Building the bomb
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 179
REVIEW DEP’T.
Megalopolis Had a Baffling Blueprint and They Didn't Finish the Punch List
Megalopolis (2024)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA directed The Godfather, and The Conversation, and The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now, and The Godfather Part III, and Tetro, and Twixt, and Rumble Fish, and One from the Heart, and Peggy Sue got Married, and Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and The Cotton Club, and The Outsiders, and also a Dracula movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Francis Ford Coppola directed Captain EO. Francis Ford Coppola won five Oscars. Francis Ford Coppola doesn’t have anything to prove, and at the age of 85, he has gone and made Megalopolis, a movie that, according to all the movie news, was his big dream project, and he even went into his own pocket to get the movie out, which you’re never supposed to do.
According to an explainer thing that comes up at the beginning of the film, Megalopolis is a fable. It’s set in New Rome, which has the Chrysler building in it, a lot, and everybody in the movie reads newspapers with titles like the New Rome Post and the Rome Times. Everybody reads newspapers, made out of paper.
It’s a fable, and I couldn’t figure out if there was any character in it who was good, they all seemed to be very flawed, so in some way I thought that was gonna pay off, since it’s a fable?
I didn’t even try to read anything about about Megalopolis, but I caught fragments of so much bad stuff that I was worried it was doomed, as far as being in movie theaters long enough for me to see it, and I’d miss it, because Indignity doesn’t get the Media hookups for pre-screenings (like newspapers do), so I kept checking the theaters last week, and it wasn’t gonna last on screens for another week in my city, so I saw it Thursday, the final day of the movie week, with maybe five other people.
Adam Driver is the Protagonist, and he’s got a Roman-type name, Cesar Catilina, an architect who also invented some sorta molecule or material or something, which reminded me of one of those pulpy Ayn Rand books, where the super-genius makes something really good and all the subgeniuses don’t like it because they’re jealous. Mr. Catilina wants to save the city and build the titular Megalopolis inside of the crumbling Rome-opolis, and I don’t like to get outside of a movie, but Adam Driver can’t carry a picture. He projects all kindsa energy, but it’s always Adam Driver. He was super-annoying in those Star Wars movies he was in. Anyway, Cesar Catilina is kinda like Robert Moses, a little. Do you remember that Off Broadway play about Robert Moses with Ralph Feinnes? It was supposed to be good, but it’s a play about Robert Moses, right? This is like a movie about Robert Moses, if he was in a fable and invented a molecule and wanted to rebuild New York Rome World with it. The movie poster has Adam Driver holding a T-square. Who is going to see a movie that has a T-square? I feel bad for this movie.
It’s easy to see this is completely personal for Francis Ford Coppola, and there’s a lotta him in Cesar, the super-creative guy who everybody wants to work with and can solve all the city’s problems, except he’s at the mercy of the Money people, etc., snore. There’s also a lot of unpleasant dysfunctional family stuff in it, many characters are related, and they don’t get along. What jumped out at me is there’s old-time movie voiceover stuff connecting the dots on a couple of the characters explaining that they are in an incestuous relationship. Why is this a feature of the movie? Ugh.
It’s not like I was all jacked up about Megalopolis and got disappointed, I went in with low expectations, but it’s a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. I was ready for something that was maybe going to be weird and not for everybody, and it was weird and not even for me. This movie isn’t one of those so-bad-it’s-good situations, it’s just not good, and it’s depressing to think this is it for Francis Ford Coppola. His movie says it’s a fable, but it’s a puzzle: How could anybody anywhere near Francis Ford Coppola while this movie was getting made not tell him that this thing is a mess?
I am sad about this movie, it’s got all these great shots and images, but it’s also got a character doing a whole Hamlet “To be or not to be” chunk that is, I think, the last thing anybody wants to sit though in a movie, especially in the first ten minutes of the movie. There’s a triple-splitscreen food montage in this movie.
There are famous actors, in Megalopolis, many who have worked with Francis Ford Coppola before: Giancarlo Esposito as the corrupt mayor of New Rome, Shia LaBeouf as the jealous and dissolute cousin, Jon Voight as the dotty rich uncle, and Laurence Fishburne as the narrator and guy who drives Adam Driver around, oy. Also Talia Shire, who was in The Godfather, and Dustin Hoffman, who is in this movie as Nush “The Fixer” Berman—not everybody got a Roman name—who gets lines like “Look at that,” when his character is in a scene with a crowd of people who are supposed to be looking at something wondrous, while the camerawork doesn’t have a master shot to make you believe for one minute that the wondrous thing and its audience are even in the same space.
There are also some actors who are almost there, fame-wise, Aubrey Plaza really vampin’ it up as the femme fatale business-news television personality Wow Platinum, and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero, the Mayor of New Rome’s daughter. She went to medical school for a year, so she’s smart, not like people say, but her character is hobbled by impossible mouthfuls of stiff dialogue.
Even if it is a fable, some preposterous stuff happens in Megalopolis, but not enough to distract from how janky it all is, even with millions of dollars and some beautiful images up on the big screen. The cinematography, art direction, and production design will at least get some sorta prize, but as soon as the images have to move, the special effects, they look like they got run through the movie-making process and then the last 20 percent didn’t get done, to smooth it all out and make everything match and not look clunky and fake, even for a fable? Some of the effects are just bad, who was looking at this stuff? I don’t know how else to explain it. I want to see it again.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, October 15, 2024
★★★★ Even stripes of white cloud, narrowly spaced on the blue, stretched low in the downtown sky. It was cold enough now for the heavy hoodie, and a dropped glove lay on the subway steps. Cold air was flowing down onto the uptown A/C/E platform at Times Square. The wind down Third Avenue chilled the scalp. A traffic cop watched cars roll through an intersection, peering through the slit between cap and balaclava. Out in the brightness, it seemed pointless to go back into the subway, heading downtown to get crosstown to the uptown train, while the towers of the Time Warner Center waited right there in the walkable distance, their glass full of the dimmed and rumpled image of the the surrounding sky. At dusk, a ragged edge of light-struck purple gaped at the bottom of the dull dark western clouds, like a bestial mouth or torn wound. A short while later, in the opposite sky, the moon hung clean and brilliant, just off round, with a frame of thin clouds to catch still more of its glow.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE WOULD LIKE to present instructions in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from 'Please, M'm, The Butcher!': A Complete Guide To Catering For The Housewife Of Moderate Means, With Menus Of All Meals For A Year, Numerous Recipes, And Fifty-Two Additional Menus Of Dinners Without Meat, by Beatrice Guarracino, published in 1903, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all; however, availability-wise, on Bluesky, the Internet Archive currently reports:
Update, Mark Graham
Wanted to share an update from Team Wayback Machine
The archives are safe & the Wayback Machine is up in read-only mode.
We hope to turn more web crawling on within a day to make sure our web collections remain whole.
Thank you for the support!
Indignity depends upon the Internet Archive for the Premium Sandwich Content you never asked for, but urges you to support their mission.
MARKETING DEP'T.
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