MIDNIGHT MEGALOPOLIS MUSINGS

These are some of my scattershot first thoughts upon witnessing Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded career annihilator, Megalopolis. Please enjoy.

1. Coppola is unhinged. When in doubt, this is the answer to most questions you will have.
2. I now understand why no studio would touch this with a 10-foot pole; it’s incoherent and the screenplay is unfilmable. Yes, unfilmable despite the fact that I somehow just saw it with mine own two eyes.
3. If Shakespeare were alive in the 21st century and had no talent and a severe concussion and a spare $100 million, he might have written something that resembles Megalopolis.
4. The film is wrapped in so many different layers of irony that it wraps back around to having none. No volume of irony can save Megalopolis from being a film that is to be laughed at, not with.
5. Casting controversial folks like Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, and Jon Voight feels intentional in a very gross way. If there were an intelligible message to be gleaned from anything in this film, it would probably be something about “cancel culture” being bad. Eye roll.
6. Let’s try to parse the rest: it’s a movie about how power is bad – unless you’re a genius visionary (who displaces hundreds of people to realize his ideas). Greed is bad – but the richest man in the world heroically takes down the supposed bad guys in the end (with a bow and arrow disguised as a boner). Conservatism is bad – but Megalopolis has a vaguely conservative stink to it that I can’t quite quantify but I feel in my bones is obnoxiously present.
7. And then. And then. And then. The movie is a series of things happening with so little causation or flow that it might as well be a series of discrete vignettes.
8. Some line readings feel like they’re begging for comparisons to The Room. Yes, that The Room. Again, the concept of irony is so loose that it’s impossible to tell whether Coppola is in on his own joke or not.
9. I wish there were an APA style list of citations during the credits. The amount of contextless philosophical quoting in this movie puts 14 year old boys who just discovered Descartes to shame.
10. I’m convinced that Aubrey Plaza’s performance is a prank being played on Coppola himself. Each and every performance is bonkers but hers is on another level, like she’s winking at the camera when Coppola’s not looking. She might be the only part of this movie that makes a lick of sense.
11. Comical green screen and effects are not something I often complain about but good lord, the actors frequently feel like they’ve been haphazardly plopped onto a The Asylum soundstage.
12. Coppola being the sole creative (and financial) voice for Megalopolis has resulted in a catastrophic clusterfuck of incoherent ideas and scenes – a Florence Foster Jenkinstein’s Monster.

I have a million more thoughts in my head but none of them can do Megalopolis justice. I want to be clear: nobody should see this movie but I want everybody to see this movie. No matter what it is, it’s entertaining. You wouldn’t believe the shit that I somehow didn’t find absurd enough to put in this post. This is a moment in history and it must be seen in all its hideous glory to be believed.