55056: Megalopolis

Ilse Aichinger's famous 1957 short story, "Der gefesselte Mann" ("The Bound Man") tells of a man who learns how to move with almost supernatural grace and strength while living within the limitations of his bindings. Once his bonds are removed, he doesn't know how to recreate his glorious acrobatic feats, and so he has to shoot a wolf and run away before he is killed by angry villagers and circus performers. I should've mentioned that it's a German story. Anyway, I've always found it interesting to think about how our limits can inspire us to find ways to exceed our expectations. And I sometimes think about how, once those limitations are taken away, we might find ourselves getting high on our supply and creating horrible, self-indulgent shit and confusing it for a magnum opus.

That's all just a longwinded way of saying that Megalopolis is a masturbatory piece of garbage, and Francis Ford Coppola either needs to stick to making wines or surround himself with some people willing to tell him "no" when he's about take a big, public, $120 million dump on his own career and legacy. It is obvious from seeing Megalopolis that Coppola needs studio notes to struggle against. He needs financial constraints and technological limitations to overcome. Perhaps most importantly, he needs solid pushback from actors unwilling damage their careers by saying the dumbest shit imaginable on camera.

Megalopolis is the "story" of an overly stylized and pretentious New York City stuffed full of references to Roman history, where Adam Driver can stop time, the mayor is mildly effective, and there's some sort of industrial Flubber that some people want to build buildings out of and other people just want to run around in togas and be all Roman or whatever. It's camp without irony or fun, sagging under the weight of its own distorted sense of self-worth and stuffed with enough incredible actors to make at least three good movies. But instead, they're in this hunk of trash.

Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, and Kathryn Hunter (who needs to fire her agent) are just some of the wasted talent that devoted precious weeks and months of their careers to making this "passion" project. I will say this for Megalopolis, in that it made me think new and previously inconceivable thoughts I never imagined I would think, such as, "Oh, Shia LeBeouf is too good for this."

Fuck, Talia Shire is too good for this.

There's a love story crammed in, and it's one of those magical relationships where nothing really ever goes wrong (aside from someone getting shot in the face) even though the pair are star-crossed AF. There's zero tension in the love story, zero stakes in the overall story, and no one really has an interesting arc. It's just essentially three hours of boring weirdos (a rare combination) bouncing from one incident to another. They never stand to lose anything, and even when Adam Driver's character is shot in the fucking eyeball, he's essentially fine in the next scene. (Because the Flubber can heal all things or something) Oh, and in that next scene, Aubrey Plaza is stealing all of his money, but everything turns out okay in the scene after that because...I don't even remember why, nor should anyone care.

The performances suffer from terrible direction that just makes everyone appear to be either completely wooden or coked to within an inch of their lives. The visuals, on the other hand, are a mix of otherworldly and amateurish, obviously created by vastly different teams with disparate levels of talent. There's just nothing to grab onto and enjoy. People in the IMAX screening I attended were laughing their asses off at points like it was a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I honestly couldn't tell if the humor was on purpose or not. There were some parts that, I assume, were intended to be taken humorously, but no one was laughing at them in my screening. Mostly we were just waiting for it to all be over, like Adam Driver had stopped time but we were still somehow aware of it.

Fuck this movie, and fuck Coppola for spending decades to make this abscess on the backside of cinematic history. I just hope that, should he decide to pump all the sleeping pills and vodka out of his career's stomach and make another movie (fucking shudder at the thought) there's someone reasonable who can sit on his goddamn shoulder throughout the production and flick him in the ear every time he wants to follow his stupid bliss.

You did a very bad thing, Francis Ford Coppola. Very, very bad.

I will not be including the trailer here. Instead, go watch Metropolis.