Damien Chazelle's high-energy ode to moviemaking, "Bablyon," babbles on and on and on for three hours and eight minutes, offering an orgy of eye-popping images and performances and one thought — that movies are bigger than life and have the power to inspire; they should mean something to the makers and the viewers. But not this one.
Chazelle's big swing is mediocre at best. In the first eight minutes, an elephant poops all over a man, a woman urinates all over another man, and there are still three hours of excessiveness to go. The elephant and the woman are both "attending" a party in 1926 Bel Air, California where a giant penis almost the size of the little person wielding it, shoots a white substance out onto the adoring, disoriented crowd. It's busy, bawdy, and bad, and it proves the theory that you can have too much decadence on display. Chazelle's direction is in overdrive here, and viewers may suffer, ahem, whiplash.
