Review: ‘Sweetwater’ (2023), starring Everett Osborne, Cary Elwes, Jeremy Piven, Richard Dreyfuss and Kevin Pollak

April 17, 2023

by Carla Hay

Jeremy Piven, Cary Elwes and Everett Osborne in “Sweetwater” (Photo by Tony Rivetti Jr. SMPSP/Briarcliff Entertainment)

“Sweetwater” (2023)

Directed by Martin Guigui

Culture Representation: Taking place in various parts of the United States, mostly in 1949 and 1950, the dramatic film “Sweetwater” (based on true events) features an African American and white cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton experiences racism and other obstacles on his way to becoming one of the first African American basketball players in the National Basketball Association. 

Culture Audience: “Sweetwater” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of basketball and sports biopics, but viewers should not expect an engaging or realistic-looking story in “Sweetwater.”

Everett Osborne in “Sweetwater” (Photo by Ian Fisher/Briarcliff Entertainment)

“Sweetwater” could have been an inspirational biopic about a groundbreaking basketball player. Instead, the movie is a stale cesspool of awful dialogue, corny scenarios and problematic racial condescension that depicts greedy basketball racists as heroes. People who don’t know anything about Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton (the second African American basketball player to play in the National Basketball Association) before seeing this sorry excuse for a biopic won’t learn much about him from the shallow way that he is presented in this film.

For starters, “Sweetwater” inaccurately depicts him as the first African American to play in the NBA, when in fact that achievement was accomplished that same year (1950) by Earl Lloyd, who was a player with the Washington Capitols. Harold Hunter of the Washington Capitols (who was cut from the team before ever playing in the NBA) and Clifton both signed contracts with the NBA in 1950, but there have been historical disputes over whether Hunter or Clifton should get credit as the first African American to sign a player contract with the NBA. In 1990, Clifton died in relative obscurity in Chicago. He was 67. In the last years of his life, Clifton was working as a taxi driver. Just like the business people who exploited Clifton in real life, the “Sweetwater” movie uses him as a pawn to make money off of his talent, and to present a self-congratulatory image of looking racially progressive.

“Sweetwater” (written and directed by Martin Guigui) doesn’t care about portraying Clifton as a whole person in this movie, because he is mainly presented in the context of what white people wanted to get from Sweetwater (played by Everett Osborne) as a commodity. (For the purposes of this review, the real Clifton is referred to as Clifton, while the movie’s Sweetwater character is referred to as Sweetwater.) The “Sweetwater” movie barely shows anything about Sweetwater’s loved ones in the African American community. The movie also doesn’t care to give much importance to his inner thoughts and feelings.

The closest that the movie shows of Sweetwater’s family background and connection to his family are a few, very brief flashback scenes that last for a combined total of less than 10 minutes of this 114-minute movie. In one scene, his mother (played by Ashani Roberts) gives 7-year-old Sweetwater (played by Ca’Ron Jaden Coleman) some sugar water, which was her way of cheering him up, and it became his favorite drink as a child in Arkansas. (Hence, the nickname Sweetwater.)

In another scene, Sweetwater is shown mournfully saying goodbye to his mother because his father Joe Nathaniel (played by Clifton Nathaniel) had decided to relocate with Sweetwater to Chicago, in search of better job opportunities in Jim Crow-plagued America. It’s in this scene that his mother says that Sweetwater needs to change his name from Clifton Nathaniel (which was his birth name) to his new name of Nathaniel Clifton. The movie gives no explanation for why his mother told Sweetwater to reverse his first and last names.

And (cringe alert) the movie makes a point of having a closeup of the cotton being picked in the field by Sweetwater and his father before they move away from Arkansas. The palms of Sweetwater’s hands have small cuts from the cotton thorns, so his mother gives him some sugar water, to help him with his discomfort. As a child, Sweetwater stares at the palms of his hands when he gets these cotton thorn cuts. And several times in the film, when Sweetwater is an adult, he stares at the palms of his hands in the same way, as if he’s remembering that he literally used to be a cotton-picking kid. It’s filmmaking that goes beyond being trite and plummets right into the depths of being racially tone-deaf.

Viewers of “Sweetwater” never get to see vivid details about what inspired him to start playing basketball and who were his earliest coaches. Instead, the movie erases that part of his life to focus on showing how white people in the basketball industry “discovered” Sweetwater and “rescued” him from a life of poverty. In other words, they wanted a piece of him so they could make money for themselves and get credit for being “visionaries.”

This “rescuing” part of the movie is shown almost immediately. The first scene of Sweetwater playing basketball is when he’s a 27-year-old underpaid player with the Harlem Globetrotters in 1949. At the time, professional basketball in the United States was segregated by race. Only white players were allowed in the NBA. And needless to say, the white basketball players, even the semi-pros, were making a lot more money than professional basketball players who weren’t white.

After a mock championship game where the Globetrotters defeated the Minneapolis Lakers (an all-white team), Sweetwater is approached by New York Knickerbockers coach Joe Lapchick (played by Jeremy Piven), who tells Sweetwater that he wants Sweetwater to play for the Knickbockers. (The Knickerbockers would later shorten their name to the Knicks.) Sweetwater, like most of the characters in the movie, thinks it’s impossible for anyone who isn’t white to play in the NBA.

But Joe, who is presented as a crusading “hero,” is determined to prove all the naysayers wrong. “I think you can help make the change,” Joe tells Sweetwater about breaking racial barriers at the NBA, even though throughout the movie, Joe wants to take all the credit for making the change. “You can be the first,” Joe adds, even though the movie wants to forget all about Lloyd of the Washington Capitols.

Joe attends a meeting with the NBA board of directors (who are all white men) and gets a mixed-to-negative reaction when Joe brings up the idea of recruiting Sweetwater for the Knickerbockers. Some of the board members support the idea, but they are outvoted by a majority who want to keep the NBA an all-white group. New York Knickerbockers owner Ned Irish (played by Cary Elwes) is one of the most adamant opponents to racial integration of the NBA, and he makes racist comments to prove it. NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is open to the idea of racial integration of the NBA, but he will only go with what the majority of the NBA board wants.

One of the worst scenes in the movie is when Joe’s wife (played by Dahlia Waingort Guigui), gives a pep talk to Joe when he thinks he’s failing to convince the necessary people to let Sweetwater join the NBA via the Knickerbockers. Joe keeps rambling about the wall of racism that Sweetwater can’t break through in order to get in the NBA. Joe mentions this “wall” several times in the movie.

Joe’s wife tells him, as if he’s pioneering civil rights activist: “You are Joe Lapchick! You don’t need to break through a wall. You just go get Sweetwater and you climb over that wall with him!” If slogan T-shirts were popular during this time period, then Joe and his wife would be wearing T-shirts that say, “We Are White Saviors.”

Meanwhile, Harlem Globetrotters coach/manager Abe Saperstein (played by Kevin Pollak) has put the Harlem Globetrotters on the basketball equivalent of the “chitlin circuit.” The overworked Globetrotters go on grueling tours to entertain audiences of different races. But because of racial segregation laws, the Globetrotters are treated like second-class citizens and denied entry or service at “whites only” places. The Globetrotters are paid a pittance, while Abe keeps much of the Globetrotters’ earnings for himself.

At times, “Sweetwater” tries to make it look like Abe is an ally to these black Globetrotters whom he is exploiting. When the Globetrotters are denied lodging at a hotel that has an unofficial “whites only” policy, the front desk clerk defensively says, “I don’t make the rules.” Abe puts on a big show of indignation and replies, “Yeah, like Nuremberg,” in reference to the excuse that Nazi officials made while on trial for World War II crimes in Nuremberg, Germany.

But Abe’s “outrage” about racism is really fake allyship. In a later scene on a tour bus, Sweetwater is the first person on the team to openly question Abe about the low payments for the Globetrotters (who win most of their games), compared to the white people (including Abe) who get considerably more money for being involved the same basketball games. When Sweetwater points out this inequality, Abe angrily snaps at him: “I’m the reason this team exists! … Just stick to playing basketball!”

And not long after Abe figures out that Sweetwater is questioning Abe’s exploitative business practices, Abe sells off Sweetwater like cattle to New York Knickerbockers owner Ned. Even though Ned is blatantly racist, he’s changed his mind about Sweetwater joining the team when Ned finally admits (after much pestering from Joe) that Sweetwater can help the team win games and sell more tickets. In other words, it all comes back to not really caring about the racial inequality that Sweetwater and other black basketball players experience. It’s about making more money for the white men in power positions, who want the money and the bragging rights about how “visionary” they are.

Most of the acting in “Sweetwater” is terribly unconvincing. Osborne’s performance is very stiff. Piven hams it up too much. Elwes acts like a robotic wax dummy. Pollak tries to be comedic, but it comes across as annoying. Dreyfuss looks emotionally disconnected, like he just signed up to be in this movie for the paycheck. Eric Roberts has a useless cameo as a racist gas station owner named Judd. Jim Caviezel has a very hokey cameo in the movie, as a sports journalist who meets Sweetwater in 1990, by being a passenger in Sweetwater’s taxi.

The movie’s dialogue is mind-numbingly horrible. Joe treats Sweetwater more like a freakishly tall money-making machine than as a human being. Early in the movie, Joe smugly comments that the size of Sweetwater’s hands “makes the [basket]ball look like a grapefruit.” Two radio announcers named Howard (played by Frank Buckley) and Marty (played by Todd Ant) at the Knickbockers basketball games give exposition-heavy play-by-plays about what was already shown in a scene, as if viewers are complete idiots and don’t understand what was already shown a few seconds earlier.

Forget about seeing anything in the movie about any friendships that Sweetwater might have developed with any of his fellow basketball players on any team. None of that meaningful camaraderie is in this dreadful biopic, which makes almost all the other basketball players nameless and generic. The basketball playing scenes in “Sweetwater” are disappointingly predictable and mostly dull. The movie reduces and downplays the racist blackash that Sweetwater got in real life after joining the NBA and instead makes it look like the worst thing that happened to him was a racist referee singling him out for unfair foul penalties.

The closest thing that the movie shows to what Sweetwater is like outside of basketball is when he begins courting a white singer named Jeanne Staples (played by Emmaline), whom he immediately asks out on a date when they meet after one of her nightclub performances. Jeanne sings jazz, but she’s a big fan of blues music, so Sweetwater takes her to a blues club on their first date. Real-life blues singer/musician Gary Clark Jr. has a cameo as in “Sweetwater” as a blues singer/musician named T-Bone, who is an acquaintance of Sweetwater’s.

“Sweetwater” shows this interracial romance, but none of the realistic conversations that would be a part of this romance. No one in Sweetwater’s inner circle makes any comments about this interracial relationship. (Jeanne’s friends are never shown.) Although a few white people glare with disapproval when they see Sweetwater and Jeanne together in public, neither Sweetwater nor Jeanne expresses any concern for their own safety for being in an interracial relationship, even though it would definitely be a concern in real life during this time period. In America in the 1940s and the 1950s, a black man would be in physical danger for dating a white woman, even in states where racial integration was legal.

But you’d never know it from watching this movie, which erases that type of historical context. What makes this erasure look so phony and inconsistent in “Sweetwater” is that the movie has many scenes where racism is a big problem for Sweetwater and his fellow Globetrotters when it’s related to their basketball work, but the movie tries to make it look like racism doesn’t exist when Sweetwater decides to date a white woman. (The movie never shows him romantically interested in any other women.) It’s another example of how the “Sweetwater” filmmakers have huge blind spots because of how they mishandle realistic depictions of race relations when telling this story. And in this male-dominated movie, it looks very sexist that Jeanne is the only female character who is given a name.

By removing so many authentic details about the real Clifton’s life, “Sweetwater” is ultimately a fake-looking, watered-down biopic. Fascinating aspects of Sweetwater’s life before he became a pro basketball player (such as serving in the U.S. Army during World War II) are barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. And the filmmakers of “Sweetwater” should be ashamed that they made his entire existence look like it only mattered in the context of how he elevated the status of the white men who used him for their own benefit.

Briarcliff Entertainment released “Sweetwater” in U.S. cinemas on April 14, 2023.

Review: ‘Babylon’ (2022), starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li

December 16, 2022

by Carla Hay

Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in “Babylon” (Photo by Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures)

“Babylon” (2022)

Directed by Damien Chazelle

Some language in Spanish and French with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area, from 1926 to 1952, the dramatic film “Babylon” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Latinos, African Americans and Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy who are connected in some way to the movie industry.

Culture Clash: A Mexican immigrant finds himself in various entanglements—including a volatile relationship with an ambitious actress—when he goes from being a service employee to a high-ranking executive at a movie studio. 

Culture Audience: “Babylon” will appeal primarily to fans of writer/director Damien Chazelle; stars Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie; and repetitive, overly long movies about people behaving badly that don’t have much else to say.

Lukas Haas (far left), Margot Robbie (second from right) and Brad Pitt (far right) in “Babylon” (Photo by Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures)

“Babylon” is cinematic vomit wrapped up in a pretty package. This movie stinks of being a phony, self-indulgent mess, but because of the pretty package, some people will insist that it’s great. And with a total running time of 189 minutes, “Babylon” wears out its welcome long before those three-plus hours are over. What’s even more irritating about “Babylon” is that it has a pretentious tone that it’s some kind of groundbreaking film. It’s not groundbreaking at all. It’s just a miscalculated, big-budget dud with awards aspirations but with a second-rate plot of a trashy B-movie.

Written and directed by Damien Chazelle (the Oscar-winning director of 2016’s “La La Land”), “Babylon” is being marketed as an “exposé” of the dark side of Hollywood, particularly from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, when most of the movie takes place. (The entire time range of “Babylon” spans from 1926 to 1952.) This long-winded train wreck is actually just a series of scenes showing hollow people acting vain and stupid, while indulging in promiscuous sex, illegal drugs and unrelenting shallowness. It is decadence that looks overly staged, not natural, and certainly not fascinating. And that’s one of the biggest problems with “Babylon.”

An example of how “Babylon” looks too contrived is shown early in the movie, in a scene that is supposed to depict a sex orgy at a mansion in Bel Air, California. Everything about the sex looks too choreographed and fake, which automatically makes this scene lose any sex appeal that it intended to have. The scene is supposed make “Babylon” viewers feel like voyeurs, but all it does is make viewers think that what the cast members are doing in these sex scenes are too precise and perfectly timed to look convincing.

“Babylon” also overuses cheap and tawdry gimmicks of showing bodily functions—defecating, urinating and vomiting—with the type of juvenile glee of someone who tells not-very-funny vulgar jokes, just to try to shock people, when it’s actually not very shocking at all. The bodily functions aren’t offensive on their own, but they’re cynically used in the movie as an obvious ploy to get people to think that Chazelle is being “bold” and “daring,” just because he’s never had these types of scenes in his previous films. When these kinds of crass, “gross-out” scenes are in “Jackass” movies, at least they’re usually funny, and they aren’t pretending to be prestigious art. “Babylon” takes itself way too seriously to even be a good dark comedy.

“Babylon” begins in 1926, by showing service employee Manuel “Manny” Torres (played by Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant who wants to break into showbiz, with two of his co-workers (played by J.C. Currais and Jimmy Ortega) while making a delivery in Bel Air. They are driving a truck that’s towing an elephant in an open cart that’s tied by rope to the truck. The elephant is being transported to a Bel Air mansion, where rich movie-studio mogul Don Wallach (played by Jeff Garlin) is having a party later that night. The elephant is supposed to be at the party, simply as a way for the party host to show off that he has the money to bring an elephant to his home.

The rope on the truck breaks while the truck is on a steep incline. The workers try frantically to prevent the cart containing the elephant from sliding down the incline. And for their efforts, the elephant defecates all over them, with everything shown in graphic detail. What the elephant does to these workers is kind of like what “Babylon” does to viewers who have the fortitude to sit through this asinine dump of a movie.

The party is where viewers first see the other main characters in “Babylon.” Most of these characters have very few redeeming qualities, as if it’s Chazelle’s way of saying that Hollywood in the 1920s attracted mostly corrupt and morally bankrupt people. People with a strong sense of personal ethics don’t last long in this story. “Babylon” is not interested in showing the reality that Hollywood has always attracted a wide variety of people, not just people who are heinous. “Babylon” only wants to give the most screen time and a narrow view to the ones that care the most about clawing their way to the top and possibly destroying the competition.

Movie star Jack Conrad (played by Brad Pitt), a sex symbol in silent films, thinks he’s at the top of his game. But his career has been fading and will soon be damaged by the arrival of talking pictures (movies with sound, also known as talkies) in the late 1920s. Jack is dropped off at the party by his soon-to-be ex-wife Ina Conrad (played by Olivia Wilde, making quick cameo in the movie), who is furious with Jack because he’s been openly cheating on her. Jack and Ina have a hostile conversation in their car, where she berates him for his infidelity and for speaking with a fake Italian accent to people he wants to impress. Before she speeds away in anger, Ina yells that she wants a divorce.

Nellie LaRoy (played by Margot Robbie) is a crude, fame-hungry aspiring actress, who literally crashes the party by crashing her car into another car in full view of the security guards outside. (It’s a minor fender bender.) And then, she argues with the security guards, who prevent an uninvited Nellie into the party. Expect to see Nellie doing a lot more yelling throughout “Babylon,” because her nasty temper is the epitome of her limited personality.

Manny, who witnesses this spectacle when it happens, is immediately infatuated with Nellie because of her physical beauty. And so, Manny lies when he tells the security guards that Nellie is an important person who’s been invited to the party. It’s the beginning of a dysfunctional relationship between Manny and Nellie, where she uses him to get her out of messes and help her in her career, while Manny hopes that Nellie will fall in love with him.

Elinor St. John (played by Jean Smart) is a very jaded and influential gossip columnist, who uses her lofty media position to give and take away clout, in regards to how people want their public images to be perceived. Not long after Manny arrives at the party as a “jack of all trades” service worker, Elinor makes a sexual advance at him, but he politely declines. Elinor is at the party mainly as an observer. She considers herself to be much smarter and tougher than the average Hollywood power player.

Sidney Palmer (played by Jovan Adepo) is a trumpet player in a jazz band where Sidney is considered the star. Sidney and his band have been hired to perform at this mansion party. Later, they get a chance to star in feature films, during the early years of talking pictures, and when it was trendy to have jazz stars perform their music in these movies.

Lady Fay Zhu (played by Li Jun Li) is an androgynous, openly queer or lesbian entertainer, who is described in the “Babylon” production notes as “Marlene Dietrich by way of Anna May Wong.” Fay develops an infatuation with Nellie, but Fay finds out the hard way that Fay’s sexuality is not as accepted by Hollywood star makers as it is when she goes to private parties or performs in nightclubs.

Some of the other “Babylon” characters, who have varying degrees of importance to the overall story include movie producer George Munn (played by Lukas Haas), who is Jack’s best friend, enabler and producing partner; Estelle Conrad (played by Katherine Waterston), Jack’s haughty next wife, a Broadway actress who looks down on people in the movie industry; and James McKay (played by Tobey Maguire), a wealthy, perverted and sadistic businessman who loans money to Nellie and threatens her life when she doesn’t pay him back.

Some of the industry players depicted in “Babylon” include movie producer Irving Thalberg (played by Max Minghella), who is based on the real Thalberg, but is a very bland and generic character in “Babylon,” when he shouldn’t be; media mogul William Randolph Hearst (played by Pat Skipper); and movie director Ruth Adler (played by Olivia Hamilton), a rare woman who helms major studio films. Hamilton is one of the producers of “Babylon” and is also Chazelle’s real-life wife, so it’s perhaps no coincidence that she was cast as one of the few women who has any real power in the movie.

Operating on the fringes of the Hollywood elite are Bob Levine (played by Flea), a sleazy “fixer” hired by movies studios to conceal scandals; Robert Roy (played by Eric Roberts), Nellie’s unsophisticated and domineering father/manager, who is not respected by many of the power players; The Count (played by Rory Scovel), a wannabe actor who supplies drugs to people in the movie industry; Max (played by P.J. Byrne), Ruth Adler’s ill-tempered and antisemitic assistant director; Wilson (played by Ethan Suplee), one of James McKay’s sycophant employees; and Constance Moore (played by Samara Weaving), a silent-film star whom Nellie sees as a rival.

Expect to see a lot of cocaine-fueled debauchery and nonsense in “Babylon,” as Nellie predictably becomes not only a silent-film starlet but also a self-destructive drug addict. Manny, with Jack’s help, breaks into the movie industry and ends up becoming a high-ranking production executive at a movie studio, but Manny keeps letting Nellie’s problems become his problems too. Meanwhile, Jack struggles with maintaining his status as a movie star when talking pictures literally make him a laughingstock with movie audiences.

“Babylon” can’t even be very original when it comes to the “scandals” in the story. Early on in the movie, a young, aspiring actress named Jane Thornton (played by Phoebe Tonkin) meets an untimely death during the party at the Wallach mansion in Bel Air. Before she dies, Jane is shown having a drug-induced, kinky sexual encounter with an older, wealthy man named Orville Pickwick (played by Troy Metcalf), who is overweight and wants Jane to call him “daddy” while she urinates on him.

Jane and Orville are just lazily written caricatures of real-life actress Virginia Rappe and actor Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who went on trial for (and was later acquitted of) Rappe’s death, after she passed away in 1921, during a party they both attended in San Francisco. In “Babylon,” when Jane’s death is discovered in the Wallach mansion, there’s a frantic rush to cover it up. “Babylon” changes the outcome of this real-life scandal, but viewers who know about the stars of the silent-film era will immediately notice that Orville and Jane are based on Arbuckle and Rappe.

“Babylon” has eye-catching cinematography and production design to make everything look dazzling. The costume design, hairstyling and makeup are mostly adequate but also very questionable, since Nellie sometimes looks like she’s from the 1970s, not the 1920s. And the film editing in “Babylon” cannot be praised for a movie this bloated and unwieldy.

The “Babylon” cast members, particularly Robbie, give performances where they look like they want to be noticed and rewarded with industry prizes. Ironically, in a movie that overloads on empty excess, the best and most realistic scene in “Babylon” is a simple but well-acted conversation between Elinor and Jack in Elinor’s office, when Elinor explains to Jack why he’s becoming a has-been.

Elinor is one of many underdeveloped characters in “Babylon,” which puts most of the emphasis on the antics of Nellie and Jack. Manny gets sidelined for a great deal of the movie and only becomes a big part of the story again when Manny is needed to help Nellie. Manny’s meteoric rise in the movie industry, which could have been shown in riveting details, instead is merely a backdrop to whatever reactions that Manny has to the drug-addled hedonism that is going on around him and in which he sometimes participates.

“Babylon” tries to make “social statements” about Hollywood’s mistreatment of queer people and people of color during this time period. However, those statements reek of glib tokenism. Fay is never presented as a whole person but only as a fetish for people who want to see a woman kiss other women, or as an Asian woman whose purpose is to satisfy white people’s sexual fantasies about Asian women.

Similarly, “Babylon” also treats Sidney as a token, because his biggest scene is a humiliating racist experience that he has on a movie set: Sidney is ordered to put blackened makeup on his face so that his skin will look as dark as his bandmates. “Babylon” has no interest in presenting Sidney as a fully formed human being. The movie does not care to reveal anything about his personal life or backstory, whereas the personal lives and backstories of other characters are on full (and sometimes disgusting) display.

“Babylon” is also insulting in how it wants audiences to spend a little more than three hours watching a movie overstuffed with scenes where it’s just a lot of people shouting at each other, doing drugs, and being paranoid about their careers—and somewhere in between, a few movies get made. The snake wrestling scene with Nellie is particularly idiotic, as anyone with basic medical knowledge of poisonous snake bites can tell you. All of these superficial and time-wasting shenanigans don’t add up to much of a cohesive story, but are really just a lot of scenes strung together like a pointless, rambling essay.

Nellie will be the most talked-about character in “Babylon,” but she isn’t even that compelling, because she comes across as a dime-a-dozen Hollywood starlet, not a true star. (The Nellie character is partially based on the real-life Clara Bow.) “Babylon” never shows Nellie having any actual talent as an actress or having a charismatic personality, which would be two of the main reasons why people would root for this air-headed egomaniac. Nellie berates and degrades people who try to help her, she’s a pathetic drug addict, and she only turns on the charm when she wants something from someone.

The character of Jack is presented as having some empathy for other people, such as in scenes where he treats service employees very well, and when he helps Manny get his first big break in the movie industry. But the way Jack is written in “Babylon” is that he’s essentially a stereotypical Hollywood “bad boy” who parties too much and is chronically unfaithful to his wife/partner. There’s a very “been there, done that” attitude that Jack seems to have, but the same could be said about how this entire character is portrayed in “Babylon.”

Pitt in “Babylon” is really just doing a 1920s version of what was already seen in writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which was set in 1969. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which also co-starred Pitt and Robbie, was about fictional has-been actor Rick Dalton (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double/best friend Cliff Booth (played by Pitt, in an Oscar-winning role), as they encounter members of Charles Manson’s cult, with Robbie in the role of real-life bombshell starlet Sharon Tate. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “Babylon” both have themes about what the quest for fame will do to people in Hollywood and how changing trends in Hollywood can affect people’s careers. It’s easy for anyone to see which is the better movie.

Chazelle has a devoted fan base of people who think he can do no wrong. Many of those people are likely to heap rapturous praise on the soulless “Babylon,” just because Chazelle wrote and directed it and got some big-name stars to be in the movie. People who aren’t as susceptible to getting blinded by celebrity names can see “Babylon” for what it is: A vanity project created by filmmakers with enough money to throw around at a movie that’s just a series of scenes of people being obnoxious, with not much else to say. A very pretentious montage near the end of “Babylon” tries to look like an artsy tribute to filmmaking, but it just looks out-of-place in a film that’s already immersed in a lot of tackiness and storytelling muck.

There are plenty of artfully made and entertaining films about people doing very bad things. Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese has made a career out of doing these kinds of movies. Simply put: “Babylon” is Chazelle’s ambitious but failed attempt to make a movie like Scorsese makes movies.

The reason why so many Scorsese films are classics, while “Babylon” will be known as a very expensive misfire, comes down to the believability of the characters and the story. People watching “Babylon” will feel like they’re watching privileged actors and actresses playing dress-up instead of truly embodying their characters. If the purpose of “Babylon” is to show how Hollywood can squander talent with overpriced and aimless movies, then that is perhaps the only area where “Babylon” truly succeeds.

Paramount Pictures will release “Babylon” in U.S. cinemas on December 23, 2022. The movie will be released on digital and VOD on January 31, 2023. “Babylon” will be released on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD on March 21, 2023.

Review: ‘Hard Luck Love Song,’ starring Michael Dorman, Sophia Bush, Dermot Mulroney, RZA, Brian Sacca, Melora Walters and Eric Roberts

October 26, 2021

by Carla Hay

Sophia Bush and Michael Dorman in “Hard Luck Love Song” (Photo by Andrea Giacomini/Roadside Attractions)

“Hard Luck Love Song”

Directed by Justin Corsbie

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed Texas city, the dramatic film “Hard Luck Love Song” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Latinos, one African American and one person of Indian heritage) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: An aspiring singer/songwriter, who is also a drug-addicted drifter, hustles for money by playing pool and has a volatile reunion with an ex-girlfriend. 

Culture Audience: “Hard Luck Love Song” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Sophia Bush (even though she isn’t in most of the movie) and to viewers who don’t mind watching unremarkable movies about self-destructive drifters with broken dreams.

Dermot Mulroney in “Hard Luck Love Song” (Photo by Jas Shelton/Roadside Attractions)

“Hard Luck Love Song” wants viewers to believe it’s a gritty and realistic portrait of an American drifter, but the movie falls apart in the last 30 minutes, with one unrealistic scenario after another. Sophia Bush, who shares top billing in the movie, doesn’t even appear on screen in “Hard Luck Love Song” until 44 minutes into this 104-minute film. Expect to see a lot of pointless footage of aimless main character Jesse Richardson (played by Michael Dorman), as he lives out of a motel and tries to figures out a way to get easy cash.

This is a movie that would’ve been better as a short film. Maybe that’s because “Hard Luck Love Song” (the feature-film directorial debut of Justin Corsbie) was inspired by a song: 2006’s “Just Like Old Times” by Americana singer/songwriter Todd Snider. It’s an interesting but somewhat gimmicky story for how this movie was conceived. Unfortunately, the “Hard Luck Love Song” screenplay (written by Corsbie and Craig Ugoretz) doesn’t live up to the potential of being a compelling tale of people who don’t have much hope in their lives while living on the fringes of society.

Jesse (who is in his late 30s) is one of those people who seems to be down on their luck, but the movie slowly reveals that his “bad luck” is actually the culmination of his bad decisions in life. A native of Texas, Jesse has been struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol for years. Jesse has also been trying for years to make it in the music business as a singer/songwriter (he performs country-ish Americana music), but he remains unknown and broke. And now, Jesse is homeless and trying to find ways to make enough cash to get through any given week.

The movie (which takes place in an unnamed Texas city) opens with Jesse driving in his car and heading to wherever he can find a cheap place to stay and a job that doesn’t care about doing background checks. (Jesse has a prison record.) Jesse checks into a motel and peruses the want ads in a newspaper. He ends up driving to a bunch of seedy-looking bars in the area and applies for jobs where they’re looking to hire people.

In the meantime, Jesse needs cash fast. Luckily for him, he has other skills besides playing the guitar and writing songs, since he can’t find work as a musician. Jesse is also a very talented pool player. And so, the first hour of the movie is about Jesse winning money in pool games at one dive bar after another. (He wins more than he loses.)

During one of these pool games, Jesse finds out about an informal pool tournament that happens every first Saturday of the month at a bar called Broadway Social. At this tournament, Jesse excels and wins $3,000 as the grand prize. However, one of the people he defeated in the tournament takes the loss very hard and decides he’s going to get his money back from Jesse any way that he can.

This sore loser is a thug named Rollo (played by Dermot Mulroney), who has two sidekick goons: a short, weaselly character named Pete (played by Zac Badasci) and a hulking brute named Bump (played by Randal Reedner), who no doubt got his nickname because he likes to snort “bumps” of cocaine. Rollo, Pete and Bump surround Jesse and pressure him to play another game of pool with Rollo, with the obvious intention of getting the prize money from Jesse.

Jesse has enough street smarts to know that this forced pool game will not end well for him. And so, there’s a somewhat suspenseful sequence showing how Jesse deals with this situation. One of the movie’s flaws is that it seems like it wants to be two different stories about the same character. One story is about Jesse’s struggles to get money. That story then gets abandoned and segues to the other story, which is about Jesse’s drama-filled reunion with an ex-girlfriend.

The first 60% of the movie is about Jesse and his search for ways to make some easy cash. He’s never seen working at an actual job. It seems to be a longtime pattern for him that he’s incapable of keeping steady employment. This part of the movie is just scene after scene of chain-smoking Jesse wandering from bar to bar and playing pool.

When he’s in his motel alone, Jesse plays his guitar and chain smokes some more. Dorman does his own singing in the movie, including an original song (“I’ll Be Your Honky Tonk”) that the wrote. He’s a good singer, but not great.

After winning the $3,000 in the pool tournament, Jesse’s first action indicates that he’d rather spend the money on some indulgences instead of saving the money or spending it on necessary expenses. One of the first things he does is look in a local rag newspaper’s back pages, where escorts are advertising their services. (Jesse is so broke, he doesn’t seem to have a smartphone, which explans why he relies on printed newspapers to read ads.)

Jesse calls one of the women who’s in these escort ads. Her alias is Cottontail, but her real name is Carla (played by Bush). When Jesse calls her, she seems to be surprised to hear from him. He invites Carla over for drinks. At first she’s reluctant, but then she agrees. While he talks to her on the phone, tears roll down his face. And that’s the first big clue that Jesse and Carla have some unfinished business.

At a nearby convenience store, Jesse has made the acquaintance of a store clerk named Benny (played by Taylor Gray), who notices that Jesse seems to be in a very good mood when Jesse comes up to the cash register to buy liquor. Benny can tell that Jesse likes to party, so Benny asks Jesse if he wants to be hooked up with something stronger than alcohol. Jesse says yes. And after Jesse assures Benny that he wasn’t a cop wearing any surveillance equipment (Jesse lifts up his shirt as proof), Benny sells Jesse some cocaine.

Jesse’s plan is to party with Carla by drinking and doing cocaine with her. And when she shows up at the motel, it’s obvious that this type of partying is familiar activity for both of them, even though they haven’t seen each other in years. Carla is initially reluctant to do cocaine with Jesse, but eventually she does.

What’s the story with Carla? She is Jesse’s ex-girlfriend from high school. They’ve known each other since before they were in high school. And they’ve had a dysfunctional, on-again/off-again relationship for years. Lately, because of Jesse’s drug problems and prison time, the relationship has been most definitely “off.”

However, Carla showed up for this rendezvous for a reason. Does she want to get back together with Jesse, or is she just paying him a visit out of curiosity? And is she a prostitute? Jesse wants answers to those questions and he gets them, even though he isn’t completely honest with Carla at first.

Jess lies to Carla by saying he’s an in-demand songwriter. He flashes her some of the cash he won and tells her it’s some of the payment he’s gotten for songwriting. Carla is no fool though, because she can see that the dumpy motel where Jesse is staying is an obvious sign that he’s struggling financially. At first Carla and Jesse’s reunion is filled with awkward tension, but they loosen up a lot when they get drunk and high together.

During this night of partying, Carla takes Jesse to a bar where she says that she works. It’s here that Jesse meets Carla’s bar boss Skip (played by Eric Roberts), who tells Jesse that he’s very protective of Carla because she’s a good person. Carla’s best friend at the bar is named Gypsy Sally (played by Melora Walters), who knows about Carla’s turbulent history with Jesse and warns her to be careful about getting involved with him again.

The main problem with “Hard Luck Love Song” is that at several points in the movie, viewers will ask themselves, “Where is this story going?” There’s a rambling style to the film that’s filled with a lot of generic dialogue. Dorman and Bush are perfectly adequate in their roles (Jesse and Carla are both emotionally damaged in their own ways), but these actors’ performances aren’t enough to make this plodding story more compelling.

“Hard Luck Love Song” goes from mediocre to bad with the mishandling of two particular characters. One is a cop named Officer Zach (played by Brian Sacca), who shows up at Jesse’s motel room when Carla is there. (Carla and Jesse predictably scramble to hide the cocaine.) Officer Zach is there in response to noise complaints because apparently Jesse and Carla were being too loud in playing music and laughing during their coke-and-alcohol-fueled party.

The first clue that Officer Zach is unrealistically written is that he shows up with no cop partner for backup. It might be excused if this is a small town with a small police force, but it’s still unrealistic. And then, Officer Zach tells Jesse that he wouldn’t mind partying with Jesse if he could, but he can’t because he’s on duty. What kind of cop on duty says that to a stranger he just met in response to a noise complaint? It’s possible but still far-fetched.

It gets worse with the other badly written character. When Carla arrived at the motel, Jesse looked out the window and saw a man lurking and watching Carla as she went to Jesse’s room. Jesse eventually finds out that this stranger’s name is Louis (played by RZA), and Jesse’s first impression of Louis is that Louis is Carla’s pimp. Without giving away any spoiler information, it’s enough to say that Louis does know Carla. The nature of their relationship is revealed in the last 15 minutes of the movie.

One of the worst things about “Hard Luck Love Song” is that it has some negative racial stereotyping that could be considered offensive to African Americans. The reason why is because there’s only one black person with a noticeable speaking role in this movie, and it’s a role that is problematic and filled with terrible clichés. There’s a racially tinged conflict in the story which has someone showing up out of the blue in an “only in a movie” moment that will have viewers rolling their eyes or cringing at how stupid this scene is.

After having a “slice of life” tone for most of the movie, the tone abruptly shifts to melodrama and moronically staged violence toward the end of the movie. It’s a very clumsy transition, even though this violence is foreshadowed with a brief flash in the beginning of the film. The aftermath of some gun violence in the movie is handled in a completely ludicrous way. And the movie’s last scene is jarringly out-of-touch and phony, compared to the rest of the film. How everything ends feels tacked-on and completely dilutes the edginess that the movie intended to convey throughout most of the story.

“Hard Luck Love Song” is not a movie with much purpose, except to show the main characters trying to forget about all their bad decisions while they make more bad decisions. Just because Jesse sheds tears of regret doesn’t mean that viewers will have a lot of sympathy for him. Because the pivotal character of Carla arrives so late in the film, “Hard Luck Love Song” is mostly a tedious slog showing a loner whose life is on a wasted repeat loop. This movie’s lack of substance isn’t too surprising because it’s a 104-minute film based on a four-minute song. And the song is better than this movie.

Roadside Attractions released “Hard Luck Love Song” in U.S. cinemas on October 15, 2021. The movie’s premium video on demand (PVOD) release date is November 9, 2021. Lionsgate Home Entertainment will release “Hard Luck Love Song” on digital and VOD on December 21, 2021.

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