18/48
It is simply the same footage flipped and slightly tilted
Story
The city of New Rome is pitted against a duel between Caesar Catilina, a brilliant artist who advocates for a utopian future, and the greedy mayor Franklyn Cicero. Among them is Julia Cicero, whose loyalties are divided between her father and her lover. Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay in the early 1980s, but the film was put on the back burner partly because of its financial debts. Pre-production finally began in 2001 after shooting 30 hours of second-unit footage and holding a table read with Paul Newman, Uma Thurman, Robert De Niro, James Gandolfini, Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Edie Falco, and Kevin Spacey , but the project was scrapped after the September 11 attacks because a scene in the script (page 166) “foreshadowed” the attacks. Coppola abandoned the project entirely in 2007 and did not resume development until 2019. The security footage of Cicero entering Ceasars’ office is supposedly shot by two different cameras, as indicated by the small text in the upper left corner.
It’s hard to know what Coppola’s intention was with this film
Hamilton Crassus III: What Do You Think of This Dick of Mine?. The “Ultimate IMAX Experience” version of the film features a live actor asking questions during the filmed press conference. Quoted on The John Campea Show: Adam Driver to lead Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis (2022). My Commitment Written by Grace VanderWaal Performed by Grace VanderWaal Courtesy of Columbia Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment Produced and orchestrated by Kris Kukul. On the one hand, this film has some interesting ideas and imagery, but some ideas never evolve and some images don’t look good. It seems like he chose not to focus too much on the characters but rather on the themes.
As I said, it’s hard to see where Coppola was going with all this
However, some scenes suggest that the audience should feel empathy for the characters, but they simply cannot. One reason is the pacing of this film; it somehow manages to be fast, but it feels slow, and that could be because some scenes are boring. If we remove all the misleading character development, we end up with misleading idea development. Megalopolis bombards you with interesting ideas, but because there are so many of them, none of them evolve into a solid conclusion. If his intention was to go against the classic narrative structure and challenge viewers with a different kind of storytelling, then this didn’t work either. Some scenes contain clichés and the overall structure feels like a mix of 50’s and 90’s scenarios.
But it just doesn’t feel right
An interesting thing the film often does is plant a seed that sometimes doesn’t grow: it stays in that scene and then we move on to the next one. This method of storytelling is confusing and confusing for most audiences and would probably work better if this technique had a solid foundation throughout the film. David Lynch once said that you can make any film, any art, any way you want, as long as it feels right. His films are stranger and harder to understand than Megalopolis, yet when you watch Lynch’s work, you don’t feel misled: everything feels right, no matter how strange it is. Megalopolis sometimes feels right, sometimes it doesn’t. Megalopolis is a good example of how the director’s stylistic touch is important to the look of the film.
I will definitely revisit this film in the future, jokes aside
The cinematography for this film was done by the same person who shot The Master. Yet this film feels like any expensive commercial film these days: too vivid, too warm, too basic. This film has a trick that I didn’t understand the first time I saw it. Overall, it’s a bit sad that this is Coppola’s last film, but I’m sure she doesn’t regret making it.