In Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola takes on Neil Breen

Spoiler room provides thoughts on the plot points we cannot disclose in our book and a place for discussion official review. Fair warning: This article contains plot details from Megalopolis.

It's a great time for Old Man Cinema. Legendary filmmakers lean back into their later eras to reckon with their own complicity (that of Martin Scorsese). Flower Moon Killer), her influential upbringing (Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans), their futile grasp on the increasingly scarce time (Víctor Erices Close your eyes), their action-spectacle death drive (Tom Cruise's continued stunt work) and their melancholic persistence (David Cronenberg's). The shrouds). Francis Ford Coppola Megalopolis fits alongside this self-reflexivity, but with a liberating, devastating reservation. Coppola's film, financed entirely from his personal fortune, doesn't have to pretend to be something it isn't or answer to anyone. It doesn't need a coherent plot, compelling ideas, or even a selling point beyond “Francis Ford Coppola's latest film.” It's one that comes from the heart and nowhere else. The compelling, tantalizing result is like a first-class vanity project from a first-class filmmaker. In a way Megalopolis fits in with Neil Breen's groundbreaking 2012 “so bad it's good” piece Ego Exploitation Fateful insights as an accompanying piece.

Megalopolis is the story of New Rome's Cesar Cataline (Adam Driver), an idealistic architect-playboy with a heart and mind (and eventually a face) of gold, who tries to build a utopia despite the corrupt, banal fools around him. He can literally stop time and has a monopoly on a nebulous supermaterial called Megalon. The latter helps him survive an assassination attempt and is the foundation of his science fiction urban renewal project. He'll win the Nobel Prize before we're sure what's going on. At least Coppola doesn't deign to play Cesar himself.

Breen, a real-life architect who took on the role of Tommy Wiseau, tends to portray himself in his self-financed fables as messianic megamen angry against corruption. In Fateful insightsHe plays the brave truth-teller Dylan, who also has supernatural powers and a magical stone that helps him survive an assassination attempt.

The heroes of these films also share a penchant for grandiose indeterminacy. “We need a big debate about the future!” shouts Cesar shortly before the finale of Megalopolis. During one Pre-screening questions and answersCoppola quoted this half-thesis, an optimistic slogan that relies on his trust in everything that human ingenuity could possibly produce if everyone simply said it. It's a line delivered with the same meaning, specificity and intonation as a speech in the epic, bloody conclusion of Fateful insights: “You now have all the truths, the real truth. Act now! On your own! Outside of corporate systems and those incompetent politicians. Act now. It is our only hope for the future.”



Fateful insights gives this sermon a diegetic applause. Megalopolis just suggests that this would be the correct answer. The further path is up to the viewer, as long as he listens carefully to his superiors.

But aside from the superhuman Superman leads, their wives who couldn't hang and took their own lives, the otherworldly substances, the stiff performances and the didactic displays (the Megalopolis (The scene in which a live actor stands in front of the auditorium with a microphone and asks Cesar a question is an inventive excuse for Cesar to preach directly to the audience.) The connection between these films is a personal esotericism, freed from external obligations.

This intimate, sincere, unfathomable individuality is what makes these unguarded films so endearing. You don't feel like you could see all the connections even if you spent as much time thinking about them as the authors who brought them into being. Breen and Coppola had the wherewithal to support their idealistic but vague points of view with soapbox-like directness. What do you create when money is no object? The answer, it seems, lies in your image and the skills and styles available to you. Breen's films consist roughly of stock images and free sound effects. Coppola holds a kaleidoscope to his soul.

Megalopolis colors Coppola's mastery of form with the signifiers of his time. A restlessly inventive visual style draws from diverse inspiration throughout cinema history. Clearly bored with classicism, Coppola spices things up with triptych split screens, garish CG symbolism and Méliès-esque theatrics. Sometimes it's shockingly beautiful. Others are just hard to watch. Like Coppola's previous film Twittersome of Megalopolis is so disarmingly flat that it looks like the amateurish green screen that Breen so often uses. Around these eclectic shifts in style, Coppola weaves his sprawling narrative (obsessed with the Roman Empire and moving sidewalks) from half-remembered themes and his personal values. Coppola's villains include gold diggers, family warriors, corrupt officials, Trump surrogates, sex tape deepfakers, and moral hypocrites. His heroes quote the classics, appreciate beauty, love children and spread platitudes. The jokes are simple and the emotions are romantic. When the credits roll, it feels like you've just had your ears ripped off by Coppola over a long dinner. It's a dizzying experience, sometimes disjointed and not always enjoyable, but valuable nonetheless.

Films that are so bad they're good reach this “good” threshold not just through sheer incompetence, but because they reveal something human in their incompetence. That something might be repulsive, silly, or so foreign that it's hard to understand, but it shocks your system instead of supporting it. For this reason, purity and sincerity are required. Moviegoers can sniff out the bill from a mile away. Although both are frustrating and absurd, Megalopolis And Fateful insights are primarily pure and sincere expressions of artists who make art for its own sake. So many films lack imagination, simply masking their cynical originals with the intellectual property lying around and trying to capitalize on their built-in audience and wide-ranging demographic. Megalopolis And Fateful insights are voracious hedonists whose goal is to please only one person at a time. Financially independent, ruthlessly self-sufficient, and thematically obsessive, these films may be neither dramatically compelling nor philosophically substantive. But they are hypnotic, raw expressions of a unique perspective.