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.

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.