Babylon is a hot mess. Writer/director Damien Chazelle‘s look at the excess and self-indulgence of 1920s Hollywood at the end of the silent film era is itself a bloated, self-indulgent, clusterfuck of a film that weaves through the lives of troubled star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), newly discovered Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), and behind-the-scenes up-and-comer Manny Torres (Diego Calva).
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Flashback Friday takes us back to 1989 and the story of an American cop stumbling into a gang war in Japan. Sitting in the middle of Michael Douglas‘ run as morally ambiguous protagonists, Black Rain casts Douglas as NYPD detective Nick Conklin under investigation from Internal Affairs who gets roped into a trip to Japan after witnessing the Yakuza gun down members of the Mafia in New York. Assigned with his partner Charlie (Andy Garcia) to escort the killer (Yûsaku Matsuda) back to Japan, only to lose him just after landing, the pair of detectives are forced to stay in the city with a chaperone (Ken Takakura) but no other help from the local police in finding the killer.
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This low-budget sci-fi thriller stars Jose Adam Alvarez as a man struggling to get over the break-up with his girlfriend (Kylee Michael). Prompted by a friend (Quentin Boyer), he contacts a company offering the use of a cleaning sexbot he names Mako (Faith West) designed to provide for his every need. Although unsure how much the service costs, and ignoring red flags, it doesn’t take long for our lonely white male to become addicted to the service.
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Adapted from Abigail Hing Wen’s 2020 novel, Love in Taipei is a coming of age story centering around introverted pre-med student Ever Wong (Ashley Liao) in the summer after her high school graduation being sent from Ohio to Taipei to take part in an exclusive summer cultural program which the students call Loveboat because of all the partying and hooking up that goes on during the summer.
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Knowing Chloe Bennet is fantastic, I’ll forgive her quite a bit, even dragging me into this convoluted romcom tale of a woman who finds herself in a triangle between the brother she married (Blair Penner) after a drunken night of shared sorrow and the one she immediately falls for (Anthony Konechny). Despite the fact that she doesn’t really know either brother very well, and the bland looking catalog models make Tom Brady look exotic by comparison, Riley (Bennet) finds herself living a lie with one brother while pinning for the other and attempting to help save the family business from recent poor management by the pair’s father (Eric Keenleyside).
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