Babylon

[Terry Monohan]

We watched this new movie at the large wide screen Theatre DelMar in Santa Cruz CA. With Avatar 2 on most large 3D screens in the SF Bay Area we were lucky to watch this new movie about Hollywood in the late 1920' 30's in a art deco large CinemaScope® screen auditorium.

The movie is long and should have been rated X in parts. Some of the best editing and sound of any movie out in 2022.

We enjoyed all the Hollywood type characters in this 'Babylon' epic movie. Brad Pitt was great Too many of the F words they did not need to put in. Some very exciting parts like the deviant under mountain part in the party booze drug cave kept us on the edge of our seats. It was like being on a dark ride at times.

I guess they have a few 70mm 'Babylon' prints made and they are all showing in NYC, no SF 70mm showing.at this time. The Drafthouse New Mission or Castro Theatres in SF or the Grand Lake in Oakland could have run in 70mm but Disney had Avatar 2 booked in the large auditoriums.

Wait till you see the last 10 minutes and the wonderful Hollywood tribute movie flash editing, even curved screen Cinerama® along with 70mm Ben Hur.

A big treat for us Tony Curtis's daughter Kelly Curtis and a retired producer sat in front of us at the Del Mar last Friday for the matinee. We talked after the movie in the deco Del Mar lobby.

[Jim Cassedy]

There are several 70mm prints of "Babylon" circulating. Over the holidays, I saw one theater in
NY was running something like 5 or 6, 70mm shows a day- - the last one got out at close to 4am.
I know they say NY is "the city that never sleeps", - I guess they apparently have projectionists
and theater staffs that don't sleep either.

At the venue I work at, we've officially started referring to "Babylon" as "Babalong"

[Leo Enticknap]

Overheard two customers who had walked out of it ranting at the lady in the box office: "Defecation and urination .... and that's just the first ten minutes! The Lord alone knows what happens in the rest of it, but we don't want to!"

[Paul H. Rayton]

Those ladies Leo overheard might be happy they were not on this [ https://fortune.com/2023/01/06/air-i...oman-new-york/ ] recent Air India flight, during which a drunken man urinated on a female passenger in the Business Class section. Maybe that passenger had seen the movie prior to his trip?

[Michael Brown]

I'm assuming this was shot on film?

I watched in in 2k digital and i noticed quite a bit of negative dirt. Is it normal for a film shot in this day and age in film to have so much negative dirt??

Will all movies shot on film look like this? or is it some sort of effect added in?


Hopefuly its ok if i ask this here. If a film has "a digital imtermediate" does that mean it is shot on film? Ive seen a few films recently with Digital intermediate mentioned in the credits.
Whats confusing me is with this film its the only time ive noticed negative dirt so obvious.

[Frank Cox]

I think that "dirt" was a deliberate effect added to the movie. (And if you want to see a movie that's deliberately beat up to a far greater degree watch Grindhouse.)

You see a fake lens flare in a lot of movies too. Just somebody's idea of being artistic.

Digital intermediate is a legacy term from several years ago. It originally meant scanned from film and processed digitally; now it's just a way to say colour correction and mastering. Very few movies are actually shot on film these days.

[Michael Brown]

Just watched Knock at the kabin that's 35mm Panavision. It's didn't have negative dirt. So yes assuming the dirt on Babylon was faked

[Bobby Henderson]

The faked "film damage" in the Planet Terror half of Grindhouse was just plain annoying. Robert Rodriguez shot the feature using digital cameras. The video-ish look was creeping through a great deal of the movie, despite Rodriguez' steps at trying to make the footage look like "film." The Death Proof half of Grindhouse was photographed far better (shot on film), but it was mostly boring as hell due to diarrhea of the typewriter excess dialog from Quentin Tarantino.

The term "digital intermediate" is still a valid term, provided if a movie is shot on film. The film negatives are scanned. The resulting files from the scans are the "digital intermediate" to be manipulated in post production. All of the color grading is done in the digital realm. In the past "color timing" was an analog, optical/chemical process. Along with digital color grading any CG-based visual effects are digitally composited into the live action footage.

Movies shot using digital cameras have a similar post production process, but there is no film scanning steps involved. They just start doing the digital color grading and effects compositing work with the digital camera footage.

It's still possible for a movie production to shoot on film and do a film-based post production work flow. Such cases are increasingly rare. Even with an all-film workflow they still have to scan and post process the finished product so it can be distributed to digital-based cinemas and released on home video platforms (which are all digital now).