My first reaction to this year’s Oscar nominations was that it was a sane and sober list, where the right films were recognized and where tokenism had largely been dispensed with. There were a couple of surprises: I had thought that Past Lives might have featured more heavily, but generally speaking, it was a robust and intellectually satisfactory assortment. But I had, of course, not fully reckoned with Barbie.
Two of last year’s biggest commercial flops, Amsterdam and Babylon, share certain DNA. They’re both big-budget, adult-oriented, period dramas of a kind that aren’t supposed to be made any more (except the fact that there are two of them suggests they are) from edgy auteur writer-directors who had big hits a few years back and have been busily spending the credit that they acquired from their success ever since. Both mix comedy and seriousness in a fashion that ought to attract critical plaudits but has brought little public interest. And they’re both long: Amsterdam is two and a quarter hours, and Babylon is a frankly staggering 189 minutes, which is near-Avatar levels of endurance. And, finally, both star Margot Robbie.
Quiet in the feature film world since the 2018 release of First Man, Damien Chazelle returns to the Hollywood-centric beat that brought him success in La La Land for Babylon, perhaps his most ambitious film yet. Opening in a raucous Hollywood party at the height of the Roaring Twenties, through a series of tracking shots, Chazelle introduces us to the three central characters of the film. Manny Torres, played by Diego Calva in his breakout role, attempts to navigate the atmosphere as an aspiring, wide-eyed Mexican immigrant who dreams of leaving his lowly assistant work to become something more. This allows Manny to serve as the surrogate for the audience.
In 1997, the Swedish pop act Aqua released a novelty single which combined being hugely popular with being even more irritating. Entitled “Barbie Girl,” it was a helium-voiced ode to the wonders of the famous Mattel creation, dusted with just enough ironic detachment to allow the musical connoisseur to believe that they were savoring a joke, while giving the unreconstructed pop lovers everything they could hope for. The lyrics are especially lamentable: the chorus declares “I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world/ Life in plastic, it's fantastic/ You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere/ Imagination, life is your creation.” It was successful for a while, sold a huge number of copies and can, very occasionally, still be heard on the radio.
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s most pleasurable film since the first installment of Kill Bill. It’s delightful pop esoterica, blending the sensational disposability of a pulp novel with an antique edition of Playboy filled with crackling cigarette ads you can practically inhale off the page. The film is a visual banquet with a daft machismo that puts Tarantino out of step with the marketing plans of today's priggish e-cigarette smoking snoots. Ultimately, Once Upon a Time... is a stylish fairytale where the two anti-heroes are a neurotic leather-clad TV cowboy named Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Caprio in his funniest performance) and Cliff Booth, a sadistic and square-jawed drunk who feeds his dog canned slop, played by Brad Pitt.
