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.

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?