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

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

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?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzcxY4fpyh0