately failed to the point that I walked out just around the time we entered the third act. I do this all the time with movies — walk out — so it’s not the insult you might think it is.
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy and Diego Calva plays Manny Torres in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
It’s just I really, really hate a certain type of conflict in stories and because I felt the movie had kind of lost the thread by that point, I just couldn’t justify forcing myself to sit through a lot of bad things happening that I didn’t like. The chief thing that led me to this point is, sad to say, Diego Calva. He just couldn’t get me invested enough to go where ever director Damien Chazelle wanted to take me.
There came a point, near the very end of the movie when I gave up. Something about Diego Calva-as-Damien Chazelle proxy just wasn’t doing it for me. So I left the theatre before the movie ended, feeling not a little ashamed of myself. Before that point, I was really digging the movie. It’s Wolf-of-Wall Street level of excess was great and interesting.
I was enthralled by the 20-odd minute prelude before the title credit was shown. I was like, “If the rest of the movie is this good, I might actually finish a movie for once.”
And whenever Brad Pitt or Margot Robbie were on the screen I was totally invested. The Robbie plot of the movie did become a bit trite just about when I decided I wanted to leave. And, really, I think if more work had been put into the taking a few unexpected left turns I might have stayed longer. And, like I said, I didn’t finish the movie so it’s very possible it ultimately didn’t end the way I assumed it would..
I have to admit that the movie was very good at characterizations and I was reminded — yet again — that with the novel I’m working on I really, really need to create interesting characters if I’m going to successfully get people to finish the novel in the first place.
Anyway. I really, really like Babylon even though I ultimately walked out. I would have revamped the Diego Calva and Margot Robbie storyline some. It grew tiresome. Instead of dragging it all out way, way too long, I would have wrapped it up a lot sooner and then done some sort of “post-Hollywood success” third act with the Robbie character. (Who knows, maybe they did that and I was just too impatient to wait through all the horrible things that had to happen to get to that point.)
Go see Babylon, though. It’s really good — especially the first 20 minutes.
I’ve imbibed a little bit, so I find myself loosened up enough to write about something meaningless — in real terms — like the following. I saw a Tik-Tok where Dua Lipa said she liked “dark thrillers” when it came to novels and movies and that got me thinking, “Hey, I’m writing a thriller!”
I know that she has a nascent movie career and, as such, given I have a huge ego and am always daydreaming about how Hollywood is going to adapt these novels I’m working on even before I finish them, obviously I came up with a perfect character for Dua Lipa to play in the inevitable movie adaption of the novels.
There is a small — but crucial character — in the series that Ms. Lipa would be perfect to play should I win the fucking creative lottery and stick the landing with this first novel to the point that Hollywood comes knocking. (This is all very dumb given I haven’t even finished the second draft of the novel, but I’m just daydreaming.)
Anyway. I’m kind of drunk at the moment. It will be interesting to see if I manage to stay sober long enough to actually query this first novel. Wink.
Maggie Haberman is a great journalist. To the point that any time we Plebes point out that maybe she’s a little too close to Trumplandia, the Liberal Elites circle the wagons around her and tell us we “don’t know how journalism works.”
And, yet.
While she is a great journalist, there was a recent reminder that she does have a weakness — she really is a little too close to Trumplandia.
Now, to call her “the Trump Whisperer” who sucks up to MAGA Nazis because of “access journalism” is too loaded. But the above is proof that she is “soft” on Trump. For all the great journalism she’s produced, even the people she’s reporting on in Trumplandia think she’s little more than a stenographer for them when the time comes.
So, at this point, it’s really an issue of semantics — when it comes to Heberman, both sides are right. She is a great journalist, but she is also a big old suck up to Trumplandia.
I saw someone angry at this output from OpenAI Chatbot and the fact that it made him angry enraged me.
It makes me angry because this is why we can’t have nice things. Members of the “men’s movement” want the right to force a chatbot to say hateful, misogynistic things about women — starting with “jokes” and getting ever worse from there.
I think given how society tends to shit on women in general that the last thing we need is a fucking chatbot adding to the pile on. And, yet, here we are, in 2022, almost 2023 with diptshits getting angry that they can’t hate on women. But I think, gaming out this particular situation in the future that we’re in for a very, very dark situation where a war or wars could be fought over who gets to program the “bias” into our new chatbot overlords.
I fucking hate MAGA Nazis. I really do. But cultural Leftists really get on my fucking nerves sometimes. I see the growing chorus of “woke” hate for Avtar — Way of Water and I find myself becoming more and more enraged. Apparently in the post “Get Out” world a movie like “Way of Water” is unacceptable and this is why we can’t have nice things. Something about this really annoys me — I haven’t seen “Get Out,” but I didn’t even think about that element of alleged “cultural appropriation.”
It’s because of such “woke” hate of a movie that is actually reasonably entertaining that most of the movies that are probably going to get Oscars this year either suck or are so obscure and “woke friendly” — at the expense of the story — that no one has actually seen them.
Excuse me. I’m cranky.
I’m cranky because I see the dumb, woke criticisms of the latest Avatar movie and I worry about how the novel I’m writing, which has a lot of organic representation — will be picked apart because I’m a “CIS white male” writing it. The thing I’ve noticed about cultural Leftists is they simply refuse to admit that maybe….they need to tone it down a little bit in name of saving democracy, if nothing else?
While I don’t fucking hate Leftists as much as I fucking hate MAGA Nazis, Leftists — especially cultural Leftists — really grind my gears because of how self-defeating they can be. But getting into the weeds about “what is a woman” they pretty much hand a loaded rhetorical handgun to MAGA Nazis whenever the issue — which shouldn’t be a big deal, but is — comes up.
The whole situation is intractable and difficult to do anything about. America is increasingly becoming two nations, one Red, one Blue and as much I hate to say it “both sides” really do have a fucking problem with very nasty extremists.
As this novel begins to get better and better, I feel like I need to get a better grip on what my heroine looks like. And, at the moment, my heroine in my mind looks a lot like Olivia Munn.
Olivia Munn
It’s maybe not a one-to-one, but that’s the vibe I’m looking for in my mind. There are a few other AmerAsian women of the right age in Hollywood who I’m also thinking about as I write the character, but it’s Munn I keep coming back to over and over again.
In my imagination, the character looks like Olivia Munn but has a very Mare of Easttown vibe to her — in a way.
At least, that’s what I’m doing in my mind as I write this novel — I really have Mare of Easttown at the forefront of my mind as I work on this novel because the dynamic of the two stories is kind of sorta similar.
Sorta. Kinda.
Or, put another way, I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from Mare of Easttown. So, at the moment, the novel (series) is a mixture of Stieg Larsson’s writing combined with Mare of Easttown.
Anyway, I’m growing nearly ecstatic as to how good things are going. I at least know how *I* develop and write a novel. I vacillate wildly between thinking absolutely no one will care about any of this no matter how hard I work to thinking I might — just might — have a chance pulling this off.
I don’t think anyone appreciates how much I live in oblivion at the moment. I live a rather isolated life, all things considered and any attention I get for any reason is enough to get me to at least raise an eyebrow.
So, tonight, something interesting happened someone — from Ottawa of all places — came to this Website via my Instagram account. Now, the reason why this is notable is I think my Instagram account is the first thing you pull up when you search my name.
As such, this mysterious person obviously decided to search my name for some reason and then came here looking for more information. The reason why this is interesting to me is I’m a nobody and there is absolutely NO REASON for ANYONE to be talking about me ANYWHERE.
So the idea that someone out there may have learned about me through a third party is….interesting. Just the idea of there being a microscopic amount of “buzz” about me somewhere out there in the aether is enough to fill me with both excitement and not a little amount of dread.
I have a very, very active imagination so I can come up with a wide range of scenarios for why someone would want to know more about me — half of them cool and half of them bad enough to scare the shit out of me.
Ok, I’m working on my first novel and, as such, I’m completely consumed with storytelling — to the point that it’s almost impossible for me to sit through a movie that I feel fails to match my personal high expectations for what makes a great yarn. (Why waste my time?)
I saw the most recent Avatar movie and I could definitely see that there was a little bit of pandering to the MAGA Nazi set in it — but not enough to drive the box office to $2 billion like James Cameron needs. When I was working at a movie theatre, the one movie that drove the most crowds was the Sniper movie because it fit the MAGA Nazi midset so perfectly that they came to see it in the theatre in droves.
Here’s what I would have done:
First, if the movie must, for the sake of James Cameron’s ego, be three hours, I would slice the “woke” Gaia-on-another-planet part of it down to a spare 1.5 hours. All the rest of the screen time would be filed with fleshing out the motives and aspirations of the “star people.” Don’t make them smug Blue caricatures of MAGA Nazi, but fleshed out people who think they’re the good guys for various reasons.
And, more importantly, I would really have do a lot more with the relationship between Spider and the bad guy. There was a lot of traditional heteronormative heart that could have been built around those two characters. Maybe it was there in the 7 hour cut of the movie, maybe it wasn’t. But it definitely seems as though Cameron could not figure out what to do with Spider.
There was a pretty deep, profound epistemological thing going on between Spider and Bad Guy and…it wasn’t really addressed at all. I know maybe that would have made the movie a little TOO different…but it would have made the proxy MAGA Nazi badguy at least a little bit less one dimensional and would have gotten MAGA Nazi asses in seats.
Anyway, I only even bring this up because the structure of the movie definitely might have allowed Cameron to have appeased both Red and Blue with two parallel storylines that intertwined at the end.
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