Megalopolis

On The Fritz

Megalopolis
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
USA 2024
American Zoetrope
UK cinema release print

“Head and hands need a mediator.
The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.”
Metropolis, 1927

So the day before I saw Megalopolis, I watched a review by one of my favourite movie critics. 

Now, I find Francis Ford Coppola a bit hit and miss but he’s always very interesting and, one of the reasons I wanted to see this one was because he’d been trying to get this film made since he was talking about it on the set of Apocalypse Now in the 1970s. After many cast changes and false starts he finally raised the $120 million dollar budget out of his own pocket (to ensure the lack of studio interference), selling one of his own vineyards in the process. However, when I watched this one review of the film by the critic I have a lot of time for, it was a ten minute rant about how it’s possibly the worst movie he’s ever seen (someone’s clearly not seen Harlem Nights then!), for various reasons. So I kinda regretted that I'd bought the ticket to see it at Leicester Square but, I was in London to attend a book signing anyway and so I went through with it and, you know what... it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

The film is a fable set in the late 21st Century where Adam Driver’s character Cesar Catilina, who has the power to freeze time whenever he wants, is one of the chief architects and power players in the royalty that is New Rome, taken over from New York (so SPQR USA, I guess). He’s also invented a new and magical building material called Megalon (not the same Megalon who is an enemy of Godzilla in a 1973 movie, reviewed here). And the whole film is a power struggle between the various members of the extended family who play Gods to this new Roman Empire... there’s Nathalie Emmanuel as latest love interest to Cesar, Julia Cicero. And there’s Giancarlo Esposito (Mayor Cicero), Shia LaBeouf (troublemaker Clodio Pulcher), Aubrey Plaza (as ambitious, backstabbing TV presenter Wow Platinum), Jon Voight (Hamilton Crassus III), Laurence Fishburne (as Cesar’s driver and wing man Fundi Romaine) and even Dustin Hoffman as a behind-the-scenes fix it man.

And I think the reason the film has been said to have no story is probably due to the fact that it’s such a fairly simple story that everyone is expecting more from it, perhaps. But there is one. And it’s been called unwatchable by many, it would seem... but no it isn’t. Unlike the reviewer I saw, I didn’t find it incredibly dull and it didn’t really feel longer than its two hours and eighteen minutes (although, it kinda felt like there may have been some cuts which could have expended certain scenes, like the final fate of Clodio).

And, yes, pretty much all the actors are giving absolutely scenery chewing, over the top performances which some may later come to regret and which seem stagey and contrived but... I’ve been thinking about this... I suspect a lot of this may have been exactly what Coppola was going for here.

To explain, the one review I saw didn’t mention a very specific film which, it turns out, lots of other people have mentioned in connection to this film... I just didn’t know about it. So I was about two thirds of the way through Megalopolis before I realised that this is a film very much informed by the 1927 Fritz Lang silent movie, Metropolis (reviewed here). And I wish I’d figured that out sooner because, yes, the dialogue is extremely bad and so much nonsense in this film, for the most part but, if you scratch that off the surface and look at it as a silent movie, treating the dialogue as unnecessary chatter, then you do have a film which starts to resemble those lofty heights that Lang committed to celluloid at the end of the silent era.

Yes, it’s a somewhat bloated corpse of a movie but, perhaps that’s how the younger generation may perceive Metropolis as being if they were presented with it as a brand new film nowadays. And, look, I’m not denying that there are a lot of problems and unfortunate artistic dead end choices in this movie but, I think it’s not something you should dismiss so lightly either... I think it’s definitely worth a look and my gut instinct is telling me that 30 to 50 years from now, if Coppola is still remembered, then this film may come under a certain re-appraisal and people might start taking it a little more seriously than, well, than it’s even possible to do right now.

Given that the film is quite all over the place tonally in some sequences, I have to also give a round of applause to composer Osvaldo Golijov, who manages to shift his musical palette through a number of different styles and really does help bring together the movie as a whole, I think.

One last thing about Megalopolis, before I move on and forget about this one for a while... the reviewer who I watched before I saw the film brought up the movie Caligula (reviewed by me here) and said that it’s a much more interesting way of doing things than what Coppola has done here. I don’t think Coppola was necessarily influenced by that film but, I think it was a good call to invoke it because there were many stretches of the movie, especially at the start, which do call to mind that particular film (actually, if Megalopolis had more female nudity, I would have thought a lot more of it, I suspect). 

It is then, as far as I'm concerned, a never dull but perhaps less substantial take on a kind of melding between the sensibilities of Metropolis and Caligula (another film people are citing in relation is The Fountainhead but, I’ve never seen it so can’t comment either way). And although it is not going to make many people who see it happy, I’m really glad I did take the opportunity to go to the screening and could certainly be tempted back to see it again in ten years or so. It’s not the aesthetic disaster that many reviews may lead you to believe but, similarly, I think this will fail abysmally at the box office and I kinda feel for Coppola (who recently lost his wife during post production). I hope this noble dinosaur of cinema can remain untouched by the possible public lambasting this film may well receive. An interesting failure then but, one which may well be considered a success by many in later years, I feel.

Emily The Criminal

Shade N’ Fraud

Emily The Criminal
USA 2022
Directed by John Patton Ford
Low Spark Films

Warning: Some small spoilers contained herein.

Okay, this one’s going to be a fairly short review, I think... but hopefully a sweet one. I’ve only seen three movies with Aubrey Plaza before this one, which played as part of this year’s London Film Festival... Scott Pilgrim Versus The World (which I honestly don’t remember her being in... I need to take another look at that one, I guess... reviewed here), Ned Rifle (by the great Hal Hartley, playing a key character mentioned in the first film of his Henry Fool trilogy but who we finally get to see in that third installment, reviewed here) and Ingrid Goes West (reviewed here). So, yeah, I don’t know her from much but she’s pretty amazing. Not just in terms of being a great actress with a real grasp of comedy but also because she has a wonderfully expressive face that sticks in the mind. So, if she’s involved in a film project and I’m actually fortunate to see it advertised, I’ll gravitate to it at some point.

Her newish film where she plays the title role, Emily The Criminal, is not a comic movie in the slightest... but she’s still knocking it out of the park with this one. Here, Aubrey plays the titular Emily, trapped in a system whereby she can’t get out of debt for her student loan and with a prior conviction for aggravated assault involving an ex-boyfriend, which makes it very difficult for her to get anything more than a very basic food delivery job. So, sunk in poverty, a colleague does her a favour by giving her a number and she becomes a ‘dummy shopper’. I’d not heard of the term before but basically she gets involved in a small gang working a credit card fraud racket, where she and a few others buy expensive goods on newly forged credit cards with stolen information and then bring it back to the guy running the operation, for a small amount of cash but which is quite a lot compared to what she’s normally earning. The first job gets her $200 and then the second, bigger job, gets her $2000... and so it goes.

Now, the guy running this particular scam, along with his brother, is called Youcef played, again quite brilliantly, by Theo Rossi. Emily and Youcef bond and then, before they end up romantically involved, just to complicate things... Youcef shows her how to run her own credit card scam. Shenanigans occur and things get tough and fairly gritty. As I said, this is Plaza playing it totally straight and also playing a very interesting character who, whenever she’s put in a position where she’s vulnerable, overcomes her fears on the turn of a dime and confronts them... whether that’s armed with a pepper spray, a taser or even a Stanley knife.

And that’s as much as I’m saying about the plot but, the film is fraught with peril (to quote a Scorcese character) and the writer/director really pours on the suspense by using lots of handheld camera during a lot of the sequences, which both gives it a kind of fly on the wall, voyeuristic, documentary feel but also indicates the chaos of Emily’s world and kind of, at least I thought, gives us a metaphorical glimpse of that character’s inner turmoil.

It’s also a film which mixes and matches tonal shifts from the odd, beautiful moments of life to the really horrendous parts... but, because of the chaotic style imparted by the way the movie is shot and edited... it really gets away with mixing all those clashing moods together quite smartly. Which in itself adds layers to the emotional complexity of the piece. This is a very simple set up and follow through, not complicated in any way, so the building tensions are created by both the fantastic performances (which I’m definitely used to from Plaza) and the way in which the footage is presented.

And that’s really me done on this one already... I did say it was going to be a short one this time. Emily The Criminal is suspenseful, down to Earth and finishes at a place which just wouldn’t have been allowed as a story outcome in a film released, say, sixty years ago, for sure. And the fact that you somehow sympathise mainly with a character who, perhaps, doesn’t make the best or most moral choices but shows a steely determination to get to where she needs to be, puts you in a position to accept the ending of the movie a little better. So, yeah... Plaza, Rossi and John Patton Ford all do a great job here and this is one I’ll definitely recommend to people, for sure.

Ingrid Goes West

Stalk On The Wild Side

Ingrid Goes West
2017 USA Directed by Matt Spicer
UK cinema release print.

Well this is a pretty amazing movie.

Ingrid Goes West is a film which I went to see purely because I’d seen Aubrey Plaza in one other movie and I was quite taken with her performance. That previous movie was Ned Rifle (reviewed here), the last part of Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool trilogy where she played a character who had only been alluded to in the previous parts of that series. I found her quite quirky and appealing as an on screen personality and so when I saw the trailer for this, although I had my reservations, I thought I’d give it a go.

As it turned out, that was a really good idea.

Here, Plaza plays the titular Ingrid who is, for want of a better term, a social media junkie who spends her waking hours trying to catch the eye of her latest Instagram obsession. The movie is toned, for the most part, as a comedy but it has a really dark heart and, as lazy as it is to say it, that dark heart is ultimately Ingrid herself. That being said, she’s not a villainous character and doubles as both protagonist and antagonist in that her actions, when viewed by the audience, are almost understandable at times and, although she is pretty much a full fledged stalker, insinuating her way into the private lives of others, she is also the character who the writers and director presumably want you to identify with.

The film poses no easy way into that mindset, however, as it starts off with the end game shenanigans of her latest obsession. A woman who she is so obsessed with and feeling excluded by that she crashes her wedding and maces her in the face for not inviting her there. The credits montage, then, is of Ingrid in her local mental hospital as we see her partaking of all the usual movie clichéd pastimes pictured at said establishments such as pill taking (with the sticking out of the tongue as proof of a swallow), group therapy and such like while her voice narrates her ‘apology’ emails to her victim, laced with the feint tinge of hope that she will get a forgiving (and possibly inviting) response.

What the start of that sequence also does, of course, is establish to the audience that Ingrid is crazy enough to flip into hostile and aggressive behaviour towards her ‘instagram crushes’ when things don’t go the way she wants... which helps to populate the character with an edge of unease as the story progresses because... well... the audience knows just what she’s capable of.

As the opening sequence finishes, Ingrid’s mother dies and leaves her a large sum of money. We don’t find out until later, in an almost throwaway line, that Ingrid’s mum was her best friend and the void in her life left by her departure may be one of the factors to have influenced the bizarre way in which she engages with the rest of the world. As the movie wears on, she gets more sympathetic, even though, as the story starts properly, she finds a new Instagram person she starts to obsessively follow, to the point where she takes her entire inheritance out from the bank, loads it up in her backpack and moves to California to stalk and penetrate her next ‘victims’ life.

That next victim is Taylor Sloane, played by Elisabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch from the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and Ingrid very quickly kidnaps her dog and waits for the appearance of a reward flyer, by way of an introduction into the lives of Taylor and her husband Ezra (played here by Wyatt Russell). The film then plays out as Ingrid becomes one of the family’s closest friends as she uses and manipulates everything around her to try to stay popular with her new ‘Insta pal’... including hooking up into a relationship with her young, Batman obsessed landlord Dan Pinto (played by O'Shea Jackson Jr.) in order to be able to turn up with her ‘imaginary boyfriend’. Then, when Taylor’s hero, her dominant and thoroughly nasty brother turns up, things start to go a bit pear shaped for Ingrid in some pretty nasty and uncomfortable ways.

Well,  that’s the basic set up and, I have to say, the actors and actresses in this movie really turn in some amazing performances... especially Plaza and Olsen. A lot of the humour in here is based on that very American style of ‘the comedy of embarrassment’, it seemed to me and, while I’m not a big fan of that kind of ‘little fish trying to fit in’ style of humour, it was just balanced and subtle enough in the performances here that it never once alienated me and I had a really good time with it. Also, as I said before, it’s not just a comedy and as the movie progresses, it kind of creeps up on you that it’s also an observation of the way loneliness can effect people and the lengths to which they will go to pursue a cure for that particular state of being.

There’s also some nice things happening with the way the film has been put together, too. The constant, almost staccato beat of Ingrid’s voice as she reads the Instagram captions out loud on the soundtrack in her head, including the vocalisation of the emojis (princess emoji, prayer emoji etc) is also echoed within the sharp cuts of certain montage sections exploring the famous social media site but it also has some nice visual echoes when the film is not specifically doing that too.

For starters, there are a fair few more static shots than you might expect in a film about the people of this particular age group. And I loved the way that, for some of the establishing shots of new locations, instead of smoothly panning the camera around to create the setting, the director will instead drop three differently angled static shots making up a quick ‘establishing edit’ rather than do the obvious... which is how you would perceive somewhere shown as static photos on a social media site, I guess (don’t get me started on gifs please).

There’s even a set of windows which he occasionally comes back to which take up the whole frame as a three across by two high grid... and of course when a character is standing outside those windows, they tend to be perfectly framed within one of the rectangles, just like you might be trying to do with an instagram picture or grid layout, I guess (I’m not actually on the site, I think).

Another great moment is in the score provided by Jonathan Sadoff and Nick Thorburn (sadly, there’s no proper CD release of this as yet... just a wretched download). Ingrid is dressed up in a Catwoman mask and seducing her new boyfriend with her best Catwoman shenanigans and this includes a moment where she licks his face in the exact same way that Michelle Pfiefer did something similar in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns... and why it works so well here is because the score is an obvious parody of Danny Elfman’s Catwoman orchestrations. It’s just a perfect moment of pastiche in a movie which is full of good ideas and, despite its bleak trajectory, I found myself thoroughly entertained by it.

It also ends in a way which is not entirely unexpected in terms of the aims and objectives of the title character but which also has a tragic poignancy. The way in which it’s pitched here works so wonderfully that, by the end of the sequence following what I was at first worried was the end sequence, I was genuinely torn between whether or not I should be feeling happy or sad for Ingrid. Is this redemption or... ? Oh no, this isn’t quite that at all it’s something else and it may seem deliberately ambivalent in its execution but I just thought the last shot was just the perfect ending for the movie.

Indeed, I didn’t realise how powerful that ending was until I started sobbing as I walked home from the cinema after it had finished. I have to confess, I felt really suicidal on the journey back and the next day and, although I can’t completely blame the movie for that right now (I have some stupid rubbish going on in real life at the moment) I felt compelled by the film to contemplate the darker parts of my biological make up for a day or two. Which is great, right? The film haunted me and made me think about things for a bit so... if that’s not a recommendation for a good time at the cinema then I don’t know what is. It wouldn’t surprise me if, when I come to tot up my top ten movies for 2017 at the end of the year, this one is in the mix somewhere on that list. Ingrid Goes West is a truly amazing little movie and I’m so glad I was lucky enough to see it.  

#IAmIngrid. 👰

Ned Rifle

To Hal And Back

Ned Rifle
USA 2015
Directed by Hal Hartley
DVD Region 2

You know, it’s always quite hard to review perfect films like the ones Hal Hartley tends to make. For many years now I’ve been citing him as my favourite living writer/director and, though I found a couple of his later shorts and one feature of his that I didn’t like as much as the others... it has to be said that he rarely disappoints and is the last word in US independent film making as far as I’m concerned. So much so that this particular movie was even funded by a Kickstarter campaign and, since I’m unaware of any screenings in this country, I had to wait for a DVD to become available from his website before I was able to see this.

Ned Rifle is a very interesting name for a feature from Hartley as many fans will know the name. He’s more often than not written the musical scores for the majority of the movies he’s directed and, again, more often than not, they’ve always been absolutely appropriate to his subject as well as being pretty good listens away from the movie... if one is actually fortunate enough to come across a release of any of them. The point is, before everybody caught on and realised it was Hartley “pulling a Carpenter” and doing the scores for his own movies, he used to use the name Ned Rifle as his compositional pseudonym... sometimes playing as part of a group with the further deviation of the name, called Ryful. Of course, everyone’s wise to all that nowadays but it was truly a full circle kind of feeling watching the opening credits of a movie called Ned Rifle with Music by Hal Hartley. Kinda made me chuckle.

Ned Rifle is a bit of a miracle for an independent movie maker because it’s actually the final part of a trilogy which he started back in 1997 with his most popular feature Henry Fool, which I saw and loved at the time of its release, either at the Lumiere Cinema in London (if it was still just about open by then) or maybe at the London Film Festival one year... I can’t remember. It was pretty self contained and had a lovely, ambiguous ending which really didn’t need any closure heaped on it. So it was pretty unusual to find that, indeed, closure did come nine years later in the form of a follow up focusing on the further adventures of Henry Fool’s wife, Fay Grim, in the movie... um... Fay Grim, in 2006.

Now, going back to my first paragraph here, it has to be said that Fay Grim was about the only feature film by Hal Hartley that I didn’t really like as much as his others. It was, as I would expect from “the greatest living director”, well made but I didn’t chuckle as much as I usually do during Hartley’s movies and I was less impressed than I’d hoped I would be. By then, though, I believe some people were saying that Fay Grim was Hal Hartley’s The Empire Strikes Back... in that there would hopefully be a ‘concluding’ part to what was shaping up to be the Henry Fool trilogy. And here it is now, in the form of Ned Rifle... another nine years after the last one.

One of the things which had impressed me about Fay Grim was the casting. In the original Henry Fool, a film where the titular character played by Thomas Jay Ryan is, maybe, a modern philosophical genius or a perverted degenerate... probably a compelling cross between the two... Fool is a catalyst for change on those about him. He eventually marries Fay Grim (played by Parker Posey), the sister of the film’s other main protagonist Simon Grim, played by James Urbaniak (you might also remember him playing comic book artist Robert Crumb in the excellent American Splendour). About three quarters of the way through that first movie they have a son, Ned, and he’s played for the last bit by a then 7 year old actor called Liam Aiken. Startingly, he returned as the 16 year old version of the same character for Fay Grim and, oh yeah... with the character’s second name changed to Rifle as part of his witness protection programme after events in that second movie, he’s back here playing the same character at 25 years of age (I guess, although he may be playing slightly younger in story years... couldn’t really tell). So he, and a lot of the regular cast from the other two, are all back for this one. Which is no mean feat.

Aiken has, of course, always been a pretty good supporting actor and he easily handles the main protagonist role in this movie, aided by Hartley’s often criticised but much loved (by this humble movie watcher), less than naturalistic dialogue. And as usual, Hartley’s writing is wonderfully performed by the various actors who, this time around, include a much loved and frequent Hartley collaborator from his early days, appearing for the first time in one of the Henry Fool films, the always watchable Martin Donovan. Here he plays a priest, which is kind of a step down in religious terms, I guess, after playing Jesus opposite Thomas Jay Ryan’s performance as the devil in Hartley’s amazing millennial movie The Book Of Life.

So this film is Ned’s story and it starts off with the revelation that he’s “found God” and so, being an unshakingly religious person, he decides to seek out the man responsible for the incarceration of his mother... his father Henry Fool... and kill him. Yeah... I guess that’s the problem with religious types, isn’t it?

Of course, this then becomes a little bit like a road movie as Ned follows the clues given to him by various old characters (and actors) from the previous movies in the trilogy, such as his mother Fay and his Uncle Simon. He’s also simultaneously aided and abetted by a character called Susan Weber, played by an actress called Aubrey Plaza, who is new to the Hal Hartley universe and seems pretty suited as a typical Hartley character... reeling off long and overtly complicated passages of his brilliant dialogue and still managing to make it all sound just about acceptable and highly comical, just the way it’s written. Actually, this character has a surprise twist revelation which, and this is my one slight criticism of this film, I feel Hartley reveals too early on in the storyline. I’m obviously not going to spoil this and tell you what it is here but what I will say is that, fans of the character Henry Fool will get a little surprise about a story element from his past turning up to haunt him... it’s a really nice touch and explores the kinds of problematic issues which are less talked about in mainstream cinema... if one can exactly call Hartley a representative of mainstream cinema these days. Though goodness knows he should be... I’ve never understood why this guy isn’t a more lionised and celebrated writer/director in his own country. The man is such a vital artist.

The film itself is typical Hartley, with crisp, witty images and the kind of strong, clean compositions you would expect from this man’s work. Beautiful, even colours create their own blocks and shapes and the director and cinematographer tend to section parts of the images off using these various shapes so that everybody gets their own little section of the screen to cleanly fit into. There’s an absolutely amazing and extreme, almost audacious culmination of this visual style at one point where the amazing Martin Donovan is sitting in the foreground of a shot in sharp focus next to a ladder. As his daughter is talking to him in the background, she moves to fill a square formed by the rungs and sides of the ladder as she does so, also in deep focus. Wow. Visual orgasm or what?

Another example is where Ned Rifle is sitting on a bed on the right of screen and Weber is lying at the other end talking to him, the shot split in half by a lampshade dividing them visually in the centre of the frame. This is great stuff and also, of course, can be seen as a visual metaphor for the divide between the lives of the two characters. The dialogue is less clever here but certainly tugs the heart somewhat as Ned says, “I have to...”. Weber finishes the sentence for him, “Pray?” “Yeah.” says Ned. Weber continues, “You have to tell me about that one day.” “What’s to tell?” asks Ned. Weber concludes the scene by responding, “How it feels to have someone listening.” The almost split screen created by the lampshade is a nice touch to augment that dialogue and it’s little moments like this which allow me to conclude, with this movie, that Hal Hartley is still a cinematic genius or, to put it another way... yeah, he’s still “got it”.

Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle is available on iTunes and you can watch, stream and grab the DVD from the director’s website www.halhartley.com If you’ve never seen a Hal Hartley film before then this may not be the absolute best one to jump on with, being as it’s technically a sequel to two of his other movies... but you can check out a load of his other films at the website and others are available from the usual channels. If you are already a fan of Hartley you’ll definitely want to pick up a copy of Ned Rifle in whatever format is your poison... if you’ve never seen a Hal Hartley movie before but are a fan of cinema in general... well, just pick any one and get to it. I’m sure you’ll soon want to watch them all.