#Cesar Catilina

[msb3hav3]

Trying to figure you out…🤨🥰

[truevelvet]

if anyone is still reading for adam driver and ben affleck characters, my requests are open!! :))

[exescenes]

Sooo… when’s the Cesar Catilina fan fictions coming out?

[theplasticman]

I officially hold the title for having made the worlds first Cesar Catilina edit

[amandaleepanda]

HIS LITTLE SMILE

Adam Driver and Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Megalopolis

-CinemabangCom via @adamdrivercentl

[zabreus]

megalopolis really is just francis ford coppola’s “well if i played sburb none of that would have happened”

[richo1915]

Cicerone Denuncia Catilina (Cicero Denounces Catiline)

[captious-solarian]

Callout post

do you think the romans had callout posts?

Pretty sure humans throughout all of history have always tried to mobilize their allies to punish, shame, and ostracize their enemies (or even entire groups of people).

[themousefromfantasyland]

Megalopolis Review, or, Why Nobody Seems to Realize the King is Naked

Brace yourselves, this will be a long post @ariel-seagull-wings @thealmightyemprex @the-blue-fairie @mask131 @tamisdava2

Today I watched Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and never has a movie made me so frustrated and irritated as I’m now. 

The film is absolutely awful. Not in a so bad it’s good but in a so awful it’s awful. Pardon the language but not even if Coppola broke into my house and shit on my face I would be as angry as I am for him having made this movie. 

But let’s go in parts.

The Premise

The film is a mixture between soft sci-fi and magical realism. We are in an alternate universe where the United States is a direct continuation of the Roman Empire and New York city is instead the capital of the empire, New Rome. 

Cesar Catilina is a brilliant architect and scientist that gained a Nobel Prize for inventing the Megalon, a miraculous substance capable of doing anything. Cesar is a mysterious and lonely genius, with a mysterious past involving an accusation of murdering his own wife and the power to stop time itself. 

He wants to use the metal to rebuild New Rome into a utopia, Megalopolis. Because of that he wages a political battle against the mayor of New Rome, Franklyn Cicero, who wants things to stay the way they have always been. The Mayor has a daughter called Julia, and she falls in love with Cesar. Meanwhile a gossip reporter called Wow Platinum has her eyes on both Cesar and his rich uncle, while Cesar’s cousin, Clodio, a decadent playboy wants to destroy Cesar once and for all.

The Problems

Now that we went into the premise of the movie, let’s see in all the ways this premise falls apart

1 - The Film as a whole makes no sense

Film is art, and art doesn’t need to fit in traditional plot structures or pacing styles. 

But art is about communication. An artist has to communicate ideas, feelings, and impressions to their public. A piece of art that can only be understood by its creator is a bad piece of art.  

A good film, as a good piece of art, has to have the minimum of coherence and cohesion to express the ideas, feelings, and impressions of the filmmaker to their public. If the movie is unable to do that, then the movie is a bad piece of art. 

A good film has to either have coherent story, characters, or at least themes.

Megalopolis doesn’t have either of those.

Megalopolis has a complicated plot filled to the brim with pointless characters and it goes nowhere. Some of the characters are killed off in cut-way jokes and the climax happens in the last twelve minutes of the film. The film lasts more than two hours, and still feels rushed, with scenes that feel missing and scenes that seem superfluous.

It has long surreal sequences that don’t fit the characters, the themes or the story. It’s weirdness for weirdness’ sake. It means nothing. 

The characters are painfully shallow and have nothing to say but famous quotes and juvenile language filled with profanity. 

The film draws painfully long scenes quoting Shakespeare among other writers and philosophers, trying to say something deep about humanity, civilization, politics and the pursuit of utopia, but everything that comes out of it is shallow and contradictory.

In some points Cesar’s desire to build his utopian city is framed as almost an act of anti-consumerism and anti-materialism, vices that are endorsed by Mayor Franklyn Cicero. But then Cesar demolishes several apartment buildings, leaving hundreds homeless and hungry, and the movie almost becomes Atlas Shrugged, where the genius has to rise above the stupid masses that drag him down. 

Cesar’s jealous cousin, Clodio, is built as a Trump stand-in, but then his politics are about helping the immigrants and the poor against Cesar’s plans. And he openly dresses in drag. 

In some way, Clodio is a mixture of Trumpism, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in a single character, ignoring the obvious ways these ideologies are completely different from each other.

In the end Cesar gives a passionate speech to the crowds that Clodio aroused, and it’s no deeper than Facebook messages of “We can disagree politically and still be friends”.

The film has a lot to say about culture and politics, but with a simple glance you realize that Coppola doesn’t understand neither politics or culture. 

Megalopolis is a film that has a lot of things to say about humanity, culture, and politics, and almost everything is pure gibberish.

2 - The film is misogynistic, biphobic and a little bit transphobic.

It’s no wonder that Coppola took almost 30 years to finish this film, because the script has the trademarked sexual prejudices of the 1980’s. 

Only two female characters are really important in this story, and they role seem to reinforce the madonna x whore dichotomy that Coppola seems to believe in.

We have Julia, our madonna. She has a Mary Magdalene complex. She’s initially presented as a shallow, decadent socialite, who only knows how to party all day and kiss passionately her female friends. She is implied to be bisexual, but her bisexuality is presented as just another vice of the decadent elite of New Rome.

Then she meets and falls in love with Cesar and becomes nothing more than his love interest. She becomes the one responsible for his moral support. Her bisexuality is stripped away and she is resumed to nothing more than  a supportive wife.

Then we have Wow Platinum, a gossip reporter that marries Cesar's uncle, is interested in Cesar himself, and has sex with Clodio, Cesar's cousin. She is a shallow gold digger and the film uses every chance it has to slutshame her. She is a typical femme fatale without any nuance or complexity, a disgusting sexist and demeaning caricature without any depth. 

And then we have Clodio and his drag scene, and just like Julia, his crossdressing is presented as just another form of the decadence of New Rome.

3 - Vesta

There’s a plot point that comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. 

New Rome has a pop star called Vesta, and she is meant to mirror the Vesta priestesses of Ancient Rome. She is clearly modeled after Taylor Swift. 

Clodio forges a video of Cesar and Vesta having sex, and since Vesta is a minor, he is arrested. But then Julia discovers that Vesta was lying about her age and is actually a 23-year old woman. After her true age is revealed and after the video is revealed as fake, Vesta reinvents herself as a provocative pop-rock star.

This whole plot point lasts ten minutes and has no bearing on the overall story.

I know for sure that it was written in the late 2000’s, because more than being inspired by Taylor Swift, Vesta is inspired by the transition that Miley Cyrus had from sweet Disney girl to provocative pop star. 

It’s very creepy and off-putting considering everything that we now know about how Coppola deals with young women.

Honestly it just feels like he wanted to fuck Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift back in 2010. 

4 - It’s just a giant ego trip

Only one thing is consistent in Megalopolis, how Cesar is portrayed as a genius that has to fight to have his vision of utopia come to life, and it’s obvious how he is an author self-insert.

It’s so annoying and irritating watching Coppola worship himself for over two hours.

He paints Cesar as this tragic figure that is misunderstood by society and how everyone should just listen to him. How he is a genius that has all the answers to solve humanity’s problems.

It’s the equivalent of watching Coppola masturbating while looking at himself in the mirror for two hours. 

The King is Naked

Listen, I too was at first excited about Megalopolis. I wanted this project to succeed. I wanted to see a creative and bold vision. I wanted to see more authoral cinema. 

But Coppola is just a rich creep with delirious visions of grandeur. 

He used this film to worship his obscene ego and to sexually exploit extras on his set.

And now I see people trying to find excuses for him, or trying to defend this thing.

Listen, if you found something positive about Megalopolis I respect your opinion, but this film is a huge piece of shit made by a more gigantic piece of shit, and his talent and past accomplishments can’t excuse this.

The film is awful, the director is awful, and the king is naked. He doesn’t need protection. 

Can we be totally sincere with this film? At least with ourselves?

I want to see films that are original and take risks, but I want from creators who aren’t megalomaniacs, sexual perverts or that at least can develop coherent ideas. 

[darkjedilady]

Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina at Megalopolis 💛💛💛

[katabay]

sort of revisiting this scene, mostly just playing around with it while I figure out the visual vibe I want bad governance to have! this is more like an abridged version of the scene I ended up writing.

for some scene context, Felix was planning on red tagging Cesar as payback, since Cesar’s family was Felix’s political opponent in the elections, but Crasso convinced him not to do it (Crasso’s family was murdered by cops when he was a teenager. It’s a cycle, baby)

I don’t really like to attach too many Ancient Rome sources for these anymore because it’s not supposed to be a modern retelling (again, the naming conventions were inspired by the Iron Heart, but for fun I thought I’d lean into it more. really ham it up, especially since Ancient Rome has a “relationship” with the Philippines lmao), but we’re still in the fucking around stage so as a treat, I’ll mention that this particular thread was partially inspired by the theory that Crassus might have been involved in getting Sulla to back off harassing Caesar. ymmv on whether or not it’s likely, but for me it’s delicious drama to think about.

I’ve also introduced Seth into the plot because politics and business go hand in hand, like you can’t really do one without the other. This is Seth’s historical counterpart, btw!

Crassus, Catilina, and the Vestal Virgins, Ronald Syme

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / tip jar!

[stumpyjoepete]

Thinking a bit more about Megalopolis (see prev post). It's not really the case that the script is as disjointed or schizophrenic as my post makes it out to be. The central plot is pretty simple: an egotistical city planner has an ambitious and futuristic vision for redeveloping the city, and he butts heads with the Mayor and others who oppose him in this. He ultimately succeeds in building his utopian "megalopolis". Everyone is happy, the end.

And yet.

There's this... intense centrifugal force that prevents everything from cohering into a unified whole. It's like a puzzle where all the pieces are cut from the same picture, but upon closer inspection, no two pieces quite fit together. Or like that collection of nonsensical objects. A fork where the tines and the handle are connected by a chain. A watering can with the spout facing the wrong way. A quick glance leaves you confused, and that confusion is only deepened by further contemplation.

I think this is especially clear in the pseudo-intellectualism of the title cards, narration, monologues, and quotations/references:

Laurence Fishburne does this heavy-handed narration at the beginning and end of the movie (and several random points in between). And there are these associated title cards that look like they were made by applying an "Ancient Rome" theme to some PowerPoint slides. "Or will we too fall victim, like old Rome, to the insatiable appetite for power of a few men?" My brother in Christ, you are making a movie where the hero is named Cesar, and the happy ending is when he successfully pulls a Robert Moses. This is not a story about power corrupting or good intentions going awry. What are you doing???

Cesar Catilina interrupts Mayor Cicero's speech (where he is introducing a plan to build a casino) in order to lay out an early plan for "megalopolis", which is an ambitious and long-term alternative to the (short-term) casino plan. He prefaces his megalopolis pitch by reciting the Hamlet soliloquy. What exactly does Coppola think "To Be Or Not To Be" is about? He must thinks it means, "I am a dark and brooding bad-boy intellectual", since it's hard to see how "I'd like to kill myself, but I fear death" fits into an argument about the importance of long-term thinking in urban planning.

Cesar says several negative things about "civilization". "[Imagine] humanity as an old tree with one misguided branch called civilization... going nowhere." (Shot of notebook shows an illustration with 'war' and 'cruelty' offshoots from said branch.) "Emerson said the end of the human race will be that we'll eventually die of civilization." (Note: unsourced, probably fake quote.) "Civilization itself remains the great enemy of mankind." Umm... you're an urban planner! You're doing a high modernism. What exactly does it mean for you to call civilization the enemy? Is "megalopolis" somehow anti-civilization because it looks like a Georgia O'Keefe painting instead of a bunch of straight lines and right angles? Will the "war" and "cruelty" branches wither and die when buildings have labia?

Also, there's this amazing line read that completely inverts the meaning of a fake Marcus Aurelius quote (the quote was attributed to him by Tolstoy but is not actually something he said). "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape... finding yourself in the ranks of the insane." Why did you put in that pause??? Fake Marcus Aurelius is turning in his grave! You're supposed to be fleeing FROM the ranks of the insane! I suppose this isn't really inconsistent with the characterization of Cesar, it's just such a fucking batshit thing to say.

All of the cargo-cult intellectualism listed above could perhaps be excused if the vision that the film is supposedly about had any content whatsoever. Or, alternatively, if the movie was about something more substantive, and the vacuous megalopolis vision took place off-screen in an epilogue, like the "happily ever after" of a children's story. But no! The movie repeatedly interrupts the plot to grab you by the shoulders and scream in your face: "I have a vision! For the future!". And then--now that it has your undivided attention--it shits the bed like a man who has just polished off an entire bag of sugar-free gummy bears and washed them down with a fistful of Ambien:

"Conversation isn't enough. It's the questions that lead it to the next step. But initially, you have to have a conversation. The city itself is immaterial, but they're talking about it for the first time. And it's not just about us talking about it. It's the need to talk about it. It's as urgent to us as air and water."

"Mr. Catalina, you said that as we jump into the future, we should do so unafraid. But what if when we do jump into the future, there is something to be afraid of?" "Well, there's nothing to be afraid of if you love, or have loved. It's an unstoppable force. It's unbreakable. It has no limits. It's within us. It's around us. And it's stretched throughout time. It's nothing you can touch. Yet it guides every decision that we make. But we do have the obligation to each other to ask questions of one another. What can we do? Is this society, is this way we're living, the only one that's available to us? And when we ask these questions, when there's a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia."

After the revolution, we won't have conflicts anymore; we'll have dialogue instead. We won't have a need for the "jobs" and "sanitation" of "now"; we'll have the "imperishable" "dreams" of "forever". We won't have problems that need solving; we'll all be too busy asking each other questions. Now, if everyone could just shut up and get the hell out of the way and let Cesar implement his vision, then "everyone" will soon be "creating together, learning together, perfecting body and mind." A chorus of children's voices gradually morphing into Laurence Fishburne's, chanting, "One Earth, indivisible, with long life, education and justice for all." It's eschatological anti-politics made entirely from cotton candy. Please, for the love of God, stop making Adam Driver monologue at me! Let's get back to Aubrey Plaza stepping on horny fascist Shia LaBeouf!

The incoherence of Megalopolis's vision is compounded by how anachronistic its depiction of our fallen world is. There are some half-hearted (and ham-fisted) gestures in the Clodio sub-plot towards the dangers of Trumpian populism, but the script was first written in the 80's, and it's extremely obvious that Coppola is writing about New York City in the preceding several decades. The city's finances are in dire straights. (There's literally a "Ford Tells City: Drop Dead" reference!) The city is full of slums, the streets are full of crime, and the elites are all decadent. (For Coppola, decadence means that ladies are doing cocaine and smooching each other in the cluh-ub.) The main character is Neo-Roman Robert Moses, and the conflict of the film is about urban renewal. In case you, like Mr. Coppola, have not been made aware, slum clearance is not a major political issue in 2020's Manhattan.

Two thirds of the way through the movie, a falling Soviet satellite provides a deus ex machina, blowing up the financial district and clearing space for megalopolis to take its place. Ironically, a previous attempt to produce the film came to its abrupt end when two planes flew into some buildings in the financial district. Perhaps you heard about it. The financial backers of the film at the time considered Megalopolis's plot a bit too close to current events for comfort and withdrew their support.

But Coppola's depiction of Manhattan was already decades out of date by then. Moses stepped down in '60. Jacobs' book railing against urban renewal came out in '61. The Power Broker came out in '74. One presumes popular opinion of Robert Moses soured in the following years. The crisis of the city's finances that peaked in '75 was over by '81 when NYC balanced its budget and reentered the bond market. The crime wave of the 70's and 80's had receded by the year 2000. The demand for housing in NYC proper is as high as it ever has been, and it's only getting higher. Megalopolis imagines America as an incoherent mishmash of several decades of mid-century NYC, dressed up in the toga of the late Roman Republic, calling out for (Robert) Moses to part the slums and take us into a promised land that is literally beyond any description, and whose only concrete feature seems to be glowing people-movers.

A Robert Moses with the power to stop time, at that!

Oh, did I forget to mention that part? Cesar discovers he has the power to stop time in the opening scene of the film. I forgot because it's literally irrelevant to the plot. Time stops a few times, and then it starts back up again, and the events of the film just plod inexorably forward. For a movie as temporally dislocated as Metropolis, perhaps that's just as well.

[sregan]

On 'Megalopolis'

I have seen 'Megalopolis: A Fable'. My assessment in one word is that it's 'striking'. It's a striking film - which is not necessarily to say that it is a 'good' film. It may be an 'important' film, insofar as it's likely the last film by the creator of 'The Godfather', 'The Conversation' and 'Apocalypse Now', and self-funded.

It's also a very strange film. In almost every scene there's something bizarre - not necessarily in the sense of worldbuilding but in terms of the directorial choices made.

For some reason 'Megalopolis' was not marketed as a work of alternate history, which I think could have brought in more attention, but a 'fable', with a heavy-handed opening monologue about the similarities between the modern USA and Rome. It's ostensibly set in the 21st century in 'New Rome', a modern city with Roman affectations - though it's also mentioned at times that it's still in the United States of America and that Elvis existed in this reality.

The best analogy I can make is that it feels like one of those adaptations to film of a Shakespearean play but set in the modern day, where much of the dialogue has been updated but the main speeches have been left in the original language (indeed, sections of dialogue from Hamlet and The Tempest appear unmodified); but without the source play.

'Megalopolis' is - though few critics seem to be crediting this - a loose adaptation of the life of Lucius Sergius Catilina, somewhat annealed with Julius Caesar (furnishing protagonist Cesar Catalina as played by Adam Driver). The real Catalina is a rival of Cicero (here Mayor Cicero as played by Giancarlo Esposito), prosecuted for an affair with a vestal virgin by Publius Clodius Pulcher - here Clodius Pulcher as played by Shia Labeouf - and accused of killing his wife in order to marry Aurelia Orestilla, the daughter of the consol (who has been merged with Cicero to create Julia Cicero, the Mayor's daughter, as played by Nathalie Emmanuel). All this happens in the film.

The real historical Catalina, of course, was the mastermind behind the Catalinarian Conspiracy, an attempt to overthrow Cicero and Hybrida and seize power. In the first of many changes, Coppola changes this to make Clodius the leader of the plot and Cesar Catalina innocent. While the historical Crassus uncovered the plot and told the Senate, Jon Voight's Hamilton Crassus is betrayed by his unfaithful trophy wife (clearly a reference to Tertulla) and Clodius in a 'Dallas' spoof sideplot, but eventually gets the upper hand and backs Catalina with his wealth.

At this point we should address the elephant in the room. In 'Megalopolis: A Fable', Cesar Catalina is an architect who wishes to build a new shining city, the titular Megapolis, using a revolutionary new metal he has developed, Megalon. This makes startling sense when you realise Coppola has long dreamed of adapting Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead'. Cesar is clearly intended to be a mix of Howard Roark and Henry Rearden from Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged', a visionary steelmaker who has developed 'Rearden Metal'.

However, Megalon may have a dark secret - Mayor Cicero says it's rumoured he used his dead wife's body to manufacture the metal. While the introduction of this rumour is cack-handed (Cicero just whispers it to Cesar at an event), it's at least an intriguing take based on a real historical rumour. This in combination with the source material - a scheming politician who launches a coup - might make you wonder if Coppola is playing Sympathy for the Devil here and will reveal Cesar as a villain protagonist (as far as I can tell, he doesn't intend this).

Cesar also has the ability to stop time. Very literally; he can talk to Time (capital T) and tell it to do things. The first scene of the film - which may be Cesar attempting suicide or testing this power for the same time - sees Driver's character on the roof of the Chrysler Building, teetering on the edge. As he begins to tip forward, he intones 'Time: stop!' and finds his body hovering in mid-air, allowing him to cautiously wuxia-float his way back onto the building (remember this).

This may all sound rather Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, but never fear - this power, which seems like it should be the metaphorical crux of the entire film (timestop as a metaphor for stagnation in a dying empire?), is largely irrelevant other than leading Julia to investigate him and then join his agency.

Oh yes, that's another thing that radically alters the dynamic from a hypothetical Francis Ford Coppola's Fountainhead; Cesar isn't a private architect but the head of a government agency, the Design Authority. We aren't told how he came into this role but he begins the film with his own staff, security, and lavish office, which makes him feel like much less of an underdog.

Cesar's Design Authority is pulling down slum buildings to replace them with his utopian Megalon developments - the plot can't quite decide whether he's doing this inside the law, but the result seems to be people forced onto the street - a clear nod, you might think, towards gentrification, although later plot points make this murkier.

Julia sees Cesar using his time stop ability during a demolition, seemingly to judge whether the collapse is safe (though what he would be able to do if it wasn't is unclear). Frustratingly we never see what this looks like to 'normal' people; Julia is the only person other than him to be able to manipulate time and we only ever see it from one of their perspectives. More on this later.

Esposito's Mayor Cicero is initially introduced as a hollow populist, who wants to use the demolished plots of land for crowd-pleasing moneymakers such as a casino. He shows off a slick model of the proposed pleasure palace, which seems to get the approval of the gathered journalists. Cesar, meanwhile, gives a philosophical speech urging grander ambitions ("Don't let the present get in the way of forever!") and offers to go through his design documents. I'm uncertain whether we are supposed to understand this to be what it looks like - that Cesar does not have people skills and finds it hard to communicate his genius - because Driver is given all sorts of quippy Tony Stark-like lines and business as he arrives to the meeting and otherwise reads as charming and personable.

This scene includes one of the most sophomoric film-school student lines in the film. When Cicero menacingly brings up Cesar's wife's death, he says: "Well, as you were the prosecutor in that case, you know I was found not guilty."

At this point Cesar is involved with Plaza's journalist femme fatale (name, I kid you not, 'Wow Platinum') but - I'm unsure whether we actually see them break up on screen - she falls for billionaire Crassus and Cesar becomes involved with Julia who, after mentioning she saw him stop time, receives work with his agency (much to her father's chagrin).

Before it's fully established that she has fallen for him, she follows him and sees him buy flowers and visit what I think is supposed to be his wife's home; we see him place them by her bedside and stroke her hair - she seems to be comatose rather than dead, but when Julia sees the same scene Cesar is alone, seemingly hallucinating. Julia somehow knows Cesar is hallucinating his wife and whispers "He still loves her!". This is one of many elements of 'Megalopolis' that make me think that despite being a self-funded auteur project, the narrative was muddled in the edit and a more coherent through-line must have existed at some point. If this scene came after Julia and Cesar were an item, it might have some emotional weight.

The chapters of the films are introduced with narration by Lawrence Fishburne, serving as Cesar's faithful chauffeur (an element that, perhaps, lets on that Coppola has been pitching this film for fifty years). The 'Bread and Circuses' chapter sees a lavish wedding for Crassus and Wow (sic.), with a Ben Hur-style chariot race and Pro Wrestling-themed gladiators. The effeminate villain Clodius appears, crossdressing after the style of the historical Caligula.

In a scene clearly intended to take aim at religious right virginity pledges, a 'vestal virgin' pop star is used to raise money by encouraging the wealthy to financially 'support' her pledge of virginity. However, as the bidding reaches 100 billion, Clodius bribes the AV technician to display on the jumbotron (!) a sex tape of the 'virgin' and Cesar, resulting in a scandal.

In a sequence clearly inspired by Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis', an intoxicated Cesar - presumably having seen the jumbotron but it's not entirely clear - hallucinates his arms moving in the shape of a clock. I initially thought this whole sequence (intercut with a gymnastic display which appears to go wrong) was intended to represent the aghast Cesar's powers going out of control and causing mayhem, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Instead his limo is stopped by police and he is arrested for corrupting a minor and statutory rape - a genuinely bold choice of peril for a protagonist and one I don't think would fly in any major studio production post-Harvey Weinstein!

Julia is oddly certain he must be innocent - again, the two are not clearly an item at this point; he's her boss - and investigates, finding that VanderWaal's vestal virgin's birth certificate was fabricated and she was in fact born out of the country six years earlier, meaning she was 23 at the time of the tape, not 17. Interestingly, in the newspaper montage showing Cesar being cleared, a voiceover also mentions the footage was found to be edited and fradulent, begging the question of why the birth certificate was even important - I can only think this VO was added after principal photography and originally the character did sleep with a girl he believed to be underage.

Again, an odd scene order - after being cleared, Julia finds a distraught Cesar on top of an under-construction building (what this is is unclear as none of his Megalon buildings use girders like this but it's a repeated location - put a pin in that). He has lost his confidence in his ability to command time and she coaxes him into regaining his mojo; he is able to stop time again with the formula 'For the sake of Julia, Time, please stop'. Again, this feels like it should have more narrative weight than it does; he 'loses' his powers for all of one scene and it doesn't impact his career or plans. It also feels like it should have come before the formal resolution of his legal woes. The hero losing his supernatural powers at the start of the second act and needing either to regain his confidence to use them or learning he must not rely on them is a well-worn superhero trope and it almost feels like Coppola felt compelled to include it since he had a super-powered protagonist but didn't understand or care to put it to any more significant use.

I forget where the scene takes place where he meets Wow again; she attempts to seduce him and offers him Crassus's bank, which she says she will steal away from him. He rebuffs her and in one of the worst pieces of professionally produced cinema I have ever seen, we fade to and from a closeup of the car's wheel driving over the coat he gives her. It wasn't even necessary to cut in - the coat is clearly visible and the audience expects the action from the way she throws it down - and the cut is executed horribly; it genuinely feels like a mistake, like a misplaced clip in Final Cut Pro.

Shortly thereafter, Cesar is approached by a young boy who asks him to sign an autograph. Utterly bafflingly, Nathalie Emmanuel is given the line of dialogue 'Cesar would never say no to a child'. This is a couple of scenes after he is accused of statutory rape; if it was meant to be delivered with wry humour, no-one told Emmanuel. In any case, the child shoots him in the face, having been revealed as an agent of Clodius.

We then get an abstract montage of what may be Cesar's dying hallucinations, with the repeated refrain (I think I remember this correctly:) "I will not give death dominion over my thoughts". It would not be unreasonable for one of the following to happen:

a.) Somehow Cesar is able to not just stop time but reverse it. We see a flower shrinking back into a bud and I was fully expecting to see the clip of his blood flowing on the street reversing. He has regained his powers and now has new incredible mastery. Or:

b.) The damage to his brain means Cesar cannot use his powers. Julia must step in and make the leap of faith - Cesar is injured now but was not so in the past. 'Time: Heal all wounds!').

Neither of these happen.

Instead, we see snippets of what seems to be a mostly cut scene where Julia and the scientist character replace the missing portions of Cesar's skull and brain with Megalon. This seems to be a triumphant return and we see him awake, bandaged but cogent.

In the next scenes, a slurring and seemingly brain-damaged, still bandaged Cesar who repeatedly shouts "No, no, no!" for some reason forces his way into Crassus's mansion to find out why the billionaire's bank has frozen his accounts. This is revealed to be a scheme of Wow at the behest of Clodius. She once again attempts to seduce Cesar (even after he reveals his horrific transparent gold skull-face) but is forced to stop when Crassus arrives.

After this, Wow turns her seductive attentions to Lebeouf's Clodius and persuades him to get Voight's character to sign over control of the bank in a rather shoddy bathhouse scene that I think is intended to show Crassus having a heart attack and aides rushing to his rescue, but which I initially believed showed him being stabbed by Clodius's accomplices. When Wow seduces Clodius she cuts his hair (something Crassus told Clodius to do) in silhouette which should clue you in she's playing the role of Delilah.

At this point we should mention that Clodius has his own sub-plot where he has been repeatedly seen trying to build cred among the mob protesting Cesar's project. The mob is, I would guess, the ultimate antagonist of the film, and Coppola is strikingly loose with his real-world targets here. The mob resembles Black Lives Matter and anti-gentrification protesters and Clodius says they are 'immigrants' whose vote can be bought; they carry SPQR flags that resemble the hammer and sickle; their slogans suggest far-left sympathies; but Clodius gives a literal stump speech on a tree stump which has been cut into the shape of a swastika (real subtle there) and his minion now has a forehead tattoo of the Black Sun, a real-world fascist symbol (I think he also said something along the lines of 'We will make New Rome great again', though I may be misremembering). You might be tempted to think that, given his historical intrigue with Rand's Objectivism, Coppola views the masses as generically 'collectivist', subsuming fascism and communism. If so, Cataline is a bizarre choice for a hero, as in the real world it was he who whipped up a mob to attack the Roman Senate, and Caesar who led the 'populists', while Cicero favoured the optimates (aristocracy). We'll talk more later about Cesar Catalina's philosophy, such as it is, in 'Megalopolis'.

As New Rome collapses in riots, Crassus, who is revealed to be less senile than previously suggested, confronts his wife and nephew in an absolutely hilarious scene where he lifts his suggestively tented blanket to reveal a tiny bow and arrow, which he uses to kill first Wow in a comedic spout of blood and then repeatedly plink a fleeing Clodius in the backside with arrows; each time it cuts back to Crassus he has another arrow (barely) drawn with no indication where they are coming from, like a YouTube Poop. I think, generously, this was meant to be slapstick comedy, even if the context is very dark (aging billionaire murders his cheating wife).

Mayor Cicero semi-reconciles with his daughter (who has since had Cesar's child) on the train as they are evacuated for their safety.

In the climax - I feel sure it's the climax - of the movie, the mob gathers at the gates of Megalopolis, but an apparently fully healed Cesar appears, projected on the golden leaves of his utopian city, and addresses them. The speech is every bit as dense, philosophical, and frankly unrousing as his opening debate, but this time it wins the crowd around and suddenly they are no longer the collectivist menace but the upstanding majority who are now delighted to live in his city as the gates open.

Crassus declares he is throwing his entire wealth (and 'the patents to Megalon', which I guess he somehow acquired when the bank froze Cesar's funds) behind the project, so all's well that ends well? The mob turn on Clodius when they find out 'he owns the bank' (except that no, we've just established he doesn't) and shockingly string him and his henchman up, Mussolini-style; while the camera cuts away quickly it's pretty clear they have stoned him to death.

As New Year dawns, Cesar persuades Julia to try stopping time herself for the first time. She does so, but surprisingly *everyone* freezes except the baby, who has clearly also inherited the power. The End. Someone in the row behind me chuckled.

To be clear, this lends the plot a degree of cogency you simply don't get in the theatre. It's clear to me much of the movie ended up on the cutting room floor - there are fully acted, costumed scenes with different dialogue that appear in the facets of the Megalon crystal as Cesar works but are not in the movie. I think the order of scenes may have been dramatically changed and possibly the ending altered, which is why Driver's character appears fully healed without explanation but only as a projection in the final speech.

The central conceit, time stop, is not used except indirectly as something one character sees to make her intrigued in Cesar, and later as evidence that he has his confidence back after a single scene where he can't use it. Losing it doesn't set back his plans and we barely get a sense of how he uses it in his work normally. An architect who literally has all the time in the world is an intriguing concept and one could easily imagine eyecatching scenes where buildings seem to erect themselves in a blink of an eye, or where from the perspective of a normal human he flashes around a room, drawing up plans and blueprints at seemingly superhuman speed. Indeed, I was fully expecting at least one scene where Driver appears where he shouldn't be, revealing he has been listening in on a conversation or confronting someone in a secure location, because he can stop time to get into any location or do anything.

But we don't see this - we don't even, unless I missed it, get a line like 'Cesar always finishes his projects ahead of schedule - what's his secret?'. Time stop also doesn't work consistently; the first time we see it, Cesar's own body is part of the timestop; he can seemingly think in normal time but his body is suspended on the brink of falling. But later, it's clear that people who use timestop move normally and are affected by gravity (when Julia drops her purse on the girder it slows and stops when it gets a certain distance from her).

The secondary conceit, Megalon, is barely defined. It's a miracle metal that allows things like flowing moving walkways and roofs that fold in like flower petals when it rains. It also bonds with living cells and is eventually replaced with healthy tissue. It sometimes reflects his wife's face, and in the medical montage I think they put some of the wife's hair into the implant, which suggests to me Megalon *is* partially a ghoulish necromantic substance that harnesses his wife's unquiet spirit - but incredibly this isn't addressed in the final narrative other than a dreamlike sequence where he hears his wife telling him 'Go to her', apparently permission for him to move on. Again, it feels like a late-era MCU production cut to hell by studio interference - except there's no studio.

There's also an ambiguous line where Mayor Cicero seems to admit *he*, not Cesar, killed her - I think the intent of this line is he is willing to publicly admit he tampered with evidence to convict Cesar if Cesar breaks up with his daughter. Cesar later tells Julia his wife killed herself because of his obsessive focus on work and we have no reason to doubt him.

It's all such a weird missed opportunity - clearly you're meant to initially wonder if Cesar did kill his wife. There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it newspaper headline that says the death was a 'Hitchcockian mystery' - which suggests a locked-room murder. Now, who can enter a room, kill someone, and leave to have an alibi elsewhere, all in the blink of an eye? Surely, surely this was intended to be explored at some point; less Chekhov's gun being visible over the fireplace and more being shoved up your nostril in the first act.

The tertiary conceit - New Rome itself - is intriguing as a stylistic choice. It's overtly a fable so it would seem churlish to ask how this Roman city-state exists in a world where both the USA (of which it's seemingly a part) and USSR existed. The limits of the budget are visible in the lack of stylisation in some areas (extras' costumes, cars, offices) but I didn't find it too offensive. I did notice that the architecture we see associated with Cesar early in the film is clearly Art Deco, but the Megalon structures later in the film are postmodern sweeping leaf-life structures, as though Coppola changed his mind about what the future looks like some time in the fifty years since first conceiving the movie.

The central conflict of the film is thornier. You might assume that Cicero represents populist, 'need'-based politics ("People need help now," the mayor says, objecting to Cesar's grand vision of a better city), while Cesar is a Randian rugged individualist, except that's not quite what we're shown in the final cut.

The Mayor's character isn't consistent - by the midway point he's become a law and order figure while the sleazy collectivist mantle has been passed to Clodius and the anti-gentrification rioters. And Cesar being a government official mixes the message on 'lone genius architect' - where we do get an insight into the philosophy of Cesar Catalina, it's also not especially Randian. The character talks repeatedly about the need for 'debate' - that even starting to talk about what we should do, or agreeing that we should talk, is already utopia. He responds to the Mayor by suggesting that 'people's futures' are as important as their present. I also think at one point he says civilisation was a mistake, which is a startling remark from a protagonist but which seems to be something Coppola has floated in real life (seemingly believing there was a utopian matriarchy before history). So at best I think you can argue he takes a broadly long-term-self-interest rationalist view and is being contrasted with the short-term populist Mayor and the short-term instant-gratification rioters.

He also briefly (as in, a single line) advocates for debt nullification, which was a position of the real Cataline, but which doesn't really seem to gel with anything else in the movie - we never get the sense that Cesar hates Crassus lending money and aren't shown the effects of usury on the people.

The cast of actors - including John Voight, and DB Sweeney who starred in the ill-fated Atlas Shrugged adaptation - makes me think it was sold as a rightish-wing endeavour, but I can't imagine the apparent both-sidesism on display will satiate red-blooded culture war types.

Certain aspects of the film also felt quite dated - the use of sapphism to shock and titilate (and the curious line where Cesar, challenged by a gossip columnist to confirm he prefers women, insists 'Everyone prefers women. Even women prefer women'); contrasted with the effete, crossdressing villain Clodius.

What's most striking (I said it was the salient word) about 'Megalopolis' is how much potential each element has relative to how it's actually used on-screen. Some of this is the tight budget constraints necessitated by Coppola burning through his own money to fund the film - the SFX were generally decent though I noticed at least one truly shoddy effect where characters walk into an idyllic field which is clearly a separate plate, and their bodies are sliding left-to-right as though walking on ice.

How might I re-imagine 'Megalopolis'? Keeping most of the beats and trying to refine the message rather than changing it:

- Cesar as a private architect, not a government agency. Put Crassus in the role of a Gail Wynand; a wealthy man and potential patron.

- Cesar has built a reputation as the man who always has time - he finishes every project ahead of schedule and under budget; his demolitions always proceed flawlessly and his staff have no idea how he does it.

- The Mayor champions sweetheart deals with contractors for cheap, trashy buildings that will fall down in thirty years (this might have been in the script at some point as Cesar calls him a 'slum lord') while Cesar wants to use Megalon to create an Art Deco utopian development.

- Julia sees Cesar stop time and he offers her a job. He demonstrates how when his staff see him flash around at super-speed he is really doing all the laborious work of drawing up plans in real time, totally alone as he previously had no-one who could do what he did.

- The press casts doubt on Megalon, with the unions pushing for proven materials like concrete and steel. A ghastly rumour emerges that Megalon contains human DNA. Cesar gives a speech, asking what would happen if the first architects using steel had faced the same resistance. What about fire?

- Julia proves her worth by securing a contract for Cesar to redevelop a large slum after a devastating fire, elbowing out her father's friends who want to use the same cheap cladding that caused the fire in the first place (anticipates and deflects viewer criticism about safety).

- Romance develops with Julia and Cesar. Scenes where they go out into the city and stop time together. Julia is pregnant.

- Clodius undermines Cesar by throwing red tape in his way. Cesar appears in his home and confronts him, showing a sinister edge, but ultimately leaves. Clodius uses this to deduce Cesar's time powers.

- Crassus's wedding is a huge event with (as in the film), chariot races and gladiatorial games. Cesar, Mayor Cicero, Julia and Clodius all attend.

- Instead of the vestal virgin scandal, Cesar is publicly accused of killing his first wife and the shock causes him to lose his control over time, causing chaos throughout the city. Unable to continue his work he locks himself away in his office.

- Time is frozen throughout the city; Cesar is subconsciously holding everything together so it doesn't change or decay (timestop as metaphor for stagnation!). Time only passes for objects if someone is holding them and if you drop them they freeze in place. If someone dies they freeze in place. We see how the city is surviving in this odd apocalypse.

- Julia investigates with a more murder-mystery focus - it's a locked-room murder and Cesar has an ironclad alibi, but a time manipulator could easily make it happen.

- She keeps digging however and a financial motive emerges for Clodius. She confronts Crassus who admits he covered up for his nephew; everything that looked supernatural about the death was possible with enough money. Facing disgrace he throws himself from the top of his skyscraper and his body freezes on the point of impact.

- Julia finds Cesar who tells her he did use his wife's body to create Megalon but insists that he found her dead. Why? Because love holds everything together (we're leaning into the cheese; amazingly I don't think they try to explain this in the real movie). Having expiated himself, Time once again hears his entreaties and begins flowing normally ("You can move on").

- Julia and Cesar brave the streets to reach the Mayor to clear his name and a mugger shoots Cesar. However, with his new mastery, he is able with a 'kick start' from Julia to turn back time and repair his own damaged brain.

- Mayor Cicero is reconciled to his daughter and meets his granddaughter for the first time.

- Clodius learns of his uncle's death and, blaming Cesar, whips up a mob to storm the construction site, but in a flash of an eye the city is completed before them as Cesar's expanded powers let him include entire construction crews in his timestop.

- Cesar emerges and gives a speech; reflecting that every one of them wanted someone else to provide for them but were ready to use violence to take what wasn't theirs, trusting there existed someone who was willing to be robbed; the city is complete, but none of them will live in it. 'Others, who saw and believed, will come, and they are welcome'.

- Clodius and his most devoted followers attack but the city itself folds in to protect Cesar, showing his wife's spirit in the metal recognises her murderer, and Clodius sinks into the ground.

- New Year's, magic baby, yada yada.

[thoughtportal]

'Megalopolis' is a piece of s—t

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary begs you not to see Francis Ford Coppola's new film

This is not a review. This is a warning. If I gave Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” a standard movie review and told you that it was an incoherent mess on par with “Rebel Moon” (which it is), your fanboy reflexes would kick and you’d write me off. You’d take me as just another pair of glasses dead set on panning a movie just to bolster their art cred. I hate critics like that, and so do you.

So I’m telling you this not as a reviewer, but as a friend: Do not see this movie. It is a piece of s—t.

You’ve been warned various times already. You were warned when the Guardian reported this spring that crew members on “Megalopolis” described its making, paid for entirely by Coppola thanks to his fortune in winemaking, as a “train wreck.” You were warned when that same article leveled allegations that the old man would sexually harass female crew members (barf) and burn hours of shooting time just hanging out and smoking weed instead of working (OK I respect it). Coppola has denied the allegations, and has sued Variety for its own investigation into his reported wrongdoing. In its introduction, the written complaint in that suit includes the sentence, “Some people are jealous and resentful of genius.” Go ahead and take that sentence as a warning, too.

Because Coppola has been running defense for this film basically ever since it wrapped. Lionsgate, the only studio willing to distribute Coppola’s vanity project, tried to get ahead of the damage by releasing a trailer larded with critical barbs that had been levied against Coppola’s old masterpieces, quotes that turned out to be fabricated.

But perhaps those warnings haven’t been enough. Perhaps, like me, you keep a soft spot in your heart for Coppola, a member of the auteur revolution who made a string of masterpieces through the ’70s and ’80s, but has made none since. Perhaps, like me, you were drawn in by a cast that includes Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman, the god Giancarlo Esposito and other luminaries. And perhaps, like me, you’re so worn out by corporate filmmaking that you’re down with any movie that showcases pure artistic ambition, even if the end result is a misfire. Maybe this thing is a disaster, but maybe that’s the fun of it, yeah? Like gawking at a car wreck?

Wrong. This movie is unwatchable. It deserves to live in infamy, with its title acting as shorthand for any multimillion-dollar flop borne out of monstrous ego. I took a bullet watching “Megalopolis” for you. An actual bullet would have been kinder.

I’ll give you the details as best as I can manage. “Megalopolis” — oh I’m sorry, “Megalopolis: A Fable” — is Coppola’s attempt to portray near-future America as Ancient Rome. And brother, he is NOT subtle about it. He renames New York as New Rome. He gives every male actor a Caesar cut. He throws in engraved title cards throughout the movie that look like the menu of an SNES game. He turns Madison Square Garden into the Coliseum and uses it for an extended bacchanalia scene that goes on longer than a Catholic wedding. And he dresses up Shia LaBeouf, a talented actor whose face I never want to see again, in toga drag. Why is Shia in drag? What’s his character up to? Please don’t expect answers to any of that.

Here is the plot, as best as I can divine it. Driver plays Cesar Catilina, who runs the Design Authority of New Rome, which has its own police force for some reason. We know that Cesar is an architect, because the posters for “Megalopolis” all show Driver holding a magic T-square. We do not actually see him use that T-square in this movie. In fact, we don’t see him doing any nuts-and-bolts design work of any kind. This is because Cesar’s real occupation is Godfather of New Rome. He somehow has more influence in New Rome than the city’s mayor (Esposito), ANDhe has the power to stop time. How he acquired this ability is never explained. In fact, the movie gives Cesar this power for virtually zero narrative purpose.

Cesar is tortured. His wife has died, and Cesar is mourning her by doing lots of blow and sleeping with salacious TV reporter Wow Platinum, played by Aubrey Plaza. Turning Aubrey Plaza blonde is one of many crimes that Coppola perpetrates in this film. Now, Wow Platinum has some skeezy motives of her own (she’s a gold digger), so Cesar is wary.

He also has beef with Mayor Cicero, who apparently tried to implicate Cesar in his wife’s death, and who is working to prevent Cesar’s Design Authority from building Megalopolis, the architect’s vision of a future city. None of this is explained with any clarity. More important, it’s boring.

The rivalry between Cesar and Cicero grows more heated when the former falls in love with the mayor’s daughter, Julia. Julia is played by Nathalie Emmanuel, whose only direction from Coppola appears to have been, “act like you’re the love interest in a Michael Bay film.” Julia is a reporter (I think?) who’s loyal to her father but enchanted by this brooding, wide-chested rival. Is this love? Does the fate of Driver’s new “city,” which we know is the city of the future because it has moving walkways that glow, depend on them staying away from one another? Do I care about ANY of this s—t?

I don’t.

The plot I described above is barely discernible through the excruciating 138-minute running time of “Megalopolis.” I had to piece the story together myself while enduring things that no paying moviegoer should ever have to sit through. There’s that endless Coliseum scene, featuring a musical interlude from the city’s “virgin sweetheart,” who turns out to be older than she claimed (no!) and not a virgin at all (ZOMG!). In fact, she f—ked Cesar! On camera! Is nothing pure?

It gets dumber. There’s a scene where Julia, with the film’s incoherent score blasting in the background, solemnly reads not one, but THREE quotes from Marcus Aurelius in a row, giving the Roman emperor attribution after each one of them. There is Dustin Hoffman looking lost. There is Jon Voight looking even MORE lost. Driver is just about the only person here who does his best with the material he’s given. He acts so, so hard. Admirably so. Everyone else, with great justification, looks like they’re already embarrassed to be here. They know this thing is going to be a lemon, and act accordingly.

That includes Laurence Fishburne, in full “Matrix 2” mode playing both a chauffeur and an occasional narrator. That also includes Jason Schwartzman, who gets almost no lines in the film but shows up mostly because he’s related to Coppola. And it includes Plaza, who will absolutely be the best interviewee from this cast whenever Werner Herzog films a documentary about how awful the production was.

Oh hey, did I mention that there’s an Elvis impersonator singing the national anthem? That was random. There are also still photos of 9/11 (Rome falling alert!), plus an “interactive element” where a live performer in the auditorium asks questions of the on-screen Cesar as part of a press conference scene. It adds nothing.

There’s a jarring sequence where a little kid walks up to Driver’s car and shoots him in the face (credit where it’s due, Coppola still knows how to film a murder), but the bullet turns Driver’s right eye into a miniature galaxy before the wound magically heals altogether.

And, most importantly, there is Voight in a Robin Hood outfit, asking Plaza, “What do you think of this boner I got?” before shooting her in the chest with an arrow. That one’ll be a meme.

Save for Voight’s erect midnight cowboy, nothing else about “Megalopolis” will last. The dialogue is terrible. The color palette is nearly as incongruent as the music. The overdubbing sometimes doesn’t match the actors’ lips at all. The visual effects are terrible, featuring virtual sets that look like early design mockups Coppola never bothered to flesh out. Even the PROPS are terrible. Every physical prop in “Megalopolis” looks like Coppola either found it in his garage or asked his grandkids to make it for him. This movie cost the old man $120 million. He sold one of his wineries off to finance it. You could have shot a better looking movie with your phone.

And that’s really all there is to it. The only reason this film was released was because Coppola made it, and the only reason that Coppola made it was because he’s a centimillionaire. This is very much the work of a bored old stoner. I knew it five minutes into “Megalopolis.” I also knew that I was stuck.

Don’t let that happen to you. Don’t be tempted by Coppola, or by the cast, or by any contrarian review that attempts to kick off a reassessment of this disaster that it will never deserve. This movie is garbage. It doesn’t work as “so bad it’s good” camp. It doesn’t work as a “fable.” It doesn’t work as a noble attempt at a Big Statement. It doesn’t work at all. I’m sorry I watched it, and I will genuinely think less of anyone who finds it redeemable. There are plenty of directing legends, Martin Scorsese chief among them, who have great stories left to tell. “Megalopolis” proves that Coppola is not one of them. This man doesn’t know how to make good movies anymore. In fact, he doesn’t appear to know how to make any movie anymore. 

Before my screening, the studio hosted a livestreamed Q&A with Coppola, Spike Lee and Robert De Niro. Toward the end of that Q&A, De Niro, an outspoken liberal, looked out at the audience and said to them, “Just imagine Trump directing this movie.” Bobby, I don’t have to.

[rogersandclarke]

weekend update with wow platinum

hi, i'm wow platinum, and here are tonight's top stories.

mayor frank cicero's limo was blocked by a group of architecture authority protestors yesterday afternoon. reports from the scene quote him as saying "you better be glad your cars aren't megalon yet, otherwise i could just walk right through them!"

earlier that day, the paparazzi snapped a photo of julia cicero leaving cesar catilina's office. julia declined to comment, but i will. somebody needs to kill her–before cesar does.

a new vesta sweetwater billboard went up in times square this week, attracting thousands of tourists. we went out and asked new romans on the street what they liked about her music. the consensus: "the virgin pledge girl makes music?"

[solohux]

As much as I didn’t like Megalopolis, General Hux and Cesar Catilina would make such a power couple.