On the Nature of Things

We saw Megalopolis



Holy Moly! It reminded me of being concussed. I couldn't describe what I saw; it's 15 movies of very simple ideas tortured into this big audacious mess where no one is in charge or on the same page. Cinematography is all over the place, story beats are raised and dropped at a moment's notice (as well as the premises the film establishes. To give an example, it is supposed to take place in "New Rome" which is clearly Manhattan and they even attempt to hide it, like showing the big sign that says "New York Public Library". Sometimes though it's just Rome. Then at other parts it moves back to jus' being plain ol' New York.)

It was incredibly preachy. The 2nd half is so on the nose as agitprop that it was insulting. Francis Ford Coppola is full of it going on in interview after interview about ambiguity and leaving things up to the audience.

The old pothead was too stoned and embarrassed himself with this one. It needed a director with more of an eye for detail to pull it off.

I also wonder what happened to Coppola's eye for scene composition? How did that talent go away?

The actor choices- however bizarre- are livable- the best Coppola movies always had the actors going out on a limb.

The anti-realism and the theatricality was fine (though a few of the actors here were just amateurish or in serious need of direction- like half the time Dustin Hoffman clearly didn't understand what was going on.)

Armound White's review on Megalopolis: Something Idiotic This Way Comes

Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis in a near-empty theater differs from other post-Covid lockdown moviegoing but indicates that the artist who inarguably made the single most popular film of the past half-century, The Godfather, is out of touch
By reimagining New York City as New Rome — an allegory warning that America faces the same fall as the Roman Empire — Coppola intends the grand-scale sci-fi political allegory of Megalopolis to address the great popular audience he had legitimately earned.
Megalopolis also serves as a personal statement of Coppola’s artistic anxieties as a man, a paterfamilias and an artist aware of his social responsibilities — seen through the character of Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a young architect and visionary based on Lucius Sergius Catilina, the subversive Roman demagogue of 80 b.c. But Coppola can’t keep up with the millennium. Madness has outpaced his wildest imaginings. Megalopolis is an inadequate reflection of our moral chaos and a pale presentation of Coppola’s artistic ambition.

The Roman allegory — in which Cesar aspires to change his government while fulfilling his creative hubris, enjoying the perks of fickle celebrity — is both inexact and unoriginal. Vin Diesel already aced this in the surprisingly Shakespearean Chronicle of Riddick, and Coppola can’t compete with the extravagant world-building of comic-book movies...Coppola was never necessarily a political filmmaker, but now he can’t resist the impulse (like Scorsese in Killers of the Flower Moon). The conceptual failures seen throughout the unwieldy Megalopolis make it a monument to Trump Derangement Syndrome.

LaBeouf gives the film’s only entertaining performance, a shadow-and-silhouette sex scene with Aubrey Plaza’s Wow Platinum that is the film’s highlight. Clodio exploits the social dystopia that Cesar cannot avoid, encouraging the city’s black populace to protest both Cicero and Cesar’s housing redevelopment. It recalls LaBeouf’s participation in a 2016 Museum of the Moving Image installation that exploited and protested Trump’s presidential election. (“He will not divide us!” LaBeouf repeatedly screamed at visitors and docents, prompting the exhibit’s closure.) The quasi–Bonfire of the Vanities episode in Megalopolis similarly trashes Coppola’s central dynamic. Claudio’s palace intrigues (attempting to overthrow Jon Voight’s Crassus, who wounds Claudio by shooting Deliverance-style arrows) initiates the film’s eventual mess.

Despite high-flown quotations from Emerson and Marcus Aurelius, scene segments portentously announced with marble engravings, and a few truly impressive shots (the inanimate statue of Justice instinctively collapses, Cesar’s nightmare of his hand in a cloud grasping after the moon) to match many silly ones, Megalopolis ultimately founders. Coppola snatches unassimilated ideas from current political paranoia and recent cultural catastrophes (manic news media promoting celebrity insanity), all tossed into the mix with demented incoherence. Cesar’s multicultural wedding reception, emulating the tripartite screen of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, might be the worst idea. It makes one sympathetic to Coppola’s creative drive (that hand in the cloud) yet infuriated at his trivial summation of the social and spiritual condition of our embattled republic.

Megalopolis closes with an engraved motto about “life, education and justice for all” which is surely the most puerile epigraph a socially disengaged filmmaker has ever asked the pubic to take seriously. None of it coheres as either political reflection or narrative. Megalopolis is stuck between being Coppola’s ultimate film maudit and a hectic romanticization of Hollywood’s casual social impulses.

The overkill of F/X in Megalopolis looks thin and claustrophobic. It lacks the pulse of great cinematic imagery and prompts Coppola’s 1979 Oscar ceremony prophecy about the digital future: “We’re on the eve of something that’s going to make the industrial revolution look like a small-town try-out.” It has come to shambles.

(for full review, follow link)

and White was so inspired that he wrote a second article about the film

Francis Ford Coppola Ransacks an H.G. Wells Classic

See https://web.archive.org/web/20000619173 ... satan.html

Wild Cecil B. de Mille depression era extravaganza. Now on TCM and other services. The first part is curious but poorly acted. It explodes into a sexual slave auction and outrageous & spectacular demon worship ritual with a huge cast on a zeppelin.

Nonc Hilaire wrote: ↑14 Dec 2024 17:11 See https://web.archive.org/web/20000619173 ... satan.html

Wild Cecil B. de Mille depression era extravaganza. Now on TCM and other services. The first part is curious but poorly acted. It explodes into a sexual slave auction and outrageous & spectacular demon worship ritual with a huge cast on a zeppelin.

Madam Satan's outfit is quite striking.

Definitely pre-Hays code.


A interesting outlier in the Cecil B. de Mille body of work. He typically used historical - biblical setting to get away with the T & A.

Metropolis, 1927, directed by Fritz Lang. The famous dance scene with the robot Maria [Brigitte Helm].

edit:

Not sure why this is posting as "not found"

but an account called pscyhotronica has David Lynch's first short here

The Odyssey directed by Christopher Nolan.

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson


I was amazed and in awe when I first read The Odyssey. I doubt that I'll go to view the movie, but I will probably read the new translation by Emily Wilson.

Typhoon wrote: ↑30 Jul 2026 03:38 LRB - Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man.pdf

The Odyssey directed by Christopher Nolan.

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson


I was amazed and in awe when I first read The Odyssey. I doubt that I'll go to view the movie, but I will probably read the new translation by Emily Wilson.

We viewed it so others will be spared

It was okay. A month or so later, that's what comes to mind. The audio mix was unforgivable though- even for a Christopher Nolan movie. Soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson and sound design though was excellent.

The film has been judged and "opinionated" to death; and while I'll always love the poem, it's hard to get as worked up as others have been over an adaptation at this point.

Nolan's adaptation really highlighted to me that the most important institution, and most formative, to Christopher Nolan is the modern school. He is a schoolman through and through.

Nolan declares it "the age of apparent magic" and that's when we knew it was actually "the age of the apparent book report." He deconstructs because it's approached like a book report with citations; that's his engagement with the original text [as it is for many of us.]

A lot of reviewers and critics have already commented the inference drawn out is that Nolan is saying the whole story is psychological or euhemeristic; and sure, I can see those threads of interpretation and it makes perfect sense if one is never bothered that no point of view is actually ever established in the movie.

I think there is a slightly different point being made: Nolan pulls freely from all sorts of secondary literature and commentary; homages and pastiches; and presents it bric-a-brac for the audience, almost as imaginary geological layers.

The story is still be told and retold and passed along by academia and the movie draws attention to that. All the readings that Nolan is aware of or interested in are presented in the movie.

"Here's feminist theory; here's Tennyson; here's some archeology about the bronze age."

He foregrounds the secondary sourcing quite deliberately. That's where the poem remains a living work, according to Nolan.

I don't think it gets pulled off though. Keep in mind this is the man's second pass at drawing from the Odyssey (which is all over Inception).

The idea of layers of differing opinions never congeals. It's like, "okay, yes Chris, we believe you were very good in school. A+; but what do you want the screen to be telling an audience that more than just A+ students?"

But that's the rub. We are talking about a popular director; a popular movie guy whose whole filmography thematically explore how (mass) audiences view the individual image- often as icon- and how that character is actually educed from his assembly of mass man. It's intuitive from his reflections on enjoying movies, theaters; the 'experience.'

I don’t follow movies much since everything turned superhero sequels, but a friend recommended Teenage Sex Camp & Miasma. Have you seen that?

Nah, we're skipping that one.

The movie may be very good but I think the conventional analysis of slasher films is dull and haven't the interest in seeing a film which explores that.

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(most) Popular slasher films are not morality plays put on by the "patriarchy" to divide the prurient from the puritan. Nor were they transformed or "taken back" to be refuges for the queer or queer coded.

Michael Myers is not a pillar of the community. Jason is a weirdo lake creature. Freddy Krueger molests children.

These are all socially isolated misfits.

The final girl is always a character on the edge of sociality (according to the movie logic). The people who get killed not for sex and drugs but for having normal social skills.

My friend is the stereotypical intellectual Jewish feminist New Yorker. I’m shocked she would be touting something like that!

Well, I'm glad it spoke to her.

Reaction is that it's intellectually divisive, which I guess was the aim. No lukewarm reactions.

The movie going habit is mostly broken here too.

Though funny enough, we've probably seen more movies in theaters this spring/summer season that we have in ages.

The Super Mario movie was cute

Took my mother to see "Young Washington"- I didn't care for it

Odyssey was a free ticket that someone offered me

For father's day, we took ours to a screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark

There may have been another movie in there but I'm drawing a blank.

Outside of Super Mario and Raiders of the Lost Ark, there wasn't an intention to see them. And truth be told, I could've lived the rest of my life without the Mario movie and Raiders, which I've seen a trillion times.

TheLastPsychiatrist has weighed in: