I previously made a post about how Francis Ford Coppola is a massive fucking piece of shit so naturally I was against this movie from the moment it was announced.
With that in mind, I was genuinely worried that the movie would be good, that it would be a commercial and/or critical success... and I'm happy to report that none of my fears came remotely true.
I could not describe the plot of the film because I was completely unable to get invested in whatever the fuck was going on, you couldn't pay me to give a shit about these characters. There's no real story here anyway, it's basically just a series of scenes and none of them are good. The writing is atrocious, the editing is bad, the music is corny and the actors clearly did not give a shit, because why would they? (this movie's only redeeming quality is that it made a bunch of hotshot celebrities look like total idiots)
(spoilers below)
But basically it's a movie about a bunch of ultra-rich assholes who hate each other. Naturally they're all a bunch of boring perverts. The protagonist, Cesar, is an architect who invents a magic building material with which he plans to build a utopia - because, of course, only the rich can save humanity, with hand-wavy bullshit.
Oh by the way Cesar has an affair with a singer who is supposedly a 16 year-old virgin. He's arrested but it's all okay because it turns out she was lying about her age and is actually 23. This adds nothing to the plot and I don't know why it's in the movie but given Francis' history with child abuse I found it very disturbing.
The whole movie is full of misogyny. The only woman with any characterization is Aubrey Plaza, who plays a gold-digging harlot who marries a rich old man just to manipulate him. Her elderly pervert husband (played by Trump-supporter Jon Voight) murders her with a crossbow and we're expected to cheer. At one point Kathryn Hunter says "womanizer is such an awful word - as if the woman had nothing to do with it!". Francis hides behind this disgusting sentiment by having a woman deliver the line.
Oh yeah, noted abuser of women and dog-murderer Shia Lebouf also stars in the film. Coppola explicitly hired canceled actors to rebel against Woke. Shia plays the villain of the film, and would you be surprised to hear that his character is also an effeminate crossdresser? Yup, we're busting out the queer villain trope, baby!
This movie is, if nothing else, a thorough repudiation of auteur theory. This movie proves that Francis is not the genius that pathetic sycophantic film bros think he is. They will forever treat him like a god for "making" Apocalypse Now and The Godfather but in reality it takes a lot of people to make a film, and it's clear to me that the success of those films has less to do with Francis and more to do with his collaborators. It's very telling that The Godfather is often called a Coppola film and not a film by Mario Puzo, who wrote the script and the novel it's based on.
If you really want to know what kind of artist Francis Ford Coppola is, you can't judge his work by a small number of successful films he happened to direct 50 years ago (all of which had co-writers and were adaptations of novels). You have to judge him by the work he has done since, which has been mostly dogshit. And looking at the two movies where he had the most creative control, Twixt and Megalopolis, it should be clear to everyone that the man is a fraud and a hack, wholly undeserving of his status as a legendary filmmaker.
They will forever treat him like a god for "making" Apocalypse Now and The Godfather
Important to note that both of those were based on pre-existing and well acclaimed novels. Francis Ford Coppola is not and has never been a good writer. But when he was younger, he was humble enough to recognize when other people had written good things and copy/ accentuate their writing.
The production of Apocalypse Now was also such a clusterfuck there are several versions, endings, and documentaries made about the making of the movie itself. I think half the hype over it is the fact it was ever released and is a cohesive film
Coppola explicitly hired canceled actors to rebel against Woke
go anti-woke, go broke
tangential thought: it's weird how people who complain about "cancel culture" include both people who get canceled for saying something unpopular, and people who get canceled for sexual/domestic abuse. not that I have much sympathy for people who out themselves as shithead chuds or zionists, but I feel like being a sexual abuser is much worse?
it's weird how people who complain about "cancel culture" include both people who get canceled for saying something unpopular, and people who get canceled for sexual/domestic abuse
I've often thought about this, as well. It seems irresponsible for the media to not make a distinction between people who say dumb shit that gets them backlash, and people who commit literal crimes. It basically implies that what people say or do is irrelevant compared to their follower count or box office draw, which, while true, isn't something that any media outlet would admit or acknowledge.
I've always assumed that the intent behind conflating the two was to deliberately minimize the actual crimes.
I assume that's the case for people running PR for the criminals. Probably also helps with the framing for people shamelessly claiming to be canceled when they haven't experienced any real career consequences and just want to pretend that criticism is persecution.
I went and saw it in theaters because I had to see it for myself
It is dogshit, but so committed to always making the weirdest choice possible at every point that I kind of have to respect it
it gets zero points for being "weird" from me, it wasn't breaking the rules with any clarity of purpose, none of the weirdness was in service of any interesting ideas. Francis is just a boring creepy old man who makes these bizarre choices because he genuinely does not know how to make a movie when left to his own devices
Well yeah, it's bad. If it were doing what you're talking about it would be good, or at least better. But there's different kinds of bad. And I find this, which emerged fully formed from Coppola's dying brain, more interesting than a Marvel movie
I feel exactly the same way, I was literally just about to make the comparison to seeing a Marvel film. I knew it was going to be bad, but I made a point to see it in the theater because I wanted to see the result of this bizarre experiment in the medium for which it was intended, and I was not disappointed. Total mess of a film, but bad in ways that you simply would not see coming out of the Disney/Warner/Universal/Sony big-budget theatrical ecosystem, which gives it some redeeming value as a sort of historical artifact of filmmaking.
I think there's still some value in auteur theory as shorthand for "creative vision" versus everything by committee (i.e. slop).
I'll take a crazy
game over most AAA titles because I know it will have a real vision (cracked as it is).Auteur theory isn't necessarily a mark of quality btw - there are shit artists too.
Yeah, somewhere along the way "auteur" came to mean "talented artist" in the public imagination, which isn't what auteur theory states.
Auteur theory is still bullshit, though.
Well, vindicated in having no desire to see the film. From how it was described to me it was a thinly veiled allegory for how Coppola sees himself as a genius visionary auteur, just transposing it onto architecture instead of movies. And I usually hate any film about making films and the power of film, because it always just ends up being a jack-off fest of film nerds telling each other how great they are. Didn't hear about all the pedo and anti-woke stuff, but even less a reason to watch it.
the vestal virgin scene is when I clocked out of the movie (actually if I'm being honest it was the second time-stop but that's like maybe what, 20-30 minutes in so I was like "no surely it'll recover") and mind you - I technically paid for it because AMC A List - so I was just sitting there in the theater waiting for it to end and then the crossbow came out & I actually said "this fucking movie..." out-loud and got stared at in the theater lmao
solid 4/10 purely on memeable scenes like when Cesar gets merged with his unobtainium or whatever it was called.
the immortal science of rejecting creepy weirdos pays off once againContinuing on with the anti-auteur thought, anyone else have thoughts on Chung Seo-Kyung's movies with Park Chan-Wook? It kinda jumped out to me how his filmography before collaborating with her was doing far, far worse in terms of the depth of the characters, especially women. His main hit from this period (and arguably the main reason he's known outside of Korea) is Oldboy, which while still being a stellar movie, has only 1 woman with any agency who is repeatedly assaulted and is shown almost no sympathy, despite the fact she's the biggest victim of the movie. Even worse, Oh Dae-su attempts to assault her in the first act, and nothing happens! It's just brushed off! Joint Security Area did a lot better before Oldboy, yet I think the movie failed to really present the complex internal world of the investigator, only slightly touching on her backstory and bringing forth the internal conflict in the third act in a much shallower way than you'd see in his later filmography; instead it mostly dwells on the personal and geopolitical conflict of the Korean troops. That's not really a fair criticism, just a missed opportunity. I think when Chung Seo-Kyung starts writing his movies, though, they start to come out a lot better in that department, and they all tend to have these incredibly rich, three-dimensional characters with complex characterization. It works particularly well with Park's style of presenting convoluted plots that can unravel those characters' layers with flashbacks, back-and-forths, and reveals. Seriously, the presentation is the whole reason a movie like Decision to Leave works, there's no better way to present these ridiculously layered characters that Chung Seo-Kyung comes up with.
I argue that as much as these directors have their weaknesses and the fans often overly center on the directors as the auteurs and sole driving force behind the success of great films, it's worth recognizing that when you aren't an egotistical jerkoff like Coppola, a director can grow across their career and build up a team of other skilled creators. There's a lot of other examples, Scorsese with Thelma Schoonmaker, Fincher and Brad Pitt (ok, both varying degrees of horrible), Kurosawa and Hashimoto, etc. So if anything, the issue with Coppola is that it appears he's alienated the people he worked with that were complementing his skills with their best contributions.
