Babylon

laird4.0

"This place used to be nice before your kind showed up. Go home!""This is my home! And it was never nice!"I love movies set in a major city that we've seen on film a billion times that never point the camera at any of the places/types of places we usually see. The London of BABYLON is misty streets strewn with litter, industrial warehouses filled with massive speaker cabinets, shabby tenement housing pocked with National Front graffiti, and literal garbage fires. There are no iconic shots of the Tower Bridge or Big Ben or anything like that. An exception would be a single scene set in Piccadilly Circus, but it's pointedly a very "other" location which the characters visit almost as if they were tourists from another city. Kitchen sink melodrama look at an immigrant subculture with a fantastic soundtrack. I hope the new subtitles on this restoration aren't indicative of a trend to come as they go beyond translating the patois to English (which oddly, they still leave in a dialect sometimes, but not always), and put parenthetical explanations for slang and even brands/proper nouns (example a character talks about an Interceptor and the subtitle reads "Interceptor (car)". It's okay to not know what someone is talking about sometimes, especially if it's a nearly 40 year old movie from a foreign country, cho bloodclaat! (damn tampon)

🦇🪦Jenna RIPcar🪦🦇4.5

One of the most well rounded films I've ever seen. That this was barred from America for having the potential to 'spark race riots' is such a red herring–this shit was barred because it's such a sympathetic and full portrait of Afro-Jamacian life in '80s Brixton. With some really nuanced and fantastic character writing and acting, this really puts you in the shoes of its main character. It flips the script by showing the full and diverse world of the black community–from work, music, different churches, family life, and even some of the ugly side with a scene about gay bullying or implied violence towards women–while the outsiders (white people) are shown strictly as the unpredictable spikes of fringe violence. It's open and blunt in its portrayal of racism. Every white face in this movie feels threatening because they are a potential threat. Between racist employers, racist neighbors, corrupt cops, and the national front... Even "the good one" feels like he could turn at any moment (which he doesn't, and then you feel bad about doubting him. But you get the doubt completely). Truly ahead of its time. It reminded me of Moonlight in its sensitivity towards its subjects.Fantastic direction, fantastic acting, and a great soundtrack to boot. It's laugh out loud funny in parts, the group dynamic between all the members of Ital Lion is so so great. It also has moments that make your stomach drop, including its fantastic optimistically pessimistic gut punch of an ending. I honestly can't praise this enough. Got to see a Q&A with star Brinsley Forde, Dennis Bovell, and Vivien Goldman moderating which was fun too, even if I didn't get the vast majority of reggae name dropping references the rest of the crowd was thrilled to hear about.

George Crosthwait4.0

"This is my fucking country lady and it's never been fucking lovely"