Riefenstahl could be a Bond villain and people would say, isn’t she a little much?
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Let’s not implicate any corvids in that whole deal, not even Huginn and Muninn!!
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I like some of Coppola’s works but he’s always come off as a guy who had a ton of smoke blown up his ass at too young of an age fueling a massive ego who checked out to pursue a life of smoking weed and stewing in a vineyard making overpriced mediocre wine. Interested to see how much of that comes through in Megalolpolis.
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A lot!
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Thanks for the review of Undefeated! Definitely helps me to know there’s not a huge number of these scenes (as is sort of implied by the marketing copy)
Also, I kind of want to see this movie everyone kind of hates or really hates or kind of likes, but not enough to pay for it. but something tells me watching it at home I’d just stop. hmm. it sounds super rayndian to me.
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if you’re gonna do it, do it in the theater, but i would say it’s far from essential
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There’s absolutely no chance I would’ve finished it if I’d started it at home ha. I would’ve walked out of the theater if I hadn’t been someone else’s ride
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The Substance is absolutely worth seeing in the cinema for anyone who can. Sitting in the middle of a crowd of people, oscilating wildly between groans of disgust to laughing out loud, it is quite an experience. Explicitly horny, implicitly feminist, taking a swing at beauty standards and capitalism.
If you are squeemish at anything gory or gross, give it a hard pass.
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There’s a new version of The Count of Monte-Cristo in theaters. I saw it while staying in Marseille for a few days—didn’t think I would have any other opportunity to see this story in the city where it begins. Before going to the movie I looked up a map and realized I’d been to several places in the first chapters of the book—very cool! But I regret to report there is almost none of the city in the film, even less of Paris, and none of Rome nor anyplace else. Just one of several ways in which the adaptation tries to extricate the story from the particular time, place, and social/class context in which it’s set.
The movie is set in roughly six locations: the count’s house in Auteuil (outside Paris), Fernand’s wealthy family(???)'s estate outside Marseille, Fernand’s estate outside Paris, the cave on Montecristo, the inside of Villefort’s office, and 2 square meters on the pier in Marseille. I can recall the images I imagined of not just the inside of apartments, but the streets, the catacombs, the Colosseum! etc. where particular scenes in the novel take place, and I’m of course not disappointed the movie couldn’t read my mind, but more that it didn’t even make the attempt. Reconstructing all these places to period accuracy with CGI would have been difficult, or ugly, or both, that’s reason enough to have avoided it most of the time, but there could have been a little more scene-setting. So much of the movie is in closeup that it hardly matters where any of the action takes place, and when you can see the location it’s in the woods like 40% of the time. When Dantès reaches Montecristo—which would have been easier to film had they adhered to the cave in the book—it’s this silly and very conspicuous stairway leading to a very conspicuous Knights Templar statue which opens a mechanical door to an Indiana Jones cave (set to incredibly syrupy music). I guess noticing the absence or alteration of these places made me understand their importance. I miss Carnival :(
Broadly speaking, there are two common variations of the book-to-screen adaptation:
- targets theme and/or character, and develops them in its own direction i.e. differently from the book
- recounts as much of the plot as possible
Both abridge or otherwise alter the story such as it exists in the form of a novel; you can’t include everything especially when it’s something this dense in detail. It’s interesting to consider no one has really done a proper screen adaptation because the novel is not formally unusual, it’s a very straightforward story, but turning it into a less-than-three-hour film means it has to be changed. In any case this new version of Monte-Cristo appears at times to be the first kind of adaptation, but turns out to be—and demonstrates the various failures of—the second.
Dantès glares gloomily at his masks and his mirrors while practicing the lines he later speaks to his old enemies. Scenes of Haydée and André(a)—who is now the count’s protégé—meeting the count’s targets are doubled and intercut with scenes of their rehearsal. The problem is these are mostly fodder for montage, the motif isn’t really interrogated. It’s just another step along the path toward REVENGE. I like that this adaptation shows Dantès assuming his aliases—there’s an extended scene where Pierre Niney affects an English accent while speaking French which is fun—but again it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just cute. They decided it looked cool when showing Dantès’s fractured reflection in all the mirrors at his dressing table and cut every half second to a different angle so none of the images can even really speak for themselves.
The abbé Faria is of course present, and he teaches Dantès everything he knows and motivates him to escape from prison as usual, but he doesn’t actually say anything specific. It’s just “look sonny boy, philosophy and math are weapons too! ;)” And that’s the movie’s problem in microcosm: it tells the outline of the story while skipping what is meaningful about it. Dantès risks losing himself to his thirst for vengeance, yes, and in the novel you see that there is a himself to lose when he acts with love and tenderness toward Morrel and his family. In the movie he is basically a ghost when he comes back from prison. It’s just thin, doesn’t make me want to root for him or anyone else.
misc. note: I realized when visiting Marseille that the Château d’If is extremely near the shore of the city, and so one change I didn’t really mind was after escaping prison Dantès swims back to the mainland to look for Mercédès (in the woods where she and everyone else live).
misc. note 2: Eugénie Danglars is not a very substantial character in the book, and is less of one in this movie. Shout-out to the anime adaptation for developing her into an interesting character.
After all that complaining I’m almost surprised to say I had an OK time watching it. But I’m never going to watch it again.
…
UNLIKE Megalopolis, oh my god.
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I saw megalopolis and I liked it. My co-worker and I have been joking about it ever since we heard about the scene where someone in the theater talks to Adam Driver. I even made wii box art for it.
To me, the aesthetic of the movie felt like a mix of the Batman quadrilogy from the 90s, the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer, and various Shakespeare live plays I’ve seen. (setting, editing, performance)
I loved all the Rome equivalents at the start, but I did feel like the movie went on a bit too long.
edit: oh yeah the costumes were great, love everyone wearing cloaks all the time
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Internet video game discourse has granted me the vocabulary to say the new Coppola movie forty years in the making has a Piss Filter
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I’m coming at you with with the wrong answers only:
- Megalopolis
- Alien: Romulus
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
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How’s that new Scarygirl?
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Isn’t there a new Terrifyer? How was it? 
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it was indeed megalopolis. i was the only one in the theater until about halfway through, which is when a very restless guy came and sat in the row in front of me.
i’m sorry to have missed the larger discussion on the movie. i largely feel the way @wickedcestus does. i thought it was a delight. it was everything i thought it would be but nothing i expected. i wouldn’t go into megalopolis looking for good politics, agreeable themes, or anything of the sort, but the decadence and panache of each scene had me stunned. undoubtedly one of the most memorable multiplex experiences of my lifetime.
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after watching and enjoying the substance, i went back and crossed coralie fargeat’s first film, revenge, off of my to-watch list last night.
i liked it, but i’m not sure if i loved it. a lot of what i found so striking about the substance - its total lack of subtlety or grounding in reality, the way it immediately moves into the realm of abstraction - was present in this movie too. it was interesting to see how fargeat built her voice but it also made the choices feel a little less… compelling, somehow? like, her framework is so instantly recognizable and insistent that it felt like she’s applying that framework to different ideas, rather than letting the ideas inform her approach. or rather, that she simplifies the ideas down in order to fit them into her stylistic decisions.
i like the way that makes her movies feel - they’re very visceral, and very cinematic - but it also really makes me hope that she doesn’t ever feel tempted to try for nuance (given the reception to the substance, i think that’s a real risk -_-). at least, not within these techniques. i think her movies work primarily as edgelordy feminine sensorial experiences, but given all the critical ink spilled over the political valences of her movies - the “takedown of sexist beauty standards” and “feminist flip on rape-revenge” advertising loglines - i feel like people aren’t necessarily receiving them that way. i don’t really think she’s trying to make overtly political films.
still, it was worth a watch for the buckets and buckets and buckets of fake blood.
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Every Frame a Painting is back, doing a short run of new things
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I watched Megalopolis this evening, and now I want to talk to everyone about it.
I did not think it was good.
I want to know what people that genuinely praise it saw in it that I did not. When the credits started rolling I was left in disbelief at what I had just witnessed; this was dementia manifest.
It sucks, but perhaps it also is great in a way that we will never see again. I can never recommend this film to anyone; you are better served watching paint dry than enduring this mess. I feel for Copolla. This must be exactly the film he intended to release; it took so long and he spent so much on it that there is no way this is somehow compromised from his vision.
…but that confounds me. How could this be his intention?
My 3/10 review of it is just: “this debunks auteur theory”.
Wow
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agreed on all counts, which is why i loved it.
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