Flawed Masterpiece and Shockingly Anti-Hollywood

This film is one of the biggest middle fingers to Hollywood I've ever seen. Yes, it's too long by about 45 minutes and kind of goofy and over the top and ridiculous in parts, but it's also quite brilliant at times, and has one of the bleakest, darkest endings I've ever seen for a film of its budget and star power given it's a product of the very thing it's lambasting. Entertaining throughout despite its length, it's one of the most horrifying and repulsive depictions of Hollywood ever captured on film.

The reason for all the bodily fluids and debauchery and excess and vulgarity and stuff throughout is because it's telling you that this industry, despite its seeming glamor and fashion and fun, is right under the surface incredibly vile and disgusting from top to bottom. The ending with the quick historical montage that takes us from cinema's birth to the present is a direct message from film to audience that the Hollywood of today, despite all the flash and CGI and technological improvements and stuff, is no different than what it was at its beginning in the 1920s as depicted in the film, that nothing's changed, that it always has been about excess and making a quick buck at the expense of the latest and hottest thing, and that it feasts on and eventually eats its own in an endless cycle of filth and drugs and death. It's Hollywood as monster, the ultimate unstoppable all-consuming antagonist.

Not a perfect film, but a damn interesting one, and coming from a director who had otherwise been a Hollywood darling no less, having made one of the most saccharin, pro-Hollywood "fantasy" films of the last few decades in La La Land. It's the anti-La La Land, if anything, and a much more interesting film because of it.