Embarssingly, I saw megalopolis immediately. I was so underwhelmed that, despite drafting this review on my way home from the theater, i forgot to post it. Now, into the void:

What must eric adams be thinking? the feds seized his phone. The standard corruption now receives higher scrutiny. No one in new york is surprised by a crooked cop. I feel like celebrating his downfall. Look what they’ve done to my beautiful boy! And what better way than w/ Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis

The old man has lost it. He sold off the vineyard; he’s widely derided as a creep (but, as wild card mayorial candidate andrew cuomo will tell you, he’s just being italian); he either used AI or fabricated negative quotes from critics himself; he wanted eitehr a live actor or an interactive ai to burst into each theater; he’s set for a disasterous opening weekend. The megalopolis lore can go on and on and on.

But, maybe like adams, coppola is a man out of step with time. A provacateur clinging to a way of transgression that no longer exists, like adams craving the corrupt mayorial lifestyle.

At the cold play concert.
35th st, lily’s crepe $13
I don’t think megalopolis was good enough or bad enough. It lingers, like a pervy old man, trading in women.

The central conflict between Caesar and Mayor Cicero is shallow. Should we let things be terrible like they are now or should we work together to make things better? For all his musings on time and consciousness, I’m not sure Coppola has more than an interconnected psychobabble. Am I for one love psychobabble, but his doesn’t feel lived in. Caesar is design, a revolutionary break, but not so much taht family structure or the institution of marriage would be uprooted. In fact, the film is predicated on the trafficking of women. Wow from Caesar to Cassius; Julia from Cicero to Caesar.

Julia’s characterization is particularly flat, morphing from party girl to muse/therapist. Wow, delishishly played by aubrey plaza, climbs to renown and riches through Caesar and Cassius. To her credit, Plaza gifts Wow with a trickster ambition. She’s hyper-sexualized and turning the performance up to 11.

But Driver’s Caesar, the genius revolutionary, is unconvincing. His charisma feels off, like someone selling their vision through how unhinged they are. He tries to present himself as an uncoverer of natural reality. Like the discovery of time and the conceptualization of consciousness, megalopolis is now a part of life itself. But when more of the movie revolves around the relationship between Caesar and Julia, the whole magic of his ideas is lost, replaced by a drab romance traingulating the death of Caesar’s previous muse/therapist/mother–wife.

Coppola’s depiction of sigificant otherness rehearses a tired script of male genius and female inspiration. The liveliness of gender, relationships, and identities–those things that would change if the megalopolis is to be–is never explored. Instead, we are presented with the megalopolis as an enormous macguffin, a magic make everything better, liveable, and just for free, for ever (?)

The supposed conflict of the film is between mayor Cicero’s preservation of the status quo and Caesar’s insurgent cosmopolis, the implications of either’s worldview beyond shallow mismanagement/corruption and untested explosive change isn’t made into interesting story beats, particularly because so much of the film circles Caesar and Julia.

The design of the world of New Rome is exiting. There is still a flash to Coppola’s worlds, even if they can swamped by rehashed psychadelia. The special effects are idiosyncratic, giving them a stylized feel that only has the edges of butgetary restrictions.

I think Eric Adams and Coppola suffer from similar problems. They are so convinced of their entitlement to the city, as an object of exploitation, that they trick themselves into thinking they own it. Adams delusional bid to trade favor internationally a reflection of his own ineptitude at being able to help the people of new york city. He can only enrich himself and his cop friends, turing the other way as they shoot off wildly in the subway.

Coppola’s delusional ownership over the city energizes his Caesar. Caesar’s genius of discovering a magic material that allows cooperation and a better quality of life is all framed around himself, his singular artistry and exceptionalism. Caesar is a stand in for how Coppola views the director, a revolutionary figure able to show a different way of living together. This humanism falls flat immediately because of the pervy old man, his flattened view of collaboration that emerges from a singular, authorial genius. Such self-indulgences can never understand how we can better world together.