Issue #347: I Saw Megalopolis and All I Got Was This Stupid Newsletter
Issue #347: I Saw Megalopolis and All I Got Was This Stupid Newsletter
My friends and I went movie crazy this weekend. On Thursday, I saw Megalopolis (2024) in IMAX but the marathon really began on Friday.
Friday:
Le Samouraï (1967) in 35mm at the Harvard Film Archive
Wolfs (2024) at home, it sucked
Saturday:
Oddity (2024) at home, a work emblematic of the crisis of middlebrow filmmaking
Report on Latent Narcotic Substances in the Brain: Drugless (1991) at home, pretty good, mentioned it in the Paradox Newsletter open thread using Substack’s chat feature (more on that in a minute)
Miami Connection (1987) at Somerville Theater after the Burning Lord record release
Sunday:
Le Cercle Rouge (1970) in 35mm at the Harvard Film Archive
Every one was a first time viewing for me. The two Melville showings were like a party, rolling five or six heads deep down the row. From stepping out of my car to stepping back into it, we are talking about transcendent film and socializing experiences. Before Le Cercle Rouge, a guy named Tim asked Eric Yu about whether or not he’s going to see Megalopolis and Eric pulled me into the conversation. I tried to get Tim to sub to the newsletter, so if you are reading, what’s up man?
It wasn’t a great weekend for contemporary filmmaking, though. Wolfs was unforgivably bad and Oddity was just okay. Megalopolis wasn’t the same kind of eyesore as those other films, but I think this year has the highest number of movies I’ve seen that I thought were mediocre to terrible. A lot of this year’s critical darlings left me unmoved.
Tomorrow (October 1st) I’ll post a thread to prompt some discussion about the state of film in 2024. This is the promised return: I used the Substack chat feature to get an open conversation thread going among the readers and it went pretty well.
You can access it through the Substack website or app. And don’t be shy about commenting on old ones. I’ll try to do these every week if they are getting some traction. It would be nice to hear from everybody about their adventures in moviegoing.
Putting the “Major” in Megalopolis
I remember when I was young, hearing all the time in movie trailers, “now a major motion picture.” This is most commonly used in the advertisement for adaptations. A book becomes a “major motion picture” and so on. But I could have sworn I heard it regularly describing films that were original screenplays. I could be misremembering. This potential misrecollection is fueled by how much the descriptor stuck with me. Major motion picture. It’s a little presumptuous, right? Or at least tries to confer some gravitas on the movie it’s describing. But what makes a motion picture major?
In my critical vernacular (in my head), for a work to be major it means something other than a description of its budget or revenue or profit. A major work has a kind of significance that involves the ever elusive “cultural footprint.” It has value as an object of thought. As I quoted from Badiou’s Cinema (2013) two weeks ago, a major film “cannot simply be placed in the space between pleasure and forgetting.”
There are films that hit the film-going populous like a bomb. Sometimes by virtue of their formal flourishes and excessive style. James Cameron, Baz Luhrmann, Ridley Scott, and Spike Lee have made these sort of films from time to time. Megalopolis (2024) is another such film. The work itself is indistinguishable from the who and how of its creation. Francis Ford Coppola hasn’t made a film since 2007, and there was a decade between Youth Without Youth (2007) and The Rainmaker (1997). But the “triumphant return” Megalopolis might portend looks more like the cresting of a white whale or an albatross around Coppola’s neck. Megalopolis’s “troubled” production was front page news, all the more schadenfreude inspiring because Coppola personally financed the film using revenue from selling his winery.
But the movie outstrips the myth of its creation. It is spectacular, “spectacular” here serving as a neutral description. And it is significant because of the conversations about auteur filmmaking, and more, it has occasioned. If the only time you have available to watch a film in your entire life is 138 minutes, then I suggest watching Strangers on a Train (1951) or Le Samouraï (1967) and then getting an ice cream cone. But if you like dedicating time to watching movies, Megalopolis is worth seeing. It’s (now) a major motion picture.
Megalopolis is interesting, but it’s not as singular as one might imagine given all the discussion and pedigree. It has an aesthetic that one could describe as Luhrmann-esque. But beyond the surface, it evokes Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq (2015), Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022), and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). These are all works that dramatize the problem of an artist’s late period, outlined in Paradox #345. But in linking Megalopolis to these three works, their shared qualities are a bit more narrow than that wide aesthetic category. Coppola’s film is naive like Babylon, effusive in its allusion like Innocence, and modernizes an old story with minimal care or precision, as does Chi-Raq.
I imagine, with more time, I could deliver a more detailed reading of the relationship between Spike Lee’s work and Coppola’s Megalopolis. I suspect there is something to their shared status as New York filmmakers. But Megalopolis also has the earnest, contemporarily minded aspiration to political intervention like Lee’s late work, BlackKkKlansman (2018) and Da 5 Bloods (2020). Why Megalopolis is worse than those films is, among other reasons, because of the performances Lee gets out of his casts. This is Megalopolis’s biggest failure: stilted, parodic line reads that lead to The Room (2003) as a possible point of comparison, something I can’t say for any of Lee’s films.
It’s a shame, because it seems to me Coppola’s script isn’t really as bad as it comes across. Adam Driver can only deliver his Hamlet (1623) monologue with modest conviction. Giancarlo Esposito, an otherwise great actor, is nothing but painful in Coppola’s lens. Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, and Jon Voight are clearly having a good time, whether they should be or not. They invite the audience to laugh at times they shouldn’t.
But there are plenty of times the audience should laugh, and I found Megalopolis’s sense of humor to be one of its high points. Coppola clearly understands the need for levity in such a self-serious film. Regrettably, I think that success will be ignored in favor of focusing on the film’s unintentionally funny moments.
The aesthetic and formal evaluation of Megalopolis could, and probably will, fill books when all is said and done. But the film’s political orientation is anodyne. Coppola seems to endorse a plural universality. He uses a tryptic repeatedly to show the disparate experiences of his city dwellers that, in fact, coalesce into one shared experience despite ostensible differences. His world isn’t Randian, it’s Lockean, liberal to a fault. The erudite start-up founder is a more appealing escape from social unrest and societal breakdown than the buffoonish strong man.
If Megalopolis was the debut film from an unknown filmmaker, I would probably guess they would eventually make the best movie of all time. Though the film’s background looms large, it is major by virtue of what’s on the celluloid, not what put it there. It is a flamboyant, sometimes punishing, work. And while the IMAX format is surely to the film’s benefit, I think its visual interest will come across on screens of any size. Is it a “must see”? Perhaps not. But it’s something you haven’t seen before.
TV Quick Hits
I put a TV out on my porch. It’s actually enclosed, so not really a porch. They call it a “three seasons room” around here. But it’s great. Sitting out there with all the windows open running a flick I’ve seen before. All the sunlight means I can’t really watch movies that I expect to be good. They would be impossible to see half the time with the glare. But I’ve been watching a lot of streaming series, some of them while sitting on my porch*. Here’s a few words on them.
*like I said, not actually a porch
Reacher (2022)
I love the tense unfolding of twist after twist emblematic of U.S. spy thrillers. Bourne, Mission Impossible, Enemy of the State (1998), Body of Lies (2008). There have been some decent TV entries into the genre, like 24 (2001) which I liked a lot and Homeland (2011) which had a good first season before imploding. More recently, I watched The Night Agent (2023), which is about the leanest thriller TV I’ve ever seen — just a nice, complicated toppling of dominos. By contrast, Reacher, despite the titular character’s asceticism, retains some of what is unnecessary. But, it is exciting, propulsive, and has best-in-class action. Alan Ritchson hits people hard in this show. I’m on board for season three.
House of the Dragon (2022)
I fell off House of the Dragon and I’m not sure if and when I am going to pick it back up. I don’t have anything good to say about it, and most of what I think is interesting in the work makes it worse.
From the first episode, “The Heirs of the Dragon,” to the second, “The Rogue Prince,” six months pass in the narrative. From there, the space between episodes generally increases. The third episode, “Second of His Name,” takes place three years after the previous one. Between episodes five and six, ten years pass, necessitating the recasting of some of the principal actors.
The idea here is a good one. Narrative storytelling need not be beholden to unfolding in real time. It’s fiction, after all. The vast majority of serial television either takes place across a similar timeframe to its airing or across an ambiguous but unimportant period of time. In practice, though, it presents some problems for House of the Dragon. There is a major focus on human drama and the friendships, betrayals, and resentments among the cast of characters. These elements don’t really resonate when so much time is supposed to have passed yet the attitudes of each character toward one another are the same as they were in the previous week’s episode. Did nothing worthy of the camera’s gaze happen across these long periods between episodes?
Worse, characters will recount events from previous episodes. This makes sense in the logic of the plot. Someone would probably have to remind someone else about something that happened ten years ago. But for the viewer, it’s maddening. We just saw it happen. Of all the unimportant stuff they choose not to show in the ten years between episodes five and six, the show really has to make sure to have a hallway walking shot of one character explaining the events of the previous episode to another? Come on.
While abandoning the excessive exposition would be easy, the problem of how to present an ongoing plot across a wide range of narrative time is not easy to answer. The sting of an indignity from one character to another is as fresh as it happened a week ago (which it did, in real time) despite the plot unfolding over a long period. Maybe a work is better because the plot and drama is beholden to real time rather than narrative time. It is certainly makes House of the Dragon more conventional. But the problem is also one of quality. The “human drama” of House of the Dragon is that of a prime time soap opera. Days of Our Dragons or The Bold & The Targaryen would be titles more indicative of the show’s content.
Servant (2019)
Servant was an early entry into the Apple TV+ exclusive pool, and for my money the best thing they’ve had on the service. Yeah, I admittedly am endeared to the show because of the handoff from M. Night Shyamalan to his daughter Ishana. But Servant is consistently spooky and interesting. It’s self-reflexive, a TV show about how TV intervenes in one’s life. It’s theological; and you shouldn’t expect anything else from a Shyamalan. It’s funny. It’s (relatively) short; the entire series is about 1,200 minutes. A regular twenty-six episode season of a prime-time drama is 1,092 minutes without commercials, 1,520 minutes with them.
I also thought it ended very strong, but some people disagree. Even those critics can’t deny that Servant never loses track of its themes or plot points, never abandoning threads to the sci-fi ether and even occasionally unobtrusively taking an inventory of outstanding plot questions. Nell Tiger Free should be a star, but we’ll see if she becomes one.
From (2022)
From this list, From is the only show that is currently airing. And I’m watching it week to week now, after marathoning the first and second seasons. I like the show a lot, but of course I have a lot to criticize. After setting some groundwork, From has delivered some genuinely riveting character drama, particularly in season two’s sixth episode “Pas de Deux” and the most recent episode, season three, episode two, “When We Go.”
When the show is good, it is tapping into perennial anxieties and problems of familial duty and social cohesion and disintegration. The drama largely avoids the soapy variety I find so distasteful, but it falls into another generic trap: the “dramatic irony” of siloed information. Characters with different alignments collect various pieces of information and make, from the perspective of the audience, poor decisions because of their incomplete knowledge. This is very common for the “mystery box” or “puzzle box” style of sci-fi TV, but it’s not fun to watch. It also leads into another problem with From.
The show has signaled unambiguously that the resolution of its plot points won’t come from detailed explanation for every science fiction contrivance or fantastical element. Many people will hold that against the show and be frustrated that these plot points aren’t explained. But why would they be? From hasn’t explained anything yet and we’re three years into the show.
A sci-fi mystery can choose to handle its plot that way, but the writers have to find some other method to resolve a plot point without explaining it. From hasn’t really managed to do that yet. What you are left with is a work that can feel, at times, lacking direction. Instead of tying off some of the hanging plot threads, From has only introduced new ones. But the new ones are, at least, sub-textually rich. Good for me, not for the sci-fi fan who thrives on expository revelations.
Weekly Reading List
If you think of the readers of this newsletter and their interests as falling into a complex Venn diagram, the “like reading about Magic: the Gathering” circle is probably pretty small. It might even be non-existent. Nonetheless, I am motivated to talk about about an important event in the history of Magic that has just ended: qualification for the Vintage Cube LIVE taking place over the weekend of October 25th-27th.
The minute details of the event aren’t that important. Suffice it to say, this is a very unusual event, where eight players will Rochester draft a full vintage cube — meaning a curated collection of the most powerful and expensive cards in Magic’s history. Usually, a cube is infinitely replayable, like a board game version of Magic, and one does not draft “for keeps.” Not the case for this special event, however, where all the participants in the draft will keep the cards they pick. Even Black Lotus.
I’ve been following the qualifications for this event pretty closely and this past weekend was the last set of qualifier drafts. The two videos above are the last two attempts of stalwart cubers Luis Scott-Vargas and Andrew Baeckstrom to qualify for the event. I won’t spoil the outcome, but these two draft videos are:
In the first actually feature length draft, you will see things you have never seen in vintage cube before. In the second, you will see a paradigmatic example of what makes vintage cube so good.
This cover of The Carpenters (okay, technically a cover of Delaney and Bonnie) has had me in a chokehold.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-extortionists-doctrine/ — Elaine Scarry writes about one of the preeminent issues of our time, the U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence.
Until next time.