Chazelle, Damien

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    Venice Film Festival Finds Drama Without Zendaya

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    Day 1 brought challenges but not “Challengers,” the film that had been scheduled to open this usually starry event until it was delayed by the strikes.The sky in Venice wept on Wednesday, for there were no pictures to be taken of Zendaya in couture clambering from a speedboat.No? Too much? Well, it’s hard not to sound melodramatic at a film festival where the movies are big but the mood swings are even bigger. Let me clear my throat, take a swig of this Aperol spritz, and start again …The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off on this rainy Wednesday with several big-name auteurs in attendance but few of the stars that this event has come to count on. With dual strikes by the writers and actors guilds forcing a Hollywood shutdown, and the actors forbidden from promoting studio films during the labor action, Venice will inaugurate a fall film season that is still in significant flux.The first day was meant to be turbocharged by the presence of Zendaya, who turned heads here two years ago in a series of stunning dresses while publicizing the first installment of “Dune.” But the shutdown cost Venice the new film she stars in, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” in which she plays a tennis pro who has to make a romantic choice between two best friends, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (the cheeky marketing materials tease that on at least one night, she chooses both).Without its lead available to support the film, MGM delayed the release of “Challengers” to spring 2024 and yanked it from the Venice lineup. Taking its place as the festival’s opening-night film was “Comandante,” a World War II film told from the point of view of Italian submariners. While it’s well-shot and full of suspenseful battle sequences, “Comandante” features exactly zero tennis hotties contemplating a threesome, which may hinder its ultimate appeal with a Venice audience that was promised starry romantic high jinks.Though the festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, admitted at a news conference on Wednesday that the likes of Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) will not be attending Venice because of the strike, other actors who hail from more independent productions have managed to secure guild waivers, including “Ferrari” star Adam Driver, “Memory” lead Jessica Chastain, and the cast of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” They’re expected to show up on the Lido this week alongside a posse of high-powered directors that includes David Fincher (“The Killer”), Ava DuVernay (“Origin”) and Richard Linklater (“Hit Man”).Still, the strikes loom large. At Barbera’s news conference, the jury president, the filmmaker Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), dressed for maximum solidarity, donning a “Writers Guild on Strike!” shirt and a similar button on the lapel of his sport coat. He noted that as of Wednesday, the writers had been on strike for 121 days, with the actors joining them for the last 48 days, and he called on studios to compensate those artists fairly.“I think there’s a basic idea that each work of art has value unto itself, that it’s not just a piece of content, to use Hollywood’s favorite word right now,” Chazelle told reporters, adding that that idea “has been eroded quite a bit over the past 10 years. There’s many issues on the table with the strikes, but to me, that’s the core issue.”Chazelle was joined by the directors Martin McDonagh and Laura Poitras, who both wore shirts supporting the Writers Guild. They are part of a jury that includes the filmmakers Jane Campion and Mia Hansen-Love, among others.“I’m not sure I entirely deserve this spot, but I will do my best to live up to it,” Chazelle said. “I thank Mr. Barbera for his foolishness in letting me try it out.”Though Chazelle has been to Venice a few times before, to debut “La La Land” and his follow-up, “First Man,” he said he still found the place quite surreal. “That fact that you take a boat to a screening, it’s silly,” Chazelle said. “Cinema, to me, is a waking dream and that, to me, is Venice.”See what I said about melodrama? When you’re in Venice, where even the paint peels in the most picturesque way, you just can’t help yourself from indulging. That’s how your columnist felt last night in the rain, mulling over two of the worst disasters to hit Italy in quite some time: St. Mark’s Square was flooded, and there was no Zendaya. But at least the sun will come out tomorrow here, as will the new films by Michael Mann and Wes Anderson. More

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      Diego Calva and the Detour That Took Him to ‘Babylon’

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      A VHS tape of “Peter and the Wolf,” the Disney animated short from 1946, played on repeat at home when Diego Calva was growing up in the 1990s.Both terrified and tantalized by that first cinematic obsession as a child, Calva discovered the power of audiovisual storytelling in the unnerving leitmotif of the villainous wolf.“Without being able to put in words, it made me realize that I was a little box of feelings and that movies could make them surface,” Calva explained, speaking in Spanish. “That hooked me.”After only one major independent movie, the actor from Mexico City is now starring alongside Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in his first mega-budget American production: the director Damien Chazelle’s silent-era revel “Babylon,” about the grotesque origins of the Hollywood film industry and why movies fascinate us.Calva, 30, recently received a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a musical or comedy for his performance as the Mexican-born Manny Torres, who slowly moves up the ranks in 1920s Hollywood — from catch-all production assistant to influential producer.Calva with Brad Pitt in “Babylon,” the Mexican star’s first big-budget American feature. Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures, via Associated PressHis character functions as the story’s driving force: as both the link between Pitt’s and Robbie’s characters — two successful, often deranged actors — and as the viewer’s guide to this decadent world. Calva gives Manny an adoring naïveté about the movies, which fuels the character’s determination to become a part of them, even if his devotion eventually backfires.While Calva worked hard to win the part, performing wasn’t his original dream. Long before Hollywood called, Calva had ambitions to become a writer-director, as he explained in an interview at a hotel in Beverly Hills. The tall, easygoing novice wore a preppy look comprised of a gray sweater vest over a white T-shirt, black slacks and a pair of shiny black shoes.From a young age, he surrounded himself with friends a few years older who were making short films. Like Manny, Calva helped out in miscellaneous positions behind the scenes of those independent shoots, whether it was catering or holding a boom mic.On one such set, he was asked to step in for an actor who hadn’t shown up, which led to more jobs, mostly unpaid, in front of the camera. He eventually landed his first lead in a feature film, appearing in the director Julio Hernández Cordón’s 2015 gay drama “I Promise You Anarchy,” a festival hit.‘Babylon’: The Essence and the Excesses of the 1920sDamien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in  a tale about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.Review: “There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging,” our critic writes.Characters: “Babylon” draws on film history just enough to flatter cinephiles and risk their ire. Here is a guide to the real-life figures behind the epic.Visuals: Chazelle and the production designer Florencia Martin discuss how they sought to convey the mythical nature of 1920s Hollywood.Hairstyle: The silent-screen star played by Robbie wears her locks long and frizzy — and that’s by design.The story follows two male skateboarders in a tumultuous romance, as they become involved with criminals trafficking human blood on the black market.On a friend’s recommendation, Hernández Cordón checked out Calva’s Facebook profile. Afterward, the director eagerly reached out to Calva, who had been skating since early adolescence.“Within five minutes of meeting Diego, I knew he was the right person for the part because of his confidence and charisma,” Hernández Cordón said on a video call from Mexico City.While there was no formal casting process, Calva and his co-star, Eduardo Eliseo Martinez, had to agree to the intimate scenes in the screenplay. Their openness to portraying intense desire solidified the director’s trust in them.“I’ve always considered myself a bit punk and I love skating,” Calva said, “so the movie was like bringing to life some situations I was already going through at the time.”As Hernández Cordón pointed out, Calva straddles the line between his middle-class upbringing, raised by a single mother who instilled in him an affinity for the arts, and the street smarts attained by wandering a large metropolis with kids from other socioeconomic backgrounds.“I knew Diego had an innate talent, but I worried that he wouldn’t realize the gift he has,” Hernández Cordón said. “I’m very happy that he’s starting a new chapter with ‘Babylon.’”Calva is up for a Golden Globe for his turn in “Babylon.”Carlos Jaramillo for The New York TimesThat introduction to performing professionally, however, didn’t dazzle Calva enough to make him push his filmmaking aspirations aside.He went on to enroll at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, one of Mexico’s pre-eminent film schools, to study directing. But to stay afloat financially, Calva took on acting work, which created a conflict with the institution’s policies.Ultimately, he chose to leave the school and returned to acting full time, appearing on TV series and in supporting parts on the big screen, and putting on acting workshops for children.It was during this period of doubt about his future that the opportunity to audition for the third season of the Netflix hit series “Narcos: Mexico” arrived. He aced it. And while playing the real-life drug lord Arturo Beltrán Leyva on the show introduced him to production on a larger scale, Calva couldn’t anticipate what would soon come his way.As Damien Chazelle searched, in late 2019, for a fresh face to star in “Babylon,” he came across Calva’s image amid a stack of headshots. The Oscar-winning director was struck by the actor’s gaze.“There was something of a dreamer in his eyes, something of a poet,” Chazelle said via video. “But I had no idea if he could act.”The character he envisioned Calva for, Manny, is partly inspired by two Latin American filmmakers whose careers started to take off in the 1920s: Enrique Juan Vallejo, the Mexican cinematographer and director, and René Cardona, the prolific Cuban-born director.Calva submitted several self-taped auditions and eventually met with Chazelle online during the early months of the Covid pandemic. The more intrigued Chazelle became by Calva, the more it also became apparent that the actor had limited experience and that his English needed work.Chazelle and Olivia Hamilton, his wife and a producer of the film, “debated whether it was a gamble worth taking with Diego,” Chazelle said. “She had this full 100 percent unwavering belief in him.”Several months into the casting process, Calva began to feel overwhelmed by the life-changing magnitude of the opportunity, which seemed closer to materializing but not yet certain. Aside from executing Chazelle’s increasingly specific notes about his line delivery, improving his English became a priority.In late 2020, Calva finally traveled to Los Angeles to meet with Chazelle and Robbie, who would play Nellie LaRoy, a fictional starlet and Manny’s love interest.Using his cellphone, Chazelle filmed the chemistry read between Calva and Robbie in his backyard. Their palpable energy convinced him that Calva could deliver on his potential.“He had this kind of Al Pacino-level ability to command the camera without seeming to do anything,” Chazelle said. In fact, Pacino’s arc from innocence to corruption as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” films served as a key reference for Calva’s turn.Robbie admired Calva’s ability to improvise in his second language.“It’s so transformative to act with him because he’s so present that you forget you’re doing a scene,” Robbie said. “He was the greatest scene partner I could ever wish for.”Calva opposite Margot Robbie in “Babylon.” She said Calva is “so present you forget you’re doing a scene.”Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures, via Associated PressFor Calva, the parallels between him and Manny feel almost like docu-fiction. “I identify with him in wanting to belong in the world of the movies,” he said. The actor’s wide-eyed reactions to an epic set piece early in the sweeping story came from genuine emotion.“My first day on a Hollywood set was also the character’s first day on a Hollywood set,” Calva explained. “All of the expressions of surprise you see on my face are real.”By the time one of the final scenes was shot, in which Manny watches the musical “Singin’ in the Rain” and cries, Calva had been immersed in the universe of Chazelle’s movie for nearly eight months. For that emotional moment, the director asked him to replay “Babylon” in its entirety, from Manny’s point of view, via facial expressions.“It’s such a crazy piece of direction, and he does it,” Robbie said. “You feel everything you’ve felt for the last three hours play out on his face in a few seconds.”“I needed an actor who could really dig deep and summon something,” Chazelle said. “It’s the hardest kind of acting to do because you don’t have the benefit of words, language or even body movement. You have to do it all just in your face, in your eyes.”As Manny rises in Hollywood, he loses perspective, even denying his Mexican identity and claiming to be from Spain. Calva, grounded in advice from his mother, whom he considers his best friend, said he believed that wouldn’t happen to him.“I don’t want to lose my childlike outlook on life, my ability for wonder,” Calva said. “I want to remember the road back home and know that if I make mistakes I won’t lose myself.”For now, Calva plans to remain in Mexico City and build his burgeoning career, but whenever he’s wanted on this side of the border, the actor will joyfully oblige.“They invited me to this party,” Calva said with a hint of mischievous glee. “Getting me out of Hollywood is going to be difficult.” More

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      ‘Babylon’ and the Case of the Missing Bob Haircut

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      Margot Robbie’s 1920s silent-screen star wears her locks long and frizzy — and that’s by design, as the director Damien Chazelle and hairstylist explain.At the start of the epic “Babylon,” Margot Robbie’s character, a rising silent-film star named Nellie LaRoy, quite literally crashes into a Hollywood bigwig’s party — her car hits a statue — and then proceeds to take over the dance floor, her voluminous hair whipping back and forth as she headbangs to a jazz score. In a sea of the kind of bobbed hairstyles usually associated with the 1920s, Nellie’s long frizzy mane stands out as Robbie wields it almost like another appendage.The hairstylist Jaime Leigh McIntosh was terrified. “I will be honest, it was freaking me out,” she said in a recent interview via video. “I was just like, I’m going to be stoned in the village square. My fellow hair stylists are going to be like, ‘That’s not period correct.’”But McIntosh and the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, also made sure that as anomalous and modern as Nellie’s hair might seem for the 1920s, there was historical precedent for it. What results is a look that evokes both Clara Bow and Janis Joplin with a bit of the Bible’s Samson thrown in. “I wanted it to be like someone just took her from the woods,” Chazelle said.The wild Nellie symbolizes the ethos of the sprawling movie, which takes the classic narrative of a starry-eyed ingénue and adds a layer of excess and scatological humor. Chazelle was intent on creating a portrait of the 1920s that didn’t look like the one audiences knew from, say, “Great Gatsby” adaptations. “He was just like, ‘There’s got to be another ’20s out there,’” McIntosh recalled. “‘We just keep kind of regurgitating the same looks and the same fashion, and there must have been other things happening.’”In the months before shooting began, she and Chazelle sent reference photos back and forth. He gave her a list of films and documentaries to watch, but the production team was also on a hunt for images of people not filtered through a movie lens. She and the makeup artist Heba Thorisdottir leafed through the book “Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots” for examples of what unvarnished people of the era might look like. Chazelle in particular was drawn to images from portrait studios. “Like Man Ray portraits, but less famous than that,” he said.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.“There’s only so much of what you would call documentary photography, candid camera stuff, but there’s a lot of really out-there, wild, transgressive studio photography that wound up inspiring a lot of the costumes, too, where people would put on crazy, crazy stuff that even the pre-Code movies of the time would never allow you to put on,” Chazelle said, referring to the Hays Code, which imposed morality restrictions on film starting in the 1930s. It was not just the hairstyles that caught his eye, he added, but also the “risqué-ness that was accepted in the wardrobe both of men and women at the time.”Anything that bucked conventional wisdom about the time sparked inspiration. McIntosh cited footage she found of women at a long hair competition and an image of Miss Philadelphia 1924, her hair a mess of frizz around her face before falling into long ringlets. Chazelle looked to the silent film star Clara Bow — “Margot and I both loved just how bird’s nest-y Clara Bow’s hair could get,” he said — but also the less well known Lili Damita, who sometimes appeared with a big curly mop. “I just kept coming back to photos I would find of women of the time with long hair, with wild long hair,” Chazelle said. “I just couldn’t get over those photos because of how un-1920s they felt. They felt so counter to expectations.”As Chazelle and McIntosh found — and as Rachael Gibson, who bills herself as the Hair Historian — confirmed, it was a misconception to think that all women in the 1920s wore their hair short. “We just kind of think, ‘Oh everyone had this hair,’” Gibson said. “But that’s not the reality.”Still, the images Gibson has seen of Nellie struck her as incongruous. (At the time of the interview, she had not yet seen the movie.) “It’s not superlong and it’s kind of got this natural wave to it, and it’s really unlike anything else that we associate with that era,” she said.That too was the point. One of the words Chazelle kept using, McIntosh said, was “timeless.” As he identified Nellie’s historical counterparts, Chazelle also kept in mind “spirits” he wanted her to evoke. Those included the musicians Joplin and Courtney Love and the actresses Jean Harlow and Julie Christie. Chazelle felt Nellie needed to “always have a foot in a different era as though she sort of came from the future,” and used ’80s punk culture as a reference, too.To determine the specific length and style, McIntosh and Chazelle went through multiple rounds of tests, putting Robbie in various wigs to see not just how they looked but eventually how they moved as she walked and danced. “I never expected it to be as complicated as it wound up being,” Chazelle said. “We locked it down right in the nick of time.”Once they settled on her long locks, Robert Pickens built a wig that could both withstand Nellie’s thrashing and convey the “grittiness” of the era. Without air conditioning, Pickens said, “people are sweating. To communicate all that through hair we went with a really fine texture.”Going into filming, McIntosh was still nervous. It wasn’t until she saw Robbie shoot the opening dance number that she suddenly realized, “‘It all makes complete sense. This is genius.’ It took me a while. I was a little stubborn but I got there.”Later in the film, Nellie’s hair is cut into a more recognizably period finger-wave bob as she tries to rehabilitate her flailing career by fitting in with high society. It looks awkward. Her power has been sapped from her, almost like Samson’s when his hair was cut.“I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, what have we done to her?’” McIntosh said. “Which is so funny because normally you’d be like, ‘Oh, wow, look at this beautiful finger wave,’ but because it was on Nellie it was so wrong.” More

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      ‘Babylon’ Review: Boozing. Snorting. That’s Entertainment!?

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      Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed.” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.BabylonRated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More