Movies Megalopolis - Francis Ford Coppola's 40-Year Passion Project - update (05/16): reviews from Cannes posted

[Greatoneshere]

The first clip from writer/director Francis Ford Coppola's upcoming film Megalopolis has dropped and it certainly looks intriguing. Coppola has been working on the film on and off since 1983 and has apparently put up $120 million of his own money to finally get the film made. Passion projects are always an interesting prospect, good or bad, and while Coppola has only been making experimental arthouse films since The Rainmaker came out in 1997 (the films Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt) he's obviously capable of making regular movies too. At 85 years old, it'll be interesting to see if Coppola has still got it since Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) was 32 years ago and that and The Rainmaker were the last good films he's made (though Tetro is underrated). And yes, that's Adam Driver in the starring role with what appears to be an intentionally bad haircut. I think everyone here knows who Coppola is, but for those who don't, this is the guy who did The Godfather I+II, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, some of the best movies ever made. Of course, those were all made during his 1970's period. 

 

 

[thewhyteboar]

I'm really excited for it. An aging auteur going out with a wild, self-financed picture? Sign me up.

[Keyser_Soze]

The last movie he made was Twixt and it was not very good so hopefully this is better than that.

[TheLeon]

I’ve been following this for a while. I love that in his 80’s he said fuck it, if nobody will give me the money to make this, I’ll sell my winery and pay for it myself. 
 

It’s got a wild cast and premise, and Coppola is having trouble finding a distributor willing to put up the massive marketing budget he wants. Sounds like it might be too experimental to be a mainstream success, but who doesn’t love a really fucking big swing? 

[SoberChef]

 

[TheLeon]

I don’t know what those distributors were talking about. This looks like a very normal, easy to market movie that’s 100% gonna make back its budget. 

[thewhyteboar]

Yes. Yes. Oh god, yes. 

[Greatoneshere]

Holy shit, that looks insane visually, I'm all in on that level. I like what I think the movie seems to be about, this could be really good (or a hot mess).

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

The only thing that could possibly make this even better is if Adam Driver once again sported a terrible Italian accent!

[Reputator]

It kinda looks like one of those event movies that you sort of have to see, good or bad, just because it happened in your lifetime. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Just now, Reputator said:

It kinda looks like one of those event movies that you sort of have to see, good or bad, just because it happened in your lifetime. 

 

It's going to be a magnificently glorious disaster!

 

‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’ Francis Ford Coppola’s 40-year battle to film Megalopolis | Megalopolis | The Guardian

WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM

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The director has spent half his life and $120m of his own money to make his sci-fi epic. Just days ahead of its debut in Cannes, some of his crew members are questioning his methods

 

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By the sound of things, the shoot became a clash between Coppola’s old-school approach, privileging spontaneity and “finding magic in the moment”, and newer digital film-making methods, such as filming actors in front of virtual CGI landscapes in a “volume” – effectively a giant wall of LED screens. Today’s technology enables directors to realise anything they can dream up – including utopian cities of the future – but working this way demands preparation and collaboration. “I think Coppola still lives in this world where, as an auteur, you’re the only one who knows what’s happening, and everybody else is there just to do what he asks them to do,” suggested one former crew member, who did not wish to be named.

 

The crew member sometimes found Coppola’s approach exasperating: “We had these beautiful designs that kept evolving but he would never settle on one. And every time we would have a new meeting, it was a different idea.” When the crew member insisted they needed to do more work to determine how the film was going to look, they say, Coppola replied: “How can you figure out what Megalopolis looks like when I don’t even know what Megalopolis looks like?”

 

A lot of time was, apparently, wasted. A second crew member recalls: “He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn’t allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana … And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would all stand around and wait. And then he’d come out and whip up something that didn’t make sense, and that didn’t follow anything anybody had spoken about or anything that was on the page, and we’d all just go along with it, trying to make the best out of it. But pretty much every day, we’d just walk away shaking our heads wondering what we’d just spent the last 12 hours doing.” As a third crew member puts it: “This sounds crazy to say, but there were times when we were all standing around going: ‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’”

 

 

[TwinIon]

I am so in. It sounds like a ridiculous mess but there's no way I miss out on seeing this in a theater.

[Firewithin]

surely thats a good sign  

[Reputator]

Oh good lord. It sounds like a spectacular train wreck.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

This film will undoubtedly represent the truest definition of "cinema"!

 

[thewhyteboar]

It will be watchable, no matter what. Which is more than you can say about 90% of studio output these days.

[TheLeon]

Aubrey Plaza talks about starring in Megalopolis as WOW PLATINUM.

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Upon her arrival on the set of Megalopolis, Plaza discovered a kind of workshop-type scenario, where improvisation, collaboration and even actors’ re-writing were welcomed.

 

“I think that’s a really big part of Francis’s approach,” Plaza says. “I don’t want to speak for him, but it seems to me that he gathers a group of interesting, wild actors and then he tries to inspire them to play. We wrote scenes and we conducted ourselves like a theater troupe, me and Jon Voight and Shia [LaBeouf]. We were writing scenes and giving them to the script supervisor. And then she would give them to Francis and sometimes he would like it and put it in. But every day he wanted to play. He ran it like it was a theater camp. There were games all day, and we were in character the whole time.”

Seems like an interesting approach to take while spending 100 mil making the movie you’ve been rewriting for decades, but what the hell do I know? 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

This will receive a 30 minute-long standing ovation at Cannes, during which Martin Scorsese will resolutely declare that "THIS IS UNAMBIGOUS END-STATE OF CINEMA AND I CAN NOW DIE HAPPILY" at which point he will keel over and die while the applause continues. 

[Mercury33]

This has 90’s weirdo sci fi vibes and I’m fucking here for it 

[Moa]

13 hours ago, Mercury33 said:

This has 90’s weirdo sci fi vibes and I’m fucking here for it 

 

Dark City but bad.

[TheLeon]

20 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

This will receive a 30 minute-long standing ovation at Cannes, during which Martin Scorsese will resolutely declare that "THIS IS UNAMBIGOUS END-STATE OF CINEMA AND I CAN NOW DIE HAPPILY" at which point he will keel over and die while the applause continues. 

And it’ll be unceremoniously dumped on Tubi and get 12% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

[MarSolo]

22 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

This will receive a 30 minute-long standing ovation at Cannes, during which Martin Scorsese will resolutely declare that "THIS IS UNAMBIGOUS END-STATE OF CINEMA AND I CAN NOW DIE HAPPILY" at which point he will keel over and die while the applause continues. 

 

Will it look like this death?

 

Worst Death Scene Ever GIF - Worst Death Scene Ever - Discover & Share GIFs

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Click to view the GIF

 

[Brick]

‘Megalopolis’ Producer Addresses Report of Francis Ford Coppola Trying to Kiss Extras on Set: ‘I Was Never Aware of Any Complaints of Harassment’

VARIETY.COM

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Crew members on "Megalopolis" allege Francis Ford Coppola wasted time on set, showed up late to shoot and more.

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

‘Megalopolis’ Review: Francis Ford Coppola’s Passion Project Starring Adam Driver Is a Staggeringly Ambitious Big Swing, if Nothing Else

WWW.HOLLYWOODREPORTER.COM

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Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza and Shia LaBeouf star in an epic reimagining of Ancient Rome in modern-day New York City on the brink of ruin.

 

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So is it a distancing work of hubris, a gigantic folly, or a bold experiment, an imaginative bid to capture our chaotic contemporary reality, both political and social, via the kind of large-canvas, high-concept storytelling that’s seldom attempted anymore? The truth is it’s all those things.

 

It’s windy and overstuffed, frequently baffling and way too talky, quoting Hamlet and The Tempest, Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch, ruminating on time, consciousness and power to a degree that becomes ponderous. But it’s also often amusing, playful, visually dazzling and illuminated by a touching hope for humanity. “Don’t let the now destroy the forever,” says Cesar.

 

I can’t say I was always engaged over its two hours-plus run time, but I was always curious about where it was going next. Is it a good movie? Not by a long stretch. But it’s not one that can be easily dismissed, either.

 

 

 

Megalopolis review – Coppola’s passion project is megabloated and megaboring | Movies | The Guardian

WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM

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Francis Ford Coppola’s question – can the US empire last forever? – may be valid but flashes of humour cannot rescue this conspiracy thriller from awful acting and dull effects

 

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His ambitious and earnestly intended new film, resoundingly dedicated to his late wife Eleanor, has some flashes of humour and verve. Jon Voight’s scene with his bow-and-arrow shoots a witty dart. The film’s heavily furnished art deco theatricality sometimes creates an interestingly self-aware spectacle, like an old-fashioned modern dress production of Shakespeare.

 

And certainly a Coppola failure is a whole lot more interesting than the functional successes of lesser directors – the middleweights who aim low and just about hit the target’s bottom rim.

 

But for me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film, full of high-school-valedictorian verities about humanity’s future. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible acting and uninteresting, inexpensive-looking VFX work which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence.

 

 

 

Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Is a Passion Project Gone Horribly Wrong | Vanity Fair

WWW.VANITYFAIR.COM

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Maybe some cinephiles will see value in the ‘Godfather’ director’s long-gestating epic. Many more, though, will be left scratching their heads.

 

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That being said, Megalopolis is too confused a film to make a truly odious or dangerous point. (Though the ending of the Vesta plotline is somewhat alarming.) This is the junkiest of junk-drawer movies, a slapped together hash of Coppola’s many disparate inspirations.

 

 

‘Megalopolis’ Review: Francis Ford Coppola’s Mad Modern Masterwork Reinvents The Possibilities Of Cinema – Cannes Film Festival

DEADLINE.COM

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Megalopolis review: Francis Ford Coppola’s mad modern masterwork, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, reinvents the possibilities of cinema.

 

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True to the advance gossip, Megalopolis is something of a mess; unruly, exaggerated and drawn to pretension like a moth to a flame. It is also, however, a pretty stunning achievement, the work of a master artist who has taken to Imax like Caravaggio to canvas. It is a true modern masterwork of the kind that outrages with its sheer audacity. In the early 20th century, the French shook their umbrellas at this kind of thing, and it will not get a soft landing in 2024, since it commands you to bend to its vision.

 

 

‘Megalopolis’ Review: Francis Ford Coppola’s Wild and Delirious Fever Dream Inspires New Hope for the Future of Movies

WWW.INDIEWIRE.COM

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Coppola's epic is as egoless as you could ever hope to expect from an $120 million self-portrait that doubles as a fable about the fall of Rome.

 

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What elevates “Megalopolis” so far above those other films — even “Jack” — is how clearly the constant madness of its folly and the occasional disaster of its design serve as conduits for its writer/director/producer/financier’s entire creative ethos. Coppola might lack the imagination required to invent the new cinema that his new movie so desperately wishes it could will into being (he’s not even De Palma in that respect, let alone Godard), but he’s always seen the need for it better and more urgently than any of his contemporaries.

 

With “Megalopolis,” he crams 85 years worth of artistic reverence and romantic love into a clunky, garish, and transcendently sincere manifesto about the role of an artist at the end of an empire. It doesn’t just speak to Coppola’s philosophy, it embodies it to its bones. To quote one of the sharper non-sequiturs from a script that’s swimming in them: “When we leap into the unknown, we prove that we are free.”

 

 

Megalopolis Review: Francis Ford Coppola's Epic Is Grandiose, Goofy

WWW.THEWRAP.COM

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Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is a project of operatic pronouncements, didactic repetitions and sprawling ambitions.

 

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At its best, “Megalopolis” feels oh so much like a live-action anime, closely following the Wachowskis’ “Speed Racer” as it collapses screen space into a pixelated spectacle, leaving any notions of physics in the dust. At its worst, the film also feels like a live-action anime, worked-over and poorly dubbed, full of halting speeches and expository drops growing ever more dramatically inert. 

 

Running 138 minutes and striving for an epic sprawl, “Megalopolis” moves at a surprisingly hiccupping pace, never lingering in any one moment nor developing a sense of inner rhythm. Scenes break instead of build, with each interaction designed to impart this or that philosophical concept or political theory the director spent the past four decades compiling. But because the operatic film is so clearly intended as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk – a total, all encompassing work – the odd lack of balance and the disparity between the artist’s intentions and execution become all the more acute. 

 

 

[skillzdadirecta]

Yeah all of that sounds about right.

[TheLeon]

[Greatoneshere]

Sounds, if nothing else, far more interesting than the glut of normal movies we get all the time. Seems first reactions are split on whether it all adds up to something or not.

[Firewithin]

[thewhyteboar]

'Megalopolis' Is a Messy, Self-Indulgent Sprawl of Ideas—In the Best Way Possible

TIME.COM

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Francis Ford Coppola's expensive opus is a lot of things at once, but mostly a reminder that an imaginative mess can be preferable to a safe, tasteful enterprise.

 

I like this review, by Stephanie Zacharek:

 

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You might want to laugh at Megalopolis; you might be tempted to walk out. And you wouldn’t be wrong to call it self-indulgent. But then, haven’t we had enough movies that are audience-indulgent, seeking only to appease—and never, ever to offend—legions of fanboys and -girls who have very specific ideas about what they want from entertainment? I found myself almost literally leaning closer to the screen during Megalopolis, trying to grasp exactly what Coppola is seeking to communicate. I might have caught about a third of it, at best, but I’ll take a messy, imaginative sprawl over a waxen, tasteful enterprise any day.

 

[silentbob]

I’ve grown some good shit. So if anyone needs something to experience “this” something . . . come find me. 
 

I do kinda wanna see it

[thewhyteboar]

Demented. I love it. 

[Greatoneshere]

1 hour ago, thewhyteboar said:

Demented. I love it. 

 

I'm in if it's good demented for sure. Love to see something different.

[MarSolo]

Finally, Coppola surpassed his greatest masterpiece: Jack starring Robin Williams.