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

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