It's Not Big, It's A MEGALOPOLIS (Coppola/Driver/Esposito/Emmanuel/Plaza/Voight/Hoffman etc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgbjQIbuI_s

lolz at the pullquotes at the beginning.

finally the Cirque du Soleil biopic we've all been waiting for

Quoting Kael on The Godfather in a way that's meant to imply she didn't like it (or didn't understand it) is some kind of ridiculous.

This film's wiki page is quite something already.

Hey, big surprise:

https://www.vulture.com/article/did-the-megalopolis-trailer-make-up-fake-movie-critic-quotes.html

I think they're trying to do some kind of a Don Draper, I-won't-accept-tobacco-ads end-around to generate some controversy.

The inclusion of Dracula alongside the Godfather and Apocalypse Now is an interesting choice. The last time I saw it was ~15 years ago and I can't say I've felt compelled to re-screen it.

It's very well worth it. A love letter to all kinds of early film visual effects techniques crossed with some astounding production design and costuming; there's a couple of scenes that should have been well shorter but I'm absolutely glad I caught it twice in the theater on its original run.

(Also the fact that it was a half year before Jurassic Park -- I distinctly remember that film's trailer playing before at least one of those Dracula screenings -- makes it a really interesting before/after moment in terms of visual effects and how we 'see' things on screen, a self-conscious but high end throwback ushering in the full CGI changeover moment.)

Yeah, it's an incredible movie; my third-favorite of his after Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. One of the best-looking movies ever.

a self-conscious but high end throwback ushering in the full CGI changeover moment

Dracula vs. Dick Tracy

Yeah Dracula's stock has definitely gone up over the last 10 or so years

Idk, maybe naive of me but I wonder if Ebiri may be going off half cocked using words like "fake" and "made up" just bc those quotes don't appear in those critics' first-run reviews? It's obviously dishonest to misrepresent Kael as disliking the Godfather but I can also imagine any of those prolific & oft-interviewed critics saying those words in essays, books, reviews of other films, interviews, or in Ebert's case a 30-year weekly TV run.

It's almost like they're predicting current critics are going to savage this film, so they're gonna beat them to the punch and show that he's always ahead of his time and they just don't get it anyway.. doesn't exactly instill confidence

Reminds me of when Terry Gilliam did that intro to Tideland where he kind of apologized in advance for the film

at the very least it's going to be a very strange big budget disaster of the kind that rarely makes it through the algorithmic content machine anymore

I don't doubt that it's gonna be a spectacle, but the fact that he's been working on it since 1977 doesn't bode well either

I can also imagine any of those prolific & oft-interviewed critics saying those words in essays, books, reviews of other films, interviews, or in Ebert's case a 30-year weekly TV run.

Ebert on his show, agree, but at least with Sarris, I'd be surprised if there was somewhere else beside his reviews where you could get a quote like that. (His books all dealt with older films.)

I should say, though: the speciousness of the quotes aside, it's actually kind of thrilling to see Kael and Sarris (let alone Simon) be used in a 2024 ad campaign. And funny!

They've pulled the trailer BTW

Do you think they intended to all along?

is this like avatar but in a city or something

Looks like a Bioshock prequel.

I just watched Dracula again a couple months ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it! The only things that are pretty overtly bad in it are Keanu and Ryder's casting and acting. The American accents are.... egregiously off putting at times. Fortunately their roles aren't exactly overflowing with lines of dialog.

It's visually incredible and of course Hopkins and Oldman steal the show. Tom Waits (along with Keanu and Ryder) truly made it feel very "90's" for me though haha

We're going about this all wrong, maybe the actual new movie itself is fake.

This got trailered before Alien, and in the same batch as the Drafthouse re-issue of “Caligula”

More like Megaflopolis

Watching this tonight, can't wait.

opens on thursday by me and it will be a big pain in the ass to see it that night, but i wont have another chance for a couple weeks and i'm not confident it will stick around that long

Per a former (I think? I could be missing something) ILXor on Bluesky who saw it tonight: “Holy fuck that was awful. FFC carved out fresh territory in the pantheon of bad cinema. Pretty remarkable achievement in that regard.”

seeing mostly positive reactions over here

It's not awful.

Gonna try to see it over the weekend.

Q&A with Coppola during screening had the director defending Haitians and De Niro telling people Trump sucked. A good time.

I know Coppola directed One From the Heart, The Cotton Club and Jack, but the eagerness with which the film press wants to ridicule this film into failure enrages me. I want Coppola and Scorsese and Kore-eda to make films into their eighties and I want them to be ambitious and ridiculous.

Tbf casting creeps/abusers (Shia, Voight, Hoffman), allegedly acting like a handsy creep himself on set and then suing Variety about reporting on this behavior may make it harder for many to root for him in this case.

whoa I didn't know about it

Lot of egregious history surrounding Coppola. I keep trolling by bringing up his vigorous defense of Victor Salva.

Yeah I was going to say, my sympathy level was generally low anyway.

What has the press got against him, is it the Marvel criticisms? What about Kore-eda?

Oh, nothing, I mentioned old dude directors.

I'm hoping this is 'bad but ambitious and admirable' rather than just bad.

^^^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6dagzWsoOI

Tickets ordered for Saturday, will report back.

Well, gotta give credit to Coppola for creating a detailed tribute to Schumacher’s Batman films that sadly lacked coherency and Batman.

It’s a metaphor for the end of film right?

As we know it

More like a metaphor for the end of metaphor.

Imagine the most expensive pretentious student movie ever made

and what's the bad part?

The bad part was Adam's character not introducing his big monologue at the end by saying "Thank you for coming to my TED talk."

I haven't written much about it because I fell asleep for about 15 minutes during Monday's screening and am rewatching it tomorrow or Monday. Some of it was twaddle if not horse shit, including those character names (I swear I heard one called Wascally Wabbit). But I love the gonzo silliness of the thing, its scale, way more interesting than One From the Heart. Like I posted earlier, I want movies like this.

way more interesting than One From the Heart

This I will buy, more or less, but it's even more gender retrograde (and when you consider OFTH has Frederic Forrest slapping Teri Garr around near the start and she goes back to him at the end for Reasons, all of which are dumb and not actually portrayed, that's saying something).

how did they spend 100M on this? it looked like complete shit and didn’t have much in terms of big production design set pieces. was it just actors salaries? i was wondering if some of the background art was ai generated

Had to be.

Coppola sold his vineyard and bought a powerplant for AI & Crypto.

It's messy, and it was mostly the dialogue that doesn't come off right but there was enough really great looking scenes that I was happy enough (a lot of it reminded me of Dracula). I liked Plaza's femme fatale . There's so many odd little dances and movements that I could imagine Coppola being incredibly specific about. It still looked under-budgeted and I just had the persistent feeling that ideally all the street scenes would have looked more futuristic. And can't help but wonder how it all would have looked if it were made in the 80s or 90s. It was good enough that I wish it was much better.

Well.

This movie is absolutely repulsive. Like being stuck at dinner with the biggest blowhard hypocrite you’ve ever seen while he reads from a book of quotations.

… and hits on the female guests.

I liked Plaza's femme fatale

*that dog. voice* Megalop-- olis

There, uh, was a lot happening in this.

During a set piece when a young woman was being dangled above the crowd in a moon mobile, singing, I turned to my fiancée and said “this is exactly what Liam Neeson and Bane loathed about Gotham in the Nolan Batman movies, isn’t it?” I seriously expected either of them to show up and start taking 1-percenters out.

So the Robert Moses character is the hero of this film?

Jon Voight as Crassus is a perfect piece of casting. (Are we concerned about spoilers in this thread?)

Coppola has a point about the oligarchs attempting to co-opt the underclass' misery for their own purposes, but does anyone else see this under all the bling?

The Vesta S. plot says interesting things about the fetishization of (white girl) purity but again, it's lost in the spectacle.

Don’t worry, folks, the NYT figured it out:

In the 1980s, when Mr. Coppola first began to develop the film, “Megalopolis” may well have had a chance in theaters. It was a time in Hollywood when ambitious films for thinking people could be eased into a few theaters and allowed to build an audience over months, adding more screens week by week and sometimes playing for a year or more. Hollywood could afford to take it slow in part because moviegoing dominated leisure time: Not only was there no internet yet, cable TV and video games were still in their relative infancy.

If anyone can find and share a good interview with the director that’s print and not paywalled, please do.

there was enough really great looking scenes

it looked pretty awful throughout imho

It looks more and more like AI pure slop as it goes along.

A take

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/megalopolis-is-francis-ford-coppolas-artistic-rejuvenation

folks you can’t just call anything ai slop

I said it looks like it. The end scenes are of happy people going off into what looks like a mushroom kingdom that's supposed to be Utopia.

Adam Driver should’ve been dressed up as Willy Wonka at that point

i liked beau is afraid. maybe i would like this. i wish i enjoyed looking at adam driver's dumb face though. i really don't. and shia leboof? oof.

Ah, but what if I told you Shia goes down on Aubrey Plaza and calls her "Auntie Wow?"

I love Driver's face.

I never seen Beau Is Afraid, I only enjoyed 20% of Kinds Of Kindness and 30-40% of Megalopolis but I'm glad there's still room at big cinemas for this kind of thing. I thought by now it might be all franchises all the time.

I still don't know what that setting was with the cords holding up the platforms where everyone was dressed like The Shadow.

Justice for Adam Driver and Matt Smith's odd faces and more like them

i like odd faces! he just looks like a dimwit. hard for me to take. but i know he is a weird muse for directors.

the old adam driver was adrien brody and i much prefer adrien.

That was… something. I figured if I was going to see this I wanted to see it on a big screen, so went to a screening with a friend. There were just enough great shots and decent enough ideas that I can’t unreservedly hate it. Just… a lot.

Our screening was filled with loud guffaws, none where FFC likely intended, at a few points - none more than the ”and if it’s a boy… Francis”

Release the 12 hour cut cowards

I'm glad there's still room at big cinemas for this kind of thing

there kind of isn’t? megalopolis was self funded. the financial failure of these movies will make it harder to get other similar stuff produced in the future

folks you can’t just call anything ai slop

― ivy., Sunday, September 29, 2024 2:18 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

some of the backgrounds really look like indistinguishable from something created using midjourney

There was a scene where Driver and Emmanuel are taking a lift up the outside of a building - the effects of that were frankly embarrassing, the movie was barely even pretending to care

I'm glad there's still room at big cinemas for this kind of thing.

Budget of "Beau" was reportedly $35 million, budget of "Kindness" supposedly $15 million. Budget of "The Substance" was supposedly around $20 million. Throw in, say, "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and all that creative go-for-brokeness adds up to still under the reported cost of this sort of indulgent farrago. A $20 million gamble that flops doesn't necessarily kill careers or movie theaters, and a success at that budget in theory lifts all boats. But a flop at the scale of this movie or, I dunno, something like "Babylon" is like tossing out an anchor so heavy it takes the boat down with it.

Or, yeah, what the (aptly named) flopson just said.

From the NY Times:

“It was madness working on that film,” Plaza said. “My mentality every day was ‘every man for himself; only the strong survive here.’”

Any given scene felt up for grabs since Coppola was as liable to tell Plaza, “In the next take, you’re a spider,” as he was to pursue an idea contributed by his barista. “There were days that I would go to set thinking we’re about to start shooting,” she said, “and instead, Francis would go, ‘I’d like to play a game.’” Recalling that, she imitated a record scratch.

Though Plaza felt inspired by Coppola’s unconventional approach, she also knew that if she couldn’t stake her claim on this constantly shifting material, she was in danger of being blown off the screen. Between takes, she stayed in character, hoping to channel Wow’s strength as a survival mechanism.

“Even in the car on the way to that set, I would transform into Wow,” she said. “I would go, ‘OK, I’m terrified right now, I’m having a nervous breakdown as myself, but Wow’s not. She can handle anything.’ And I would switch like a lightbulb: ‘It’s Wow time.’”

Interesting that virtually every actor who works with David Lynch describes how much fun they have working under a similar method, whereas here it's described as a nerve-wracking process.

Rough

How is Nic Cage not in this?

How is Nic Cage not in this, playing every role?

speaking of bonkers alternate universe aubrey plaza stuff i should really go back and finish watching Legion.

How is Nic Cage not in this, playing every role?

Serious answer: he and FFC have had a tangled relationship for decades now and the latter clearly doesn't want to work with him again.

Also he was probably shooting 10 other movies at the time

The Big Picture podcast did…. not love this film

Really wish this had been made before the computer effects were available and with a good co-writer (FFC would probably never allow that though) or just give the ideas to Francois Schuiten and see what he does with it, seems ideal for him.

might watch this on a plane, might not

your reviews aren't exactly compelling me to seek this out

Despite disliking so much about it, I liked parts of it a great deal, so much so it puts Megalopolis above many better executed films this year. Approach with a lot of caution.

I still don't know what that setting was with the cords holding up the platforms where everyone was dressed like The Shadow.

iirc, there was a brief mention that the press conference (or whatever the hell that was) was being held at a large scale model of the city but then they just... never showed the model? i figured they were walking around in catwalks over the big model and the scene would end with a reveal of the model, but nope.

iirc, there was a brief mention that the press conference (or whatever the hell that was) was being held at a large scale model of the city but then they just... never showed the model? i figured they were walking around in catwalks over the big model and the scene would end with a reveal of the model, but nope.

I remember a brief shot of something that looked like a traditional architectural model (beneath the catwalks and gangways). I suppose it could serve to represent the city's political and cultural tumults (plus being more dynamic than the usual suspects just verbally sniping one another), but that might be giving Coppola credit he doesn't deserve.

So ... this is Coppola's Southland Tales, then?

“Eckhardt, think about the future!”

I made my Batman comment for a reason!

And it resonated when I saw the movie, on many levels!

https://racketmn.com/megalopolis-coppola-batshit-mess-aubrey-plaza-my-old-ass?fbclid=IwY2xjawFpEWJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHQGGuskwbdKk3VKsUsixlzb6lBlzRRVLJGiXJUh_ypDlWk6eZnlaO12Kdg_aem_f0BEKJbq7jK-cBOWbZMmqQ

ned otm about schumacher batman. it actually would’ve been suuuch a better film if the production design were as good as schumacher batman though. instead it’s in an awkward middle ground where it has the wacky grotesque look but doesn’t commit fully and just ends up looking like shit

What the fuck did I just see? This seemed as if FFC spent a week on each and every scene, pursuing every idea he got on how to direct it, only to realize at the end his film was now seven hours long, and then cutting everything out except the things he liked directing the most. So many continuity mistakes, so many dialogues where it seemed like five or ten lines were missing (we keep Driver doing Hamlet for minutes, but then all of a sudden he goes 'and therefore you are a slumlord' and then someone has a giant key for some reason?) Favourite part was a character being dead all of a sudden and it only being shown in a short flashback, in what was clearly a sequence cut for time, which made two or three subplots make no sense.

It'll all make sense in the aforementioned director's cut, have no fear

predictably i loved every minute of this visually insane and achingly optimistic and sincere film

Even Shia?

Have Shia’s eyebrows always looked like that? I was very confused by them

As his sins multiplied so have his follicles.

For some reason I was convinced this was from a Don DeLillo book?

You're thinking of Cosmopolis

Made into a film by David Cronenberg

predictably i loved every minute of this visually insane and achingly optimistic and sincere film

― ivy., Tuesday, October 1, 2024

hi, come sit by me

xp - featuring the CGI crew from your favorite CBS procedural!

Should we poll worst -polis?

the constant use of triptychs, the camera lens eroding to a pinhole, the dreams driver has of his dead wife, the entire psychedelic/phantasmagoric effect of the coliseum/drug trip sequence, it is just a complete fucking flood of style, and as evidenced by my posts throughout history i don't care about the "quality" of cgi as long as it has some kind of aesthetic imprint and purpose and the strange knotted glowing megalo structures and especially the fucking FLOWER HOUSE really did it for me. driver was great imo, making constant choices that would embarrass most actors, very similar register to his performance in annette, but i also loved plaza who knew exactly what movie she was in (shakespearean tragedy perverted/denatured by modernity), moreso than anyone else. sexual politics were abysmal ("womanizer. i hate that word. as if the woman had nothing to do with it" pretty much sums it up!!!) but otherwise it was, politically, not that embarrassing???? could've done without the revised pledge at the end tho

I am typically a big fan of Driver and I thought he was terrific in some scenes and absolutely awful in others.

To echo what others have said, Plaza and Voight seemed to be the only two ready to fully embrace the camp.

Glad somebody else here sees that some of the scenes are really damn good, I've been baffled by the complete negativity about the visuals on the thread. I'm mostly a cgi hater and I can count on one hand the number of times I've been enthusiastic about it but theres times when even bad special effects still open up my imagination or move me (Great Yokai War is maybe the ultimate example, that has some godawful special effects in it)

i mean the cgi also accounts for what, 10 minutes of the film

The film somehow didn't feel that long to me, I was surprised how soon it was over

and it's almost entirely speeches and dialogues

Just because we all know how Hollywood works, the reputation of this flick won't hurt Driver a bit, but I really hope it doesn't haunt Plaza and Emmanuel. Plaza seems to be really maturing into some really interesting roles and Emmanuel is just wonderful and deserves to be in many more things!

Just because we all know how Hollywood works, the reputation of this flick won't hurt Driver a bit, but I really hope it doesn't haunt Plaza and Emmanuel.

Other than the Star Wars movies, nothing Driver has been in has been an actual *hit*. The majority of movies in which he stars have probably lost money. How long will this pattern be allowed to continue?

Not disagreeing with that, my point was more that Hollywood tends to "blame" women actors for bombs than they do the male stars.

It occurred to me while watching this that the only conventionally palatable movie I’ve seen Adam Driver in is “Logan Lucky”.

BlacKKKlansman?

Didn’t see it

I thought he was pretty good in “Silence” (which I enjoy a lot more than most). He was weird as hell in “While We’re Young” but that was the point of the character I guess; wasn’t into the movie.

I don't think anyone's getting blamed for this except Coppola. Actors will be assumed to have signed on because of his legendary stature, can't imagine anyone going "oh I think this would have been a hit except for Plaza/Driver/whoever's performance".

Driver's a good enough actor, but a) he does a lot of weird low-budget stuff that I would swear is intended as a writeoff by the producers; b) when he does big movies that are presumably intended to sell tickets, like The Last Duel or House of Gucci or Ferrari, they don't.

Just seeing that he was in Burberry adverts, did they play in america? He seems to have a lot of fans.

I thought Driver's contribution to "Please Mr. Kennedy" was the single funniest thing in Inside Llewyn Davis.

He was brilliant playing a very specific type of fuckup on Girls.

His performance on Girls still might be his most compelling.

https://racketmn.com/megalopolis-coppola-batshit-mess-aubrey-plaza-my-old-ass

Stories that can in no way match the majesty of their URLs

To be somewhat charitable, that coliseum scene is pretty great

Raymond, what did you think?

@Alfred:

I thought it was a complete mess, and the messiness takes away from the bones of what could be an interesting movie. I knew it was gonna be a mess going in, so no regrets about having seen it. The draw was, honestly, what if this is FFC’s last film? (Though I’m not a committed fan and this is probably, let’s see, the fifth of his movies I’ve seen.)

I will probably watch it again with an eye on plot and themes. Not in a theater, since there are too many other things old and new coming up - maybe on a library DVD or on streaming.

This seems unlikely but I would LOVE to see someone else remake Megalopolis: different cast, better effects, dialogue tweaks, more adroit directing. It would serve this story well, because the mess of what we got distracts from the ideas at the heart of it.

That’s big picture - there’s more to be said about actors and scenes et al but it’s mostly been said in this thread already.

This seems unlikely but I would LOVE to see someone else remake Megalopolis

with an even BIGGER budget

🤣

What if it was animated though

Tim Burton’s The Night Before Megalopolis

lol

thanks!

The FountainYAY!

People were laughing at the most random ass times in my screening, the laughter of “what is even going on?”

When the Frank vs Francis thing happened, I was laughing and it didn’t seem like anyone else reacted

lol Ned

https://jacobin.com/2024/09/megalopolis-francis-ford-coppola-review

the remake should star will ferrell. and every other actor is the same.

fuck off to that jacobin thing

i don't find adam driver posed at the edge of a building as time stops around him... silly-looking. it doesn't look silly. please watch the movie instead of trying to decide whether every choice its making is cool or not

as for “why does the movie reference so many other movies”… childish. film is immersed in several storytelling traditions and i think ffc might love the freakin movies idk

you could just write a pan about how ridiculously staged and written it is, do you need to reach this hard

anyway sorry i prob shouldn’t feel moved to defend this film. it is unfailingly itself and a lot of ppl will reject that

fuck off to that jacobin thing

Words to live by.

it is unfailingly itself and a lot of ppl will reject that

I mean I get that but it works in different ways. Like, I'm seeing a one-off screening of Tarsem's The Fall in a couple of weeks, can't wait, sold out crowd on the theater's biggest screen, and that movie is absolutely unfailingly itself. But I'd be happy to see it again any day of the week. This film, uh, no? I can say I've seen it, I can say it was wearying, and I do happily reject it. *shrug* (But as unperson rightly notes, this is not me defending Jacobin's whine there.)

i haven’t seen the fall since i was in high school but i remember it being very tastefully made! and i kinda think things that are tastefully made are a little boring sorry that’s where im coming from

i think we should reject the tasteful bc it strangles both expression and appreciation. this is the ivy philosophy of aesthetics

Hey I don't mind ragged edges and garishness, but Coppola didn't make it all that compelling. And...I'm just not up to taking an make-the-subtext-text lecture from him on his wonderfulness all that seriously?

Ivy you might enjoy revisiting the Fall, its not quite up to todays levels of gonzo but I would not describe it as a film strangled by tasteful restraint, wonder if you might like it more now

The majority of movies in which he stars have probably lost money. How long will this pattern be allowed to continue?

indefinitely? (1) the majority of movies lose money, profits are recouped by a minority of hits, that’s the business model. people can’t predict which movies will be hits and which will be flops ex ante so they take calculated risks. megalopolis is the rare case where everyone (possibly including ffc) knew it would flop, which is why no one invested. (2) even if the movies themselves don’t make money, adam driver could still be justifying his salary by bringing in more viewers than another cheaper actor would. he doesn’t have to single handedly bring the movie into the black, he just has to clear his own wage (on average)

oeo: i guess it’s time to renew my tarsem fandom (your girl loves the “losing my religion” video still)

I like The Fall, I wish more fantasy films looked like that. I wish somebody gave Tarsem more passion project money.

Something really annoying me about some of the reactions to Megalopolis, Beau Is Afraid and (believe it or not) Boy And The Heron is a weird fear and hatred of directors doing exactly what they want. As if they need to be kept on a leash to make good things.

I think someone said it already but there was maybe a lot cut from Megalopolis that they couldn't do, in an earlier version of the script there was supposed to be a mass crucifixions (unless it was during the first ever piss break I taken from a movie, I was bursting)

As someone who loved Boy And the Heron and thought Beau Is Afraid is arguably annoyingly worse than Megalopolis, it's not a throughline!

Something really annoying me about some of the reactions to Megalopolis, Beau Is Afraid and (believe it or not) Boy And The Heron is a weird fear and hatred of directors doing exactly what they want. As if they need to be kept on a leash to make good things.

I noted a similar sentiment upthread but it's among industry people, not posters her (or even critics).

i want all of these directors to keep making long opuses, maybe i'm just reacting to an era when most movie clips i see are online in the tik-tok aspect ratio and comes from the same small group of pop culture chestnuts.

it took me about two weeks to watch all of Beau Is Afraid but i enjoyed parts of it. it was the FIRST Joaquin Phoenix movie i had seen since Gladiator because i don't watch crappy hollywood movies that aren't action or horror and he seems to specialize in a type of "indie" movie that i stay away from or a type of hollywood movie that just looks like its going to be terrible to me. he sucked in Gladiator. the one i saw before that was 8mm which i have no memory of other than it was grimy and the one i saw before that was U Turn which i enjoyed but i have no memory of him in it and the one i saw before that was To Die For which was an excellent movie and the one i saw before that was the horrible piece of shit Parenthood. that's my experience with Joaquin Phoenix. could totally see him starring in Megalopolis though. speaking of Batman.

for the record: i have always been a fan of the album Pinkerton. #toheckwithNedwhatdoesheknow

Yeah, I totally salute Coppola for making what he wanted to make and will take Megalopolis over much of what's available. I'm not really in the market for the film but not all things are meant for me.

xpost You terrible person

I've seen enough of it on social media to see that it's a recurring attitude with a fair amount of people. I think it partly comes from the fine art world becoming increasingly avant garde in the last century. I recently seen a youtube commenter saying that artists lose their way when they stop serving the public.

I think Alan Moore and Hideo Kojima get these kind of responses. I remember someone expressing dismay that Kojima was becoming a star developer because he might get too much freedom.

my suspicion is these clowns get amplified because it's ragebait, very conductive to making despairing statements about media literacy and all that stuff .

Scott, you should totally check out Inherent Vice.

“he seems to specialize in a type of "indie" movie that i stay away from or a type of hollywood movie that just looks like its going to be terrible to me.”

I suspect this is why I haven’t seen many of his movies either, see also Driver, Kidman, and a variety of other performers

Concur that Inherent Vice is worth a watch

I strongly recommend We Own the Night, Two Lovers, and The Immigrant -- James Gray coaxes excellent work out of. Also: Inherent Vice and especially You Were Never Really Here.

*out of him.

I watched the trailer for Inherent Vice and it filled me with rage. I can't think of anything I've seen Phoenix in where he's been a reason I liked it. There have been movies I've seen with him where I can get past his presence and enjoy the movie anyway, but he's never a selling point. Anything he's been in would have been better with someone else in his part.

The performance of his I’ve most enjoyed is in Gladiator, for whatever that’s worth.

My god, he was in Russkies, a tv listing tricked me into thinking that was Hitchcock's last film and I watched it, awful junk of its time

until 2019 or so I considered him by far the most interesting well-known male American actor.

I thought he was good in The Master, compelling even, but what do I know

I think he's great, my favorites are The Master and The Sisters Brothers but he's not a standout in the latter

he was memorable in Gladiator. that's for sure.

i don't know why i haven't watched you were never really here cuz i like that director. i'll get to it. and people like that one too.

Well in a couple of hours I'll be seeing ol' Joaquin in some indie project here, I hear he's someone who has found love.

I thought his role in U-Turn was memorable, he's possibly a bigger asshole in that than he was in Gladiator

You will not have a good time xpost

Joaquin really turned into his dad.

https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/159FE/production/_110847588_gettyimages-1204474561.jpg

Something really annoying me about some of the reactions to Megalopolis, Beau Is Afraid and (believe it or not) Boy And The Heron is a weird fear and hatred of directors doing exactly what they want. As if they need to be kept on a leash to make good things.

i haven’t seen boy and the heron, and i like beau is afraid more than anyone else i’ve talked to about it irl. but i think it’s fair to resent when directors squander opportunities of total artistic license and unlimited financial capital by making shitty art. in the case of megalopolis, i don’t think coppola should have been restrained by a studio to make something more commercial, but i do wish he hasn’t made it. by making a movie that sucked, he proved the haters right.

i am not surprised that jacobin wrote a negative review of a libertarian science fiction movie that celebrates the genius of real estate developers

Something really annoying me about some of the reactions to Megalopolis, Beau Is Afraid and (believe it or not) Boy And The Heron is a weird fear and hatred of directors doing exactly what they want. As if they need to be kept on a leash to make good things.

I saw a tweet this morning praising Todd Phillips for Joker 2 on exactly these grounds. "He took the studio's money and followed his vision! Praise Todd!"

I only finally saw the first one the other day and the vision was "Boy I wish I could've directed King of Comedy in Taxi Driver's setting."

by making a movie that sucked, he proved the haters right.

― flopson, Friday, October 4, 2024 9:19 PM (forty minutes ago)

What's the consequence to worry about?

I haven't seen Copenhagen Cowboy yet but I doubt Netflix or Amazon got what they wanted from Refn. Too Old To Die Young was kind of glorious.

Copenhagen Cowboy is great. I hope he gets to make a second season.

Too Old To Die Young is insane and it IS kind of glorious. even though i never finished it. just the first episode alone...sheesh.

you would have to put a gun to my head to watch those Joker movies. yuck.

i haven’t seen boy and the heron, and i like beau is afraid more than anyone else i’ve talked to about it irl. but i think it’s fair to resent when directors squander opportunities of total artistic license and unlimited financial capital by making shitty art. in the case of megalopolis, i don’t think coppola should have been restrained by a studio to make something more commercial, but i do wish he hasn’t made it. by making a movie that sucked, he proved the haters right.

― flopson, Friday, October 4, 2024 4:19 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Right, but as we know he paid for his own film, so he can critter away what he likes. I'm no sentimentality for the Easy Rider-Raging Bull era.

what about poor kevin costner. 100 million to make 30 million? something like that. and he used 30+ million of his own horse money. poor horseface.

You will not have a good time xpost

This, unsurprisingly, was accurate.

I don't want more power handed from the director to the producers/studio. But there's a ton of other artists working on a film, and Megalopolis would have benefited enormously from Coppola handing them more of the spotlight. It's a film about a city, and there's a long scene that takes place in a room where we're told there's a model of said city, and that should have been the point where the scenography department got to shine, where the responsibility for creating a complete image of the city was put into their hands. But instead we see almost nothing of the model, and spent our time looking at Adam Driver doing Hamlet...

Another thing that's botched badly is the foley work. It's boring, the director never gets credit for his film having good foley work, but it's really necessary to make a film. Every time Cicero turns up in public we hear boos, but I could never figure out how big the crowd is meant to be, because the foley work isn't good enough. A great director would take care to get that lowly technician the space they needed to create that effect. And Coppola does not do that.

I think the 'megalon' idea says it all. It's a mysterious substance that Catiline has 'invented', and that somehow grows itself into the shapes that is needed. No builders needed. None but the genius to share the credit. It's the dream of creation without needing other humans, and it's a director who doesn't trust the people he has hired.

is that adam driver hamlet scene not showcasing a model of a casino and not the megalopolis itself

Well, the casino is the only thing we see. But there's no need to have an elaborate system of bridges hanging from the ceiling, if there's only a casino on the floor...

why wouldn’t you. it looks ridiculous. i loved it

the emphasis on traipsing across scaffolding and elevated beams might’ve even been thematically appropriate

Surely it's a room with a model of a city in it. That's a normal thing that exists. To display a building/block like that would be insane.

…. in a movie where there is nothing but insane misé en scene

Right, but it's not 'mise en scene', it's something Cicero has made for specific reasons.

Like, it's the same problem. There's nothing in the film to think about, other than whether or not Coppola is good. Choices haven't been made for us to think about Ciceros plans, they've been made so that we can think some more about Coppolas direction.

Already working on my thesis that this is an American remake of Straub/Huillet's OTHON - Ancient Rome but in the present, long speeches, political allegory etc.

The last time I experienced audience reaction as nutty as MEGALOPOLIS was the opening night screening of NORBIT that I will cherish for the rest of my life. Cinema!!!

— Candygram for Mongo (@spencer_parsons) September 28, 2024

OK, Armond.

It reminded me that I really should see this while it's still in theaters (surprisingly quite a few where I am).

As I mentioned on a different thread, I ended up seeing this twice so I could do a Zoomcast with my friend (my short-term memory with movies is so bad, I always do this). Took a while to get it together and posted. It's a forgotten film by now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya7HCu4nHhs

Coppola's appearing on tonight's Colbert, presumably to promote the streaming release.

It's a forgotten film by now.

The Flop House ep just came out this week, with Roman Mars as guest.

Colbert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpJZAM12rlo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42Wy_lfnzs4

Ok finally watched this last night (I fell asleep for at least 30 minutes in the middle of it) and jesus fuck, it is some kind of accomplishment that absolutely every scene of this film is terrible. These are also good actors but Coppola either asked them to be very terrible, or used only the first take of every scene. Aggressively ugly looking movie as well. Mindblowingly terrible. I wish Nicholas Cage had been in it.

I tried to watch this. I really did. Got through a half hour but the editing style - all the goofy cutaways and reaction shots, the portentous voiceover, the ACTING - began to remind me, of all things, of Graffiti Bridge so I bailed.

I like this. Southland Tales’ older-no-more-wiser cousin.

Wasn’t sure what to think until a CGI Lady Justice statue comes alive and collapses in grief. Then I was all aboard

That is a gorgeous scene. I love the montage when Driver is planning Megalopolis in his office as well. Wonderful score

My first thought was “Southland Tales is what happens when you give 15m to a sixteen year old boy, Megalopolis is what happens when you give 100m to and eighty-year old boy (not derogatory)”

My second thought was that I really, really, think Shia The Beouf is bad at acting and he should focus on other methods of employment

My third thought was “maybe FFC hates actors?” bc he hired the one of the greatest in the world (Kathryn Hunter) to play a role where she will walk around and be booed at

i recently watched ‘youth without youth’, such a great movie that imo really puts into contrast how terrible megalopolis is

Coppola sez it don't need no stinkin' physical media release:

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2025/5/7/francis-ford-coppola-doesnt-want-megalopolis-to-stream-or-get-physical-release

pissing away his retirement funds I guess

Instead of opting for a digital rollout, Coppola is taking “Megalopolis” on tour. He recently appeared in Boston for a sold-out screening at the Coolidge Theater and is scheduled to bring the film to Detroit later this month.

doesn’t sound like he thinks he’s retired

Following the example of Crispin Hellion Glover's rollout of What Is It? but (hopefully) without the snail stomping

In this case, taking it on tour seems less like indie guy against the system and more like "The Room" or Neil Breen.

i can't imagine the market for a physical release of this thing is more than a few dozen people

I watched this on my phone on a flight over the weekend so it isn’t completely unstreamable yet.

^^^ I'm telling Coppola

"Go back to the Admiral's Clubbbbbbbbbbb!"

Get the film onto USBs, and put the USBs into Cracker Jack boxes.

Then deep fry the boxes.

https://www.afi.com/press/francis-ford-coppola-honored-at-50th-afi-life-achievement-award-gala-tribute/

AFI Silver has invited me to the local premiere of AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to Francis Ford Coppola. I would be interested only if the honoree was taking unscreened questions from the audience. "WTF were you ON when you approved Megalopolis for release?"

Please, give it a try! I have a few others you can add to that list.

Per the link, it's already been recorded, presumably to a houseful of sycophants. But to be able to ask him, face to face, "What is the most unacceptable thing to come out of your ass?"