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

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.