An elephant's anus opens and lets fecal matter fly. It runs, a river of sewage, over a misfortunate man.
The movie is Damien Chazelle's Babylon (2022), and this scene, from the opening sequence, lampshades what follows.
The title references the ancient city by way of Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger's angry collection of salacious libel from Tinseltown's early history. Every musty scandal gets reworked either for comic effect or thematic clarion-calling. Stars rise and fall, death gets waved away as dark comedy, anachronisms are spoken and sung, and excesses run like the film's diarrheic elephant. I can accept anachronistically stylistic flourishes, but the sporadically contemporary-sounding dialogue mostly feels lazy.
The film settles for a time. Performances are excellent, though it becomes difficult to take the characters seriously after the hyperbolic satire of the first third. The talented ensemble and a considerable budget largely get wasted in deliberate excess and disjointed execution. A few scenes-- a Hedda Hopperesque columnist musing on fame, for example-- make some amends.
In case we miss the broader targets, Chazelle riddles the film with allusions to the entire history of cinema, up to the present. The level of attendant wit falls somewhere between early-1990s Simpsons and any-season Family Guy: "Frankly, Scarlett, you're a cunt."
The film's final excess: several consecutive endings (some of them interesting) which reflect on the history and future of cinema.
Stephen King claims this film will one day be praised, a once-maligned classic. Most critics and theatre-goers just maligned it. The editing of individual scenes is often brilliant; the movie overall needs to have a hatchet taken to it. Ultimately, it's an indulgent commentary on indulgence, a three-hour tour with no desert isle in sight. Just because you can drown your audience in foul effluence, doesn't mean you should.
298 words