Damien Chazelle would really like to talk to you about “Singin’ in the Rain.” Of course, you already know the 1952 Stanley Donen MGM meta musical comedy starring Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds about the transition from silent to sound films, but if not, Chazelle will recount it for you, at great length, and with more bodily fluids, in his three-hour plus Hollywood history lecture “Babylon,” which waffles between being a love letter to cinema and a suicide note.
Chazelle also cribs heavily from another text about the movies, Kenneth Anger’s tawdry 1959 gossip tome “Hollywood Babylon,” filled with outrageous stories about the sex, drugs and scandals that roiled Hollywoodland in the 1920s and ‘30s, back when people were still figuring out what the motion pictures would be.
“Babylon” is Chazelle’s debauched, dizzying, deviant, depraved, deranged marriage of “Singin’” and “Hollywood Babylon,” also heavily influenced by the most outrageously druggy and hallucinatory filmmaking of Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch.
