Film Review: Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 13 years is ambitious, messy, cheesy at times, confusing, breathtaking, and weird as hell. Is it fun? Oh yes. Does it make sense? Absolutely not. Is it worth seeing? I'm not sure.

I had many thoughts during this 2 hour and 20 minute movie. They include:

• Is this the same man that directed the back-to-back Oscar-winning Godfather movies?
• Is that eyebrowless man... Shia LaBeouf? (It was, and it took me an hour to recognize him.)
• Why is Jason Schwartzmann just wandering around here? (Oh, Talia Shire is here, and that's his mom.)
• Is Adam Driver handsome or is he just tall?
• Do I just want to get up and walk out right now?
• Why are there essentially PowerPoint slides and historical quotes scattered throughout this film? (To call it didactic would be the understatement of the year.)

Needless to say, Megalopolis has a lot going on in it. It's been rumbling around in Francis Ford Coppola's head since the 1970s, and he only just now managed to make it because sold off $100ish million from his winery business to finance it. It would be easy to just say "it sucked!" like nearly everyone else online is doing, but there's so much happening in this movie that that would be doing it a disservice. It's hard to even form cogent thoughts around it because they all bleed into each other, reflecting the countless inspirations and influences.

If I had to pick Coppola's Letterboxd top four while he was making Megalopolis, they'd be: Batman Forever, Caligula, The Hunger Games, and The Fountainhead.

The high-level plot

Caesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a brilliant designer looking to transform his city of New Rome, but at every turn he's stopped by the mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). Catilina is a genius that can stop time (which is used mainly as a little treat to do things like kiss on precariously dangling construction beams off of the Chrysler building, where his office is).

That's the main plot, as bare as I can make it. Where the story gets confusing is all of the side plots Coppola manages to squish into it, and these include:

• A dead wife mystery haunting Catilina 
• A teen singer scandal / rebranding effort à la Jo Jo Siwa
• A family drama involving a boner joke and an old-timey bow and arrow
• A hostile bank takeover
• A dangerous USSR satellite falling out of orbit and destroying New Rome
• A love story between Catilina and Julie, Cicero's daughter played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who I most instantly recognized as Misandei from Game of Thrones. 
• A science story involving megalon, a new material that can do... basically anything?

The characters

The characters are, arguably, the most interesting part of this movie, and even that's not enough to save it. Every single person is acting like they're in a different movie. This includes the old veterans like Jon Voight, Dustin Huffman, Talia Shire, Laurence Fishburne, and Esposito. But it's also got younger folks ranging from Driver and Schwartzman to Aubrey Plaza.

Speaking of—Aubrey Plaza is an absolute high point of this movie. She plays a conniving, ambitious reporter named Wow Platinum, and she manages to sleep her way to power through various leaders in the film. It's a fascinating role for her, and very, very funny.

Every one is depraved, and like their ancient Roman inspiration, power- hungry and angry. At one point, there's a wedding held at the Colosseum (which is just Madison Square Garden), and the audience just watches while the patrician fancy folk celebrate on stage. Megalopolis is indeed intended as a cautionary tale about the excesses of a society's waning days, and this sort of attraction is something I could definitely see happen in America even right now.

How to fix this movie

First off, we have to reshoot this in technicolor. I'm talking about old-timey, super colorful, kinda grainy technicolor. This movie just feels old-fashioned, and I'm not sure why. Maybe its the hokey dialogue, or the Art Deco flourishes. While we're at it, let's give them all transatlantic accents.

Honestly? Maybe make it a musical! Every thing seems so over the top and emotionally pregnant that these people need an outlet!

If we're going to have a little magical realism, we need to go all in. Catilina can stop time, the statues can move, clouds reach out and grab the moon. It's unclear whether these are in a character's head or not. Let's make it REAL weird and go full magical realism.

Next, we're going to cut at least half the subplots. Let's focus more on Adam Driver's character. I could watch this man recite the phone book. And basically, he does—he recites on screen in the first few minutes of Hamlet's entire "To be or not to be" speech. And not just the fun first lines; he goes all the way to the proud man's contumely and bare bodkin parts.

Final thoughts

I still feel strangely compelled to defend this movie a little bit. Maybe that's the Stockholm syndrome talking, I'm not sure. I can say without hesitation that I've definitely never seen anything like it. Will I watch it again? On TV sure, so I can try to understand this bloated beast a little better. 

The Math

Baseline Score: 6/10.

Bonuses: The cast is superb; the amount of time spent in the Chrysler building made me happy; I will always, always celebrate new stories versus just having another Spider-Man reboot.

Penalties: Too many to list. 

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Cult Films 101: The Corman

I swear by this mighty beard, Vance, if you don't shut up about
Dementia 13 already, the Apocalypse is coming right the f*$% now.

Welcome back to Cult Films 101, where this week's film is Dementia 13. This is a b-horror movie about some folks jockeying to inherit a fortune but instead meet untimely ends at the blade of an axe murder, and it's an example of the third main type of cult film...The Corman. Made in 1963, Dementia 13 was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Now, from 1972 to 1979, Francis Ford Coppola had about as good a run as any director has ever had, cranking out four consecutive, unassailable film classics -- The Godfather, Parts 1 & 2, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. But ten years earlier, like so, so many fimmakers of his generation, he was working for Roger Corman.

If you ask my honest opinion, I'll tell you that Dementia 13 is a good movie. It manages a not inconsiderable bit of atmosphere, has a number of memorable scenes, inventive camera work, and it clips along well enough for 70 minutes to keep you entertained. But let's be honest, the real draw here is that this was Francis Coppola's first credited directing job.

This trait is the unifying factor for The Corman category of cult movies. They could be good, bad, or indifferent, but they launched the careers of filmmakers who subsequently went on to make remarkable work. Most often, these movies will have been made under extremely tight budgets and restrictive production circumstances (often both, and for Roger Corman), and sometimes those conditions will have gotten the better of the movies and made kind of a mess of them. But we watch hoping for that flash of genius, the little recognizable spark that, with hindsight, we can point to and say "That! There's the birth of something amazing!"

"Dear Ma - I made it to Hollywood, where shirts are
optional but high socks are totally required."

At the University of Texas, my alma mater, the Harry Ransom Center contains many, many treasures. One of them is a letter a young William Faulkner wrote to his mother. It is the first piece of writing in which appears, fully formed and breathtakingly, the style that is now recognizable as William Faulkner's "voice."

When we watch films like Coppola's Dementia 13, Christopher Nolan's Following, Wes Anderson's short film Bottle Rocket, Katherine Bigelow's Near Dark, or watch a 20-year-old Jack Nicholson in The Cry Baby Killer or Crispin Glover and Sean Penn in The Beaver Trilogy, we're looking for the joy of that discovery.

And also, it makes us feel better to know that Francis Coppola started with Dementia 13 and Battle Beyond the Sun before becoming a genius. It gives us hope. Because if everybody had to crank out a Reservoir Dogs or The 400 Blows right out of the box, aspiring filmmakers everywhere would be burying their dreams under a stepping stone in the back yard as we speak.