When I judge films, I consider the narrative. I want to be told a story. A movie’s success in my eyes has to do with how cogent a tale it tells.
What if the story isn’t the point? This is a visual medium. Pictures might be what you want to see. Sometimes the visuals are the story.
Splashes of color, images moving speedily or in slo-mo, all carefully superimposed over a generational chronicle are what you’ve come to see.
Or perhaps it’s just the art or the movement without the annals and references. Some films need no consistent content to be great or great fun.
Early films, before we had color to beguile us, were often short comedies, like the Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton movies or Western dramas or sometimes long dark fantasies like Nosferatu or Metropolis.
I hear, for instance, that Avatar 2 is spectacular. By all appearances that doesn’t mean I would find that it makes sense.
Likewise, I hear that Babylon, by the LaLaLand team, is another beautiful spectacle. In this case, based on its predecessor it likely has a lovely plot.
My assessments about a movie may need an overhaul. Just as I have come to like the ridiculous slapstick of The Stooges and the confusing dialog of the Brothers Marx, perhaps I can absorb and value fantastical ramblings in technicolor and beyond.
All The Best 