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Episode: The Flop House: Megalopolis, with Roman Mars

Author: Roman Mars
Duration: 01:48:20

Episode Shownotes

Roman Mars and the Flop House team dive into Francis Ford Coppola's intriguing and controversial film, Megalopolis, exploring its chaotic narrative, ambitious ideas, and perplexing execution.Listen to The Flop House wherever you get your podcasts!The Flop House: Megalopolis, with Roman Mars Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen

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Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_06
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you've been listening to our Power Broker breakdown series, you know my co-host, Elliot Kalin. Elliot is an unbelievably productive person who juggles way more projects than I could possibly keep track of.

00:00:18 Speaker_06
But I first got to know Elliot over a decade ago as one of the co-hosts of one of my first favorite podcasts called The Flophouse.

00:00:26 Speaker_06
It's from our friends at Maximum Fun, and it's all about movies, specifically bad movies, box office bombs, critical duds, and movies that should not have ever been made in the first place.

00:00:37 Speaker_06
As fate would have it, there is one movie in 2024 that lands at that exact Venn diagram of the Flophouse and the power broker. And that is Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. It is a difficult movie to summarize, as you will hear.

00:00:52 Speaker_06
But essentially, Adam Driver plays a city planner that's very, very, very loosely based on Robert Moses.

00:01:00 Speaker_03
This time you've gone too far, Catalina. This site is under design authority jurisdiction. And what happens if you've overstepped your mandate? We'll apologize. Apologize? After the building's down? Mayor Cicero will be pissed.

00:01:12 Speaker_01
And it is a bad movie. And you think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?

00:01:21 Speaker_00
Entitles me?

00:01:22 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:01:23 Speaker_00
Entitles me?

00:01:24 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:01:25 Speaker_00
Entitles me?

00:01:26 Speaker_06
Yes. A few weeks back, I went on The Flophouse to talk about Megalopolis, not just as a movie, but as a vision of an urban utopia.

00:01:35 Speaker_03
Is this society, is this way we're living, the only one that's available to us? And when we ask these questions, when there's a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.

00:01:46 Speaker_06
Not that it's a very clear vision, but you know, you'll see. Enjoy.

00:01:54 Speaker_05
On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis.

00:01:57 Speaker_02
I got a feeling this is gonna be a mega love fest.

00:02:02 Speaker_07
That's a good one. Yum, yum. Give me that. Delish.

00:02:28 Speaker_05
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Flophouse. I'm Dan McCoy. And I'm Stuart Wellington.

00:02:34 Speaker_09
I'm Elliot Kalin. And I'm Roman Mars. Wait, what? Hold on a second. What? Oh, my God. How did you get here?

00:02:40 Speaker_10
How did you get here?

00:02:44 Speaker_02
Dan, I told you, you got to have your apartment fumigated.

00:02:46 Speaker_05
You got to get a Roman Mars infestation. Someone much more respectable got in here somehow.

00:02:51 Speaker_06
I got on my lit up moving sidewalk and I landed right here.

00:02:56 Speaker_02
Wow, in the city of the future, a.k.a.

00:02:58 Speaker_05
the flop house. Yeah, well, we you know, this is a special movie, a very special movie. So we have a very special guest. Elliot, why don't you talk a little bit about Roman being on the show?

00:03:10 Speaker_05
Because you you have been doing some work with you've been moonlighting. You've been cheating on us with another podcast.

00:03:16 Speaker_02
That's right. It's been so exciting to be discovering new things with another host, discovering new things about myself, showing the things about me that you guys have gotten bored with.

00:03:25 Speaker_07
It's made you a better co-host of The Flop House, honestly.

00:03:29 Speaker_02
In some ways, yeah, because I'm more excited. I come in and I kiss you guys and I give you flowers and you're like, what? What's this? You haven't done this in years. And I've got a spring in my step and a song in my heart.

00:03:37 Speaker_02
So, Megalopolis is a special movie in that it feels like it is so indebted to the ideas of city building that come from having read The Power Broker and then forgotten most of what was in the book.

00:03:50 Speaker_02
And so what better person have come talk to us than Roman Mars, with whom I have been co-hosting the 99% Invisible Breakdown, The Power Broker, all throughout this year.

00:03:58 Speaker_02
We have been taking on one of the greatest works of nonfiction writing, or I would say writing period in American literature, The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Every month we break down 100 pages of it. We just recorded our penultimate summary episode.

00:04:14 Speaker_02
We actually made our way through most of the book at this point.

00:04:17 Speaker_02
And so the power broker is always on our minds, and this movie, Megalopolis, there's so much about it that is so clearly indebted to a certain idea of Robert Moses, the subject of the power broker, and indebted in a way that is totally weird and doesn't really work and is messed up.

00:04:34 Speaker_02
And so we wanted to bring Roman on to talk about that aspect of it, and also have a little bit of synergistic cross-promotion between these two endeavors.

00:04:47 Speaker_07
I thought because we're talking about a movie that's all about New Rome, we would bring in the best Roman we know.

00:04:52 Speaker_09
Yeah, it was just a name-based pun scenario. An actual Roman, yeah.

00:04:55 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's right. That's right. No, I'm very happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And I don't think...

00:05:01 Speaker_06
I kind of needed a sort of a work excuse to see this movie, because it looked a little bit, I don't know, like something I wouldn't necessarily see on my own. And so it was a good excuse.

00:05:13 Speaker_02
You would make this, as I did, the only movie I've seen in the theater for the past couple months. That's amazing.

00:05:19 Speaker_06
As soon as we decided that I would see it for the show, I was very excited to take it in. But anyway, we'll get to that.

00:05:28 Speaker_08
No, I mean, you know, I...

00:05:30 Speaker_05
I'm on the show all the time. And I had a similar experience where I'm like, well, I mean, maybe it's partly because I'm like, well, we'll probably have to watch that eventually. So I don't need to run out to the theater to do it.

00:05:40 Speaker_05
But then when we all decided to do this together, I'm like, oh, great. I can see it on a big screen.

00:05:45 Speaker_05
I can see all the nutty vision of Francis Ford Coppola, all of the ideas that he's been saving up for decades and put them all in one script, whether they all belong in the same script or not.

00:05:55 Speaker_07
Yeah. What was the last one we did, last flop house in the aisles we did? Last Exorcist, I think.

00:06:01 Speaker_02
The one with Russell Crowe.

00:06:03 Speaker_07
Was Madame Webb since then?

00:06:05 Speaker_02
Oh, Madame Webb was... Oh, no, you know what? That was the theater when we saw it.

00:06:09 Speaker_07
Yeah, yeah.

00:06:11 Speaker_02
That was the theater movie.

00:06:12 Speaker_07
Guys, can we talk about Madame Webb some more?

00:06:15 Speaker_02
I mean, another time, maybe.

00:06:16 Speaker_07
You know, her web connects us all. Kind of like how Megalon connects all these houses. Yeah, yeah, sure.

00:06:24 Speaker_02
The other thing about this movie is that I wanted to see it in the theaters because unlike every other movie we've seen, where there's a reasonable expectation it will be available for home viewing, and like, they were like, gotta see this new Marvel or Star Wars movie or whatever in the theaters.

00:06:35 Speaker_02
I'm like, I don't have to, because I'll be able to see it on my nicely sized DCV at home. This movie, conceivably could disappear. It is a Francis Ford Coppola owned thing. It's amazing to me that it was a national release movie.

00:06:48 Speaker_02
And it's very possible that it may disappear after this. I don't think it will. I think it will be home viewing somewhere, but this is such an indie film in so many ways that it's potentially unavailable at a certain point.

00:07:02 Speaker_02
So we had to see it when we could see it.

00:07:04 Speaker_05
I guess I see what you're saying in the sense that the response to this was so, I mean, you know, there are people who are like, wow, big swing. Love you, Francis.

00:07:13 Speaker_05
But like for the most part, very negative that there could be a part of them that's like, well, I'm taking my ball and going back to my vineyard, you know, but like, he doesn't have a vineyard anymore. He only sold part of it.

00:07:25 Speaker_09
He only sold part of the vineyard.

00:07:27 Speaker_05
But he wants to recoup anything, like it has to go to streaming, it has to be available somewhere.

00:07:32 Speaker_02
So it was distributed theatrically by Lionsgate, but it's more like I can see a world where a large distributor is like, we don't want to handle this. And so he has to scramble to find some way.

00:07:41 Speaker_02
And maybe it's up on, maybe it's Francis Ford Coppola's YouTube channel that he uploads all of Megalopolis to in 10 chapters or something like that.

00:07:48 Speaker_07
Yeah, his TikTok channel, he just splits it all up. Wait a minute, didn't Lionsgate also distribute Borderlands this year? Man, they're having a tough one.

00:07:58 Speaker_02
It's been a great year for Lionsgate. But in a world where even movies that are owned by corporations are not readily available the way that they maybe once were or that we assume they were,

00:08:08 Speaker_02
to have a movie that is literally one guy paid for it himself.

00:08:12 Speaker_02
It is, anyway, that's all a long way of saying, I had to see it in the theater because it was the first time in years that a movie has come out where I'd be like, this might be my only chance to see this movie.

00:08:21 Speaker_02
And of course, maybe it'll be on HBO Max next week, I don't know. But it was like, this would be my only shot.

00:08:26 Speaker_06
Yeah. There was only one theater showing it when I was looking. Wow. Well, it was, there was maybe a couple, but it was like showing at 3 p.m. or something at Emory Bay. Oh, yeah.

00:08:37 Speaker_07
It makes sense with the Bay Area. Tech companies hate this guy.

00:08:40 Speaker_02
No, but that's in the Texas. That's Copa country. That's the Bay Area. You know, his offices were in San Francisco. He lives up over in the Napa area, like.

00:08:47 Speaker_06
And then we ended up seeing it at the Kabuki, my wife and I saw the Kabuki theater in Japantown in San Francisco, which was, it was, we went to dinner ahead of time. Pretty on the nose name for a theater in Japantown.

00:08:58 Speaker_06
But it was, it was, it was a weird experience. That was a weird vibe.

00:09:02 Speaker_05
I want to ask, what does, how does your wife feel about our podcast now?

00:09:09 Speaker_06
There was about midway through the, through the movie where she looked at me and she said, Why is Francis Ford Coppola doing this to us? But it started from the very beginning. We sat down at Empty Theater. It didn't stay empty, but it started empty.

00:09:25 Speaker_06
We were there early, like just, you know, we just got there after dinner. And the place is completely empty. And then this older white woman comes and sits right next to my wife. Like, the theater's empty. There's two of us.

00:09:39 Speaker_02
Your wife is a very friendly person. There's something very welcoming about her. So I get it, yeah.

00:09:43 Speaker_06
I was like, and it already started. It was like, oh, this is, there's a weird vibe here that you would want to sit right next to us in this little pack.

00:09:50 Speaker_06
And then it just kept on getting weird because more and more people sat like glommed on right around us. Maybe they just wanted to sort of like sit mostly in the middle because it's a spectacle and whatever. But it started out weird.

00:10:02 Speaker_06
It just got weirder.

00:10:04 Speaker_05
Yeah, well, speaking of how weird it gets, Stuart, you took notes. We all saw this, as we said, in the theater, because that's the way we could do it.

00:10:14 Speaker_07
I respect you for- I took the notes in the dark of the Alamo.

00:10:17 Speaker_05
Yeah, being able to do that.

00:10:19 Speaker_07
Well, I mean, we're going to see how good these notes are, since I transcribed them onto note cards, and I'm like, does this say? Like, surely it couldn't say that about Claudio.

00:10:30 Speaker_02
This is an intricate puzzle box of a movie. Every link indelibly forged to the next, uh, so that it just like, it's airtight. The thing is airtight.

00:10:39 Speaker_07
So I'm going to need some help here, guys. Um, so Megalopolis movie opens with what? Uh, like, uh, but it like a title card, right? That's Megalopolis, a fable.

00:10:52 Speaker_05
Yeah, and it like, right off the bat is like, hey, modern society is kind of like Rome, if you think about it.

00:10:59 Speaker_02
It's true. I mean, it is a movie that is, it is a movie that one, anytime a filmmaker puts a fable at the end of their title, you go, this movie is not going to make sense. This is, this is a, this is a, that's calling it a fable, really. It's like,

00:11:15 Speaker_02
When we did North a while back, I was thinking about these interviews I've heard with Alan Zweibel, who wrote North, and he just kept saying, it's a fable, like it's a fairy tale. Why do people dislike it?

00:11:26 Speaker_02
It's like, you can't just, you can't bandage over a movie that doesn't make sense by calling it a fable.

00:11:30 Speaker_05
It is the equivalent of being like, I washed my hands of this at the beginning of the movie.

00:11:35 Speaker_02
It's like when a political candidate says something racist And they're like, it was a joke. Come on, everybody. Like, well, people have liked it. You wouldn't say it was a joke. But anyway, that never happens. But you're right, Stuart.

00:11:45 Speaker_02
At the very beginning, they start with their thesis statement. Hey, America's kind of like Rome. Is America going to fall like Rome does?

00:11:51 Speaker_07
And we have title cards that look like they're chiseled into marble. So you're like, oh, that's like classic Roman shit. OK, so. Let's just talk about some of the characters, and then we'll get into the plot. I think that's easy.

00:12:03 Speaker_02
So our hero- Easier than trying to walk us through the actual sequence, which is baffling, yeah.

00:12:10 Speaker_07
Our protagonist is Caesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver. It's impossible to say this name and not smile. I mean, come on.

00:12:18 Speaker_02
Yeah, because you're eating a Catalina Island.

00:12:19 Speaker_07
Uh-huh, and it's a Caesar salad. I love it.

00:12:23 Speaker_02
The ultimate fantasy of eating a Caesar salad on Catalina Island.

00:12:27 Speaker_06
Or with Catalina dressing on it.

00:12:28 Speaker_07
Oh, yeah. Stop it, stop it, guys. Turn the cameras off. It's two types of salads in one.

00:12:37 Speaker_02
They pop aside a sandwich like this, the ultra salad.

00:12:40 Speaker_07
He is the genius head of the design authority of New Rome, whose task is to design things like buildings and plan out the city, right? City planning type stuff.

00:12:53 Speaker_02
He is the master builder of New Rome.

00:12:56 Speaker_07
He is also, the inventor or discoverer of Megalon, a magic super substance.

00:13:04 Speaker_05
Yes. And he also has the ability to stop time. Oh, yes. And I do not object to this film having a magical realist component.

00:13:18 Speaker_05
I don't even particularly object to it not being explained why he can do this because what explanation would be Appropriate would be necessary.

00:13:26 Speaker_05
I mean, it's I would But this is a very large bizarre elements to be added to the film with no appearance like

00:13:37 Speaker_05
I mean, I wouldn't say no apparent, but like, it seems like it should have more thematic heft or something if you're going to put this thing in there. I mean, I might be just too dumb to realize what's going on.

00:13:47 Speaker_02
I think you're right that it's, it does not work on a plot level. I mean, I would say that when you say magical realist, the issue is that there is no realist. aspect to this. It's just all magic.

00:13:57 Speaker_02
And Adam Driver's character is so clearly a stand-in for the artist, and in this case, the filmmaker.

00:14:04 Speaker_02
And I think his ability to stop time is supposed to be the artist's ability to reshape the world around them even more explicitly than him just building buildings and stuff like that. But you're right, he doesn't do anything with it.

00:14:16 Speaker_02
Like he never uses it for anything.

00:14:17 Speaker_06
As a plot device, it is like an anti-Chekhov's gun, like it never pays off in any meaningful way of how the story goes.

00:14:24 Speaker_06
Especially when you're talking about someone who is struggling in a power play, you think, why don't you use some of your time stopping powers?

00:14:38 Speaker_07
If Megalopolis was released as a series of episodes, the nerds in the Megalopolis subreddit would be like, why isn't Caesar using his powers?

00:14:46 Speaker_02
They'd be like, in the last episode, he's going to use his powers to do X, X, and Y. And then when the show doesn't do what they thought it was going to do, they'll be like, the show sucks.

00:14:55 Speaker_07
The, I think also to me, an element of, uh, of this time stop power is like, it plays into the fantasy of a guy who is trying to achieve something amazing, but he is beset by all this other stuff, all this background noise, so many things like distracting him from what he's trying to do and the fantasy of being able to just stop everything and focus on the one thing he wants to work on.

00:15:17 Speaker_07
Does that like, to me, especially for like a filmmaker like Coppola, I'm sure that that's part of it for him.

00:15:22 Speaker_02
Well, it reminds me of the story I've heard about Stanley Kubrick and Jerry Lewis talking, that they were both editing movies at the same facility and both took a break at the same time. And Jerry Lewis was like, well, you can't polish a turd.

00:15:36 Speaker_02
And Kubrick says, you can if you freeze it. And this idea that if you can just stop time, then you can do the work that otherwise would be impossible. You know, if you could just freeze something in place, you know.

00:15:47 Speaker_07
Sorry, I got a leg cramp. I'm dancing around my chair. OK, so that's Caesar Catalina. We know who he is. He's super cool. Now, the mayor of New Rome is in a bit of a pickle.

00:15:57 Speaker_07
That's Mayor Frank Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, who plays a little hammy. I feel like Adam Driver is pretty straight in this one. I mean, I don't know about that.

00:16:10 Speaker_05
I would say he's I mean, he's like Driver is.

00:16:13 Speaker_05
big like you can't not be in this movie I mean like the one I mean there are some performances that aren't big and they suffer for it I think that yeah and the best performances in the movie are the biggest performances yes I feel like well I here's what here's what I'd say there are very hammy performances in

00:16:28 Speaker_05
in this movie that are fun to watch because what else are you gonna do in a movie called Megalopolis with all this stuff in it than chew the scenery?

00:16:35 Speaker_05
And then there's Adam Driver who magically seems to create a grounded and consistent character despite the movie around him being gibberish, like he's amazing.

00:16:45 Speaker_05
And then there's, we'll get to her, but like the female lead is sort of lost in this movie because she is giving a small performance and the movie is not helping her out. Is it Nathalie Emmanuelle?

00:16:53 Speaker_05
Yeah, he's, uh, the daughter is good and other things, but is, is sort of not served by this. Yeah.

00:16:59 Speaker_07
Did you see her in the, that John Woo killer remake where she does the very realistic jump and then latch her legs around a guy's neck and spin around shooting every other dude in the room. It's incredible. It's amazing.

00:17:10 Speaker_05
It's a solid move.

00:17:11 Speaker_07
It's cool. I mean, if you're going to use a move.

00:17:12 Speaker_02
That's why people do it all the time. That's why it's such a common move. Yeah.

00:17:15 Speaker_07
It's a great move, but you can only do it once. Okay.

00:17:17 Speaker_02
Now, Madame Driver is set up. It feels like it's set up at first.

00:17:20 Speaker_02
This is the movie I was expecting, at least, was it is a battle between the mayor and the designer over the future of this portion of the city, and they each have competing goals, and we're going to see the pros and cons of each, and it quickly becomes

00:17:34 Speaker_02
Even though Adam Driver is kind of a Robert Moseley character, it quickly becomes, no, he's a genius and everyone needs to just like SDFU and let him do whatever he wants to do, you know?

00:17:42 Speaker_07
Yeah, and this kind of comes to a head in the first scene where we're also introduced to the mayor's daughter, Julia Cicero, who seems to be a vapid club girl, but it turns out that she's much more than that.

00:17:58 Speaker_07
If anything, because she is able to witness Caesar when he stops time, it stops for her as well, and she can see what's going on.

00:18:09 Speaker_02
witness the stopping of time and it doesn't affect her, which seems to be an indicator, yeah, that she has a hidden, she has the hidden artistic, you know, ability or at least intellectual skill that Caesar has.

00:18:19 Speaker_07
And then the last like big faction, I guess, in this is Crassus, who is the owner of the largest bank. He's a very rich old man played by John Voight, who, guys, I think he knew, I think he knew what he was doing here. He brings a lot of juice.

00:18:34 Speaker_02
Well, as we'll see, he does deliver the best line in the entire movie later towards the end of the film.

00:18:39 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, he's had a lot of practice, like both playing and being ritualed assholes. And doddering. Yeah, it's his thing.

00:18:48 Speaker_02
Now, we should mention also, there's a lot of little side minor characters that pop up around here. They're all played by, for the most part, but like Dustin Hoffman shows up, James Remar shows up, like D.B. Sweeney shows up.

00:18:59 Speaker_02
It's all these well-known faces.

00:19:00 Speaker_07
D.B. Sweeney? Jason Schwartzman has a very good scene later on where he plays drums.

00:19:09 Speaker_02
Yes. Yeah. Like Talia Shire, family member of Francis Ford Coppola shows up like there's a, but it's a, it's one of these where it feels like one of these movies that is overstuffed with people.

00:19:18 Speaker_02
And you have to imagine there is hours and hours of footage. Lawrence Fishburne who is the narrator slash chauffeur.

00:19:26 Speaker_07
Yeah. And we also haven't even touched on the other two characters, other two important characters. We have the son of Crassus, Claudio, played by Shia LaBeouf. And, uh, wow, platinum, uh, journalist extraordinaire.

00:19:44 Speaker_02
She's very, she's very clearly a take on Maria Bartiromo. Maria Bartiroma, the money bunny, because she calls herself the money honey in this, right? It's the other way around.

00:19:53 Speaker_02
Maria Bartiroma, now she's just a straightforward Trump, Trump all the time person. Her whole thing was she was the CNBC kind of like lady reporter.

00:20:01 Speaker_02
And they used to call her, whatever one wow platinum is in this, she's the other one of either the money bunny or the money honey. And I don't remember which one. is which.

00:20:09 Speaker_07
Listeners write in. Okay. Or don't.

00:20:12 Speaker_02
I mean, these are, but these are, I mean, we'll get like much as, uh, uh, is it Jared Leto and Haseguchi who, uh, right. Much as his performance is at the level the movie wants to be at.

00:20:22 Speaker_02
I feel like these two are at the level the movie wants to be at, which is cartoonish, you know?

00:20:26 Speaker_07
Yeah, I mean, it feels very much like Aubrey Plaza is doing a performance of her character, April Ludgate, doing a performance of this character almost. Yeah.

00:20:36 Speaker_07
So we're kind of introduced to this drama and these different personalities at a press conference that is held over a scale model of what the city is supposed to look like, I guess, where they're like walking around on like what, gantries and like.

00:20:50 Speaker_02
Now, Roman, you know urban study stuff. Is this usually how a new city development is unveiled, by everyone walking on a catwalk over it, and it's very dimly lit, and people are arguing with each other in the catwalk?

00:21:02 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's similar to all the ones I've been to, for sure. But the dramatic lighting, all this sort of thing, it just... This is where the beginning of the nonsense, especially the big talk with nothing inside of the big talk starts.

00:21:15 Speaker_02
Apparently Adam Driver had a speech that he was supposed to deliver in this scene and Coppola to loosen him up said, why don't you just go out there and do the to be or not to be soliloquy from Hamlet?

00:21:23 Speaker_02
And he did it and Coppola was like, I like that more, I'll put that in the movie. So that's why Adam Driver just goes out and does To Be or Not To Be.

00:21:28 Speaker_02
And it's not a bad performance of that soliloquy, but the whole time I was reaching to be like, why is he doing this in this moment?

00:21:35 Speaker_02
Because I wasn't yet far enough into the movie to realize there's not really a logical reason for a lot of the things to happen in the movie.

00:21:42 Speaker_07
Um, so we get a little bit of a further backstory. We get, uh, it turns out that Caesar Catalina has a tragic backstory. His wife was, uh, potentially what, like killed by him.

00:21:52 Speaker_07
Is there, that's the belief is that he may or may not have been involved in her death or a car accident that she, she was found.

00:21:59 Speaker_02
She was found, drowned in a car at the bottom of the lake or bottom of the river in a shot that is an explicit call to the Night of the Hunter, to Shelly Winters in the drowned car in Night of the Hunter.

00:22:10 Speaker_02
And so we already know that before he was mayor, Giancarlo Esposito was the DA and he brought Adam Driver up on charges and took him to court, accusing him of that murder. And he was acquitted of that murder.

00:22:21 Speaker_02
And so, yeah, there's bad blood and he's a bad boy. It's bad blood over a bad boy. Now, speaking of bad drivers... Adam Driver, ironically, they said that he drove her to death.

00:22:32 Speaker_05
That is ironic.

00:22:33 Speaker_07
That's ironic. Thanks for explaining irony to me. So, uh, he's a bad boy because he's also kind of secretly dating Wow Platinum. Uh, and they have this scene where they are kind of hooking up in a very messy hotel room or apartment.

00:22:48 Speaker_07
Uh, he kind of spurs her, uh, spurns her affections. There is the lovely line where she is down on her knees and says, Caesar, you're anal as hell. Luckily I'm oral as hell. And I was like hooting and hollering in the theater. Yeah.

00:23:01 Speaker_02
Academy Award winner for the screenplay for Patton, who wrote that line.

00:23:04 Speaker_05
You shot off your pistols into the air.

00:23:09 Speaker_06
Should we set up here one thing? When they are in this press conference talking about the different visions for the city, I think the mayor wants to do this sort of garish, you know, Biff style casino in this space.

00:23:23 Speaker_06
And then Adam Driver's like talking and he quotes Hamlet and stuff, but there's no presentation of what his ideas are really. Or did I just miss them?

00:23:35 Speaker_02
No, it's kind of, I think it's kind of taken for granted on his part. I mean, the movie's part that everyone already kind of has a sense of megalopolis, his, his dream city that he wants to build, but he does not present.

00:23:45 Speaker_02
I think that was probably the speech he was going to give in the original screenplay.

00:23:49 Speaker_05
That's the thing. Like I also, look, casinos are basically never the answer. But the way it's at least presented-.

00:23:57 Speaker_02
Where can I get a cheap steak at 3 in the morning?

00:24:00 Speaker_05
The way it is at least presented here is the mayor is like, hey, you've got all these pie in the sky ideas, but there are people who need things right now and I'm going to give them to them.

00:24:12 Speaker_05
And in the absence of Adam Driver's character having any argument, I'm like, I don't know, it sounds like he's making some sense. Why am I supposed to sympathize immediately with Adam Driver? Because he can stop time? Great.

00:24:26 Speaker_06
But he says something to the effect of, like, let's just give the people what they want. We need to serve the people. And this is the way we serve the people at City's Casino. And then Adam Driver offers, right, no counterargument whatsoever.

00:24:39 Speaker_06
So I was trying to get, like, this is my, this is the beginning of my frustration with this movie.

00:24:44 Speaker_02
Up till now, you were totally on board. I love it, I love it.

00:24:48 Speaker_06
Yeah, you showed up wearing a Caesar Catalina t-shirt. Foam finger and everything. But it's, if you're going to be broad stroke fables, then you have to present ideas. You know what I mean?

00:25:03 Speaker_06
Like if the characters are not going to make sense and they're going to be completely arched and not have natural dialogue, if the sets are all fantastical and stuff, that usually means that you're clearing the way of all this nuance so you can tell

00:25:17 Speaker_06
you know, like a war of ideas of good and evil or whatever. And this is where I begin to like, what is the premise of Megalopolis? You know, like, what is this utopia mean other than the word utopia? What is the casino?

00:25:34 Speaker_06
Like, is it really about serving the people? Is it about corruption? Is it about both? None of these things are clear here. And I'm just like, I'm just at sea with this idea of like, and so much of it is like,

00:25:47 Speaker_06
is that the deflation of this moment of like, oh, it isn't that. Caesar is a Moses-like figure. It's, oh, he is just a genius. Like, he's just great.

00:26:01 Speaker_07
That's the- Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that kind of Elliot pointed out.

00:26:03 Speaker_07
Like, it'd be one thing if the idea was that Caesar is this guy who, he believes that people don't understand what they actually want or need and that he's at odds with the mayor. And there's an actual question as to which one, who's right.

00:26:16 Speaker_07
But the movie is like, nope, Caesar's right.

00:26:19 Speaker_02
listen to the smart guy. I'm interested in that.

00:26:20 Speaker_02
I really think one of the, the way that it makes sense to me is just if I look at it as a metaphor for Francis Ford Coppola, the genius and the mayor is a studio executive and he's saying, make me a superhero movie.

00:26:31 Speaker_02
We got to serve the people and that's what they want. They want a flashy casino. And Francis Ford Coppola is like, no, I want to build them the movies of the future that will create new ways to think and feel.

00:26:41 Speaker_02
And I have this new element, Coppola, I mean, Megalon, like that's the only And I don't know if it's that explicit in his head, or if that was intentional, but that's the way I can read it as a metaphor where it starts to make sense.

00:26:55 Speaker_06
But that's the only way it makes sense.

00:26:59 Speaker_02
But he also seems to think that it makes sense on a political level of like, this is a story about politics and populism versus It's one of those things where it's like, obviously populism is bad. We need a genius who can cut through things.

00:27:11 Speaker_02
And it's like, well, that's fascism. Like the thing you present is like the mob gone unruly. Your only solution is that we all just trust Adam Driver's magic metal, you know?

00:27:22 Speaker_06
But that's the thing, as you're doing the synopsis, the main thing that is to be conveyed about this moment is that The ideas are almost there as if there's some kind of thing to be said or some point, but they don't connect.

00:27:39 Speaker_06
And instead, it just moves on. And it's very, very weird. That's what I was like. I was like, what is it? What does it mean to serve the people at the casino? These ideas, none of them stick, none of them are consistent. And it just keeps rolling on.

00:27:56 Speaker_07
I think Giancarlo Esposito or Mayor Cicero, my mistake, his plan, actually, there is something, he's saying, we need to build a casino because it'll, like, the people want it. At least that's a concrete thing, explanation.

00:28:09 Speaker_07
Like, I can at least understand that.

00:28:10 Speaker_02
I mean, we learn more about what Megalopolis will be like later. You'll get to it, Stuart, the plant buildings and the glowing, moving sidewalks.

00:28:17 Speaker_07
The plant buildings, a home for everyone. with apparently tons of space now, I don't know. I'm like, did half the population die?

00:28:24 Speaker_02
Did everybody get... I mean, you'll see, there's a disaster that opens up quite a bit of extra space for building.

00:28:29 Speaker_05
We're like 15 minutes to this two and a half hour.

00:28:32 Speaker_06
I'm sorry for moving us backward when we should be moving forward. So, this scene happens, you realize he has a relationship with Wow Platinum.

00:28:38 Speaker_02
With Wow Platinum, exactly.

00:28:39 Speaker_06
I kind of enjoy that name. That was one where I was like, I'm into that.

00:28:42 Speaker_02
I mean, everything about Aubrey Plaza's performance and character is on the level of a political editorial cartoon, which is kind of where this movie wants to exist, you know? And she knows how to play these characters, you know?

00:28:53 Speaker_07
Meanwhile, Julia Cicero bluffs her way into the office of Cesar Catalina, and we have a little bit of a verbal sparring between the two of them. She wants to get in on this Cesar Catalina department of this design authority stuff.

00:29:10 Speaker_07
Uh, and he is initially gone.

00:29:12 Speaker_02
Well, she like sent him a, like a letter to insult him, right? And she wants it back cause she doesn't want to embarrass her dad.

00:29:18 Speaker_07
And she also like, but she's also like, I think she's interested in him. She saw him stop time for God's sakes. Um, and he looks like Adam Driver, which is not to everyone's taste, but you know, most people.

00:29:30 Speaker_02
This is where he tells her to go back to the club, which is a moment that, in context, it does not seem as bonkers as it does when it's clicked out. It's a fun reading, is what it is. It's a fun line reading.

00:29:40 Speaker_02
He's trying to make fun of the idea of the cool club.

00:29:43 Speaker_07
This is also where he says, like, why do you deserve to be exposed to the riches of my Emersonian mind or whatever, which is also a very funny line. It's great.

00:29:55 Speaker_05
It's everyone on Twitter.

00:29:57 Speaker_07
Yeah, he then takes her. He then takes her to a scale, a not probably not perfectly to scale cardboard model of the city and has her walk through it with her eyes closed.

00:30:09 Speaker_07
And she pictures the megalopolis that could be, you know, with again, like floating walkways and streets and everything's glowing and looks like it's made out of plants. It's super bio working.

00:30:20 Speaker_02
It looks like every CGI rendering proposal of a skyscraper in New York when they're like, here's what we're gonna do with this space that opened up. And it's always a CGI rendering where everything's super glossy and there's trees all over.

00:30:32 Speaker_07
Yeah, it looks like the cover of a super melodic Tech Death album cover, you know?

00:30:38 Speaker_05
Yes, exactly, yeah. I also hate to slow us down, but in terms of like the look of this film- I hate to slow us down, but in terms of- I'd like to do the Bob and Ray Slow Talkers of America sketch. Great sketch.

00:30:53 Speaker_05
The look of this movie is all over the place, partly I assume because, you know, some of it was filmed years ago and then some of it was filmed more recently and it was all sort of jammed together. And, you know, it's what affects

00:31:08 Speaker_05
I mean, even though this is $120 million of his own money, it wasn't enough, and it's what he could afford in certain scenes.

00:31:16 Speaker_05
But I think that there's some scenes that are genuinely beautiful and visually striking, and some of them look like maybe a C-tier CGI effects company's reel, and some of it looks like

00:31:31 Speaker_05
they got it off of Storyblocks or something, you know, which is, you know, there's some beautiful stuff on there, a former sponsor of ours.

00:31:38 Speaker_02
Storyblocks has a lot of great footage, but it's not what you would expect from a major motion picture.

00:31:42 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's odd to see what seems to be stock footage just sort of interspersed in this thing.

00:31:48 Speaker_02
This is definitely, there's a, so they were making a documentary about them making this movie at the same time that they're making the movie and it hasn't come out yet.

00:31:54 Speaker_02
And I'm so curious to watch it because I have to imagine there were huge swaths of the film that were changed at the last minute because of budget reasons and things like that.

00:32:03 Speaker_07
So the mayor finds out that his daughter's been spending some time with Caesar, and he's not a big fan of this. Right around now, he has a parade, and everybody's like mean to him and don't like him. They're all booing him, yeah.

00:32:17 Speaker_07
I think also this is where a random guy gets recruited off the street to be one of Claudio's henchmen.

00:32:22 Speaker_02
I think that's the same guy- The tuba player in the marching band. Thank you. He gets recruited to go off with Claudio, and I'm like, I guess this is gonna be an important character, but it's not really.

00:32:30 Speaker_02
Like they spent a surprising amount of time with the marching band, wondering where this guy went to, considering we barely ever see any of them ever again.

00:32:37 Speaker_07
Okay. Uh, fast forward a little bit there. It is nighttime. Caesar jumps in his car and goes driving through the rainy streets of new Rome. He is pursued by Claudio and Julia in separate cars. We have like a little rainy street. Chase, I guess.

00:32:54 Speaker_02
And this is where we have one of the, there are a couple moments in this movie that I do think are brilliant and beautiful. And this is where he's going driving through the city and he's seeing the statues of the city.

00:33:02 Speaker_02
These huge kind of Greco Roman type statues are literally sagging out of fatigue and dropping the things they're holding and leaning against buildings.

00:33:10 Speaker_02
And it's like such, I think it's such a, it's a beautiful way of getting across the idea of a society that is exhausted itself. that is losing the energy that made it great once.

00:33:19 Speaker_02
And I'm like, ugh, this is the kind of beautiful, straightforward metaphor that he's not achieving through most of the movie, in my opinion.

00:33:26 Speaker_05
Right. Well, it's a sort of directly expressionist look that I think part of the problem is it doesn't settle on one thing. If it was all sort of poetic in the same way, it would feel better. But there's a lot of disjointed different ways of doing it.

00:33:42 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:33:43 Speaker_06
I had the same feeling when I saw this. This scene was the most where I was like, oh, this is what this kind of fantastical imagery is. This is where it's achieving what I think it's supposed to be achieving the whole time. This is where it hit me.

00:33:56 Speaker_06
And I was like, I can deal with this artifice. I can deal with the fact that this all feels like green screen, but not you know, like purposeful, you know, kind of green screen.

00:34:06 Speaker_06
And it just felt that that was my favorite visual moment in the whole movie was the statues and the sort of dilapidated parts of New Rome. That worked on me totally.

00:34:17 Speaker_07
And it's a bit of a sledgehammer, but I feel like it is very clear what it's trying to say. It's not as messy as some of the other stuff.

00:34:24 Speaker_06
That's where it delivers being a fable, is the thing. That's like, I want it to, yeah. I want to be a fable.

00:34:30 Speaker_07
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you saw those statues, you're like, we have title, finally.

00:34:33 Speaker_05
Um, so, uh... Robin, I have a movie for you called The Fablemans, that you might enjoy more.

00:34:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's a real fable, yeah. Fable-oriented. It's about a little mouse. So that's a fable goes west. I apologize. It's an American tale. Fable goes west.

00:34:49 Speaker_07
Caesar's car stops in front of a mysterious glowing flower stall that appears in the middle of the street. Yeah. Julia sees this and says, that doesn't make sense. And I'm like, it doesn't make sense. You're right.

00:35:03 Speaker_07
And then he takes the flowers he buys and goes up into a dilapidated apartment building. She pursues him. In his mind, he sees that he's walking into in a point like a well-appointed room with attendants and his wife is in the bed.

00:35:17 Speaker_07
But in reality, he's just like sitting on a bed, right? Like there's there's no wife there at all. He's like.

00:35:22 Speaker_02
He's hallucinating that his wife is still alive and is being cared for, and he's visiting her. And Julia seems to see both reality and the hallucination. She sees reality but seems to understand, oh, he thinks his wife is there.

00:35:33 Speaker_07
And Claudio is also spying on this as well, but he doesn't see the hallucination, I don't believe.

00:35:39 Speaker_02
It's also, I never could quite figure out why, I know why Claudio gets mad later. I could never quite figure out why Claudio cares about Caesar right now.

00:35:47 Speaker_07
He has like a burn book of all the people he doesn't like, and Caesar can't leave his written down on that.

00:35:52 Speaker_02
Yeah, maybe that's it. This character doesn't need a motivation. I mean, and Shia LaBeouf, I think he's harnessing his natural unlikeability for this character in a really strong way.

00:36:02 Speaker_05
No, that's true. You don't need a backstory. You're like, Oh, this guy's just, you know, he's just a jerk who doesn't like this guy.

00:36:07 Speaker_07
Yeah. I just assumed that a Caesar Catalina, like, I don't know, uh, accidentally, uh, threw some logs in the fire when they were sitting around the fire and it burned off Shia LaBeouf's eyebrows. So that's why he hates him.

00:36:18 Speaker_07
Cause he has, uh, he has like painted on eyebrows or something.

00:36:22 Speaker_02
Yeah. Just like Superman allegedly. Yeah.

00:36:24 Speaker_07
Uh, okay. So, uh, shortly after this, I guess it's like the next day or something.

00:36:29 Speaker_07
Uh, Caesar takes Julia up in his private elevator to the top of the design authority where he has his like, I don't know, like thinking area, which is a, like a clock on its side and a bunch of ledges and girders that looks kind of like the, to me, it looked like a, like a set for like a play.

00:36:49 Speaker_07
Right. And where they can like gaze down upon all of New Rome and kind of see as everything moves.

00:36:56 Speaker_05
Maybe it's sort of like they're hanging out on top of like a mobile. Yeah. Put over either a baby or you'd have an art gallery on either side of the sort of spectrum of mobiles.

00:37:10 Speaker_07
Um, I think it's, I think around now he kind of explains what he's doing or what he's thinking, but I don't really remember this scene outside of them just hanging out on clocks. Yeah.

00:37:20 Speaker_02
Um, meanwhile, I think there's a, there's, yeah, there's nothing in my notes. There's nothing particular. It just says clocks.

00:37:26 Speaker_07
Yeah. Meanwhile, we get a wedding between Wow Platinum and Crassus, uh, the banker guy. Um, is that, I don't remember his last name. Is it, is that his last name? I think Crassus is his last name.

00:37:41 Speaker_02
John Voigt. Yeah. John Voigt.

00:37:43 Speaker_07
Okay. So this is clearly Wild Platinum is this is a power play for her.

00:37:48 Speaker_02
She wants access to his money.

00:37:49 Speaker_07
Hamilton Crassus the third. Thank you. Hamilton Crassus the third. Thank you. And so we have a big fancy wedding. It has a it's a wedding that has everything. It has gladiators. It has guys riding chariots around on the inside of a coliseum.

00:38:05 Speaker_07
Caesar shows up and a pop star shows up wearing a dress made out of wedding. Yeah.

00:38:10 Speaker_05
Yeah. Honestly, guys, I was just like, oh, they all went to the circus. And I was like, fine with that as an explanation. I'm just like, they're at the circus now.

00:38:21 Speaker_02
I don't know if it's necessarily the wedding, but it's a celebration of their, of their betrothal though, right? I mean, it's either one or the other. Yeah, but that's why they're doing it.

00:38:29 Speaker_07
Yeah. And there's a pop star wearing, I can't remember if this is the same pop star from later, Vesta Sweetwater, who shows up wearing a dress made out of Megalon.

00:38:38 Speaker_02
Yes, this is Vesta Sweetwater.

00:38:41 Speaker_07
This Megalon dress is perfect camouflage. Does not matter for later. There's no moment where you're like, oh, you can use a Megalon if you cover yourself like the predator can't see you or something. That doesn't matter.

00:38:53 Speaker_02
No, it's just a one-off idea that it's a dress made out of Megalon where there's cameras in the back that project what's behind you on the front. So you turn invisible and that's it. It's just an effect.

00:39:04 Speaker_07
There's a ton of Roman stuff. We haven't really even talked about the outfits and stuff. Like everybody has like, vaguely futuristic Roman outfits. You know it's futuristic because like men's suits have slightly different collar cuts.

00:39:17 Speaker_02
Yeah, like sometimes they don't have, it's like a severe suit cut, but they also have little, they have like little laurel wreaths behind their ears, you know, leaves behind their ears.

00:39:25 Speaker_06
So it's like- Kind of epaulets to make them like their shoulders very broad, lots of capes and stuff like that.

00:39:30 Speaker_02
It's the kind of stuff that has been done on stage in productions of Julius Caesar since at least the 1930s. Yes. Where it's like,

00:39:37 Speaker_02
We'll pull out how it's like modern political times by having everyone wear suits, but they still have like Roman haircuts, you know, that kind of thing.

00:39:45 Speaker_05
You know, Roman talked earlier about when the movie started to sort of lose him. I think he meant when he lost himself in the film. He lost himself in the moment.

00:39:57 Speaker_05
No, I want to talk about the inverse where the movie, which up until this point had only baffled and dismayed me, started to get me a little bit.

00:40:07 Speaker_05
And that like during this whole circus sequence, I'm like, oh, like it started to engage me in spite of myself, partly because I was like, Oh, I don't need to care what any of it means.

00:40:18 Speaker_05
Like, at least the movie at this point was throwing a bunch of stuff at me, and I appreciated that. Like, this is one of the sequences maybe, you know, before they started running out of money.

00:40:30 Speaker_05
It felt very, like, full of splendor and ideas, and none of it necessarily hung together in any thematic way that made any sense to me, but I'm like, oh. Okay, movie.

00:40:43 Speaker_06
It's kind of delivering the bread and circuses to placate, you know, people in the audience.

00:40:48 Speaker_05
Yeah, I'm one of the idiot rabble.

00:40:52 Speaker_02
You're like, finally, I can relate to someone in the movie, the people screaming for blood in the stands.

00:40:59 Speaker_06
It is throwing a lot. But it's like, I think the point, which is easy to get into, is the sneering at the at the wealthy and, you know, staring at their excess and stuff like that. And it just, it's totally, I mean, it works, that works.

00:41:13 Speaker_07
And Caesar seems to be doing his best to play along, but he is clearly kind of disgusted by this whole situation. He ends up getting very drunk and getting himself into trouble.

00:41:26 Speaker_07
Meanwhile, scheming little Claudio, who is, I think he's in drag at this point, He sneaks into like the control booth and he puts a, he frames Caesar and Vesta Sweetwater who has been, who is a, like a Taylor Swift style pop star.

00:41:46 Speaker_07
And the idea is that she is supposed to be a, like a young virgin, right?

00:41:51 Speaker_05
Yes, she's both made a big deal out of like I'm going to keep myself a virgin and she's presenting herself as being Younger than she is so this is learn later.

00:42:02 Speaker_06
Yeah, this is like statutory rape it seems, but it's not actually yeah But isn't the premise of all this like that these old men the old rich oligarchy is bidding on her virginity like bidding on Is that happening?

00:42:17 Speaker_02
I believe that's true, yes. They're like betting that she's gonna keep her promise, right? Like they're not auctioning off her virginity, right?

00:42:23 Speaker_06
I thought that's what was happening there. But you guys took notes, I didn't.

00:42:28 Speaker_10
Somehow the economy of this city is balanced on her promise of staying a virgin until marriage, yeah.

00:42:34 Speaker_05
Yeah, I thought they were sort of like bidding to keep her a virgin somehow, but I don't know what the mechanics of that would be.

00:42:41 Speaker_02
I mean, it's ancient Rome stuff, though, because it's like, right? Like the Vestal Virgins, their virginity was one of the things underpinning the spiritual safety of Rome.

00:42:50 Speaker_02
That like, that's part of the issue with trying to compare, do a metaphor where you're like, ancient Rome is like nowadays, is that the basic foundational underpinnings of society are so different compared to ancient Rome.

00:43:02 Speaker_02
Like Rome, yeah, they had a Senate. Yeah, that's true. But also like religion and politics were the same thing.

00:43:07 Speaker_02
And like, it was just taken for granted that if the city was having trouble, you'd make some sacrifices to the gods and hopefully that'll keep things right the way you thought like- In a way, don't we do that these days?

00:43:19 Speaker_06
Well, he writes too, I'm the one who's being naive, yeah. But I did interpret this as way more sinister than maybe it was.

00:43:26 Speaker_07
Yeah, my notes say, fundraiser question mark, pledging for purity question mark.

00:43:32 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think it's like a marathon fundraiser, where you're pledging someone to run a marathon. I think they're pledging for her to just stay a virgin. Got it, got it, got it. And so when they see her on tape,

00:43:43 Speaker_02
supposedly in bed with, uh, with Caesar, uh, Catalina.

00:43:47 Speaker_05
Yeah. They're like, I wasted all that money.

00:43:49 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:43:49 Speaker_02
And everybody of our city is all wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

00:43:53 Speaker_07
Everyone is incensed by this. Like the crowd is, is paying for blood. Her big musical. number though, right? Yeah, after a big musical number. I didn't talk about it, but do you want to talk about it?

00:44:03 Speaker_02
She does this big musical number where there's suddenly like six of her singing all at the same time. And again, doesn't make sense. Doesn't really work thematically. Never explained, but it's a, it's a cool, cool looking scene.

00:44:15 Speaker_02
And I have to say, actually the Vesta stuff is, The last we see of her character is one of my favorite moments in the movie also, but we'll get to that, yeah.

00:44:24 Speaker_07
Please get to it, because I don't have it written down in my notes.

00:44:27 Speaker_02
That's okay. Okay, well, I don't remember what happens here, but like the scandal comes out that this video has been shown to, you know, Shia LaBeouf arranged for this video to be shown on the Jumbotron of her in bed with Adam Driver.

00:44:41 Speaker_02
And then suddenly, like the screen fills with fire, and there are headlines that are like, Vesta reimagines herself and suddenly she is singing like a bad girl song. Now she's reimagined herself as like a sinful bad girl and she's a superstar again.

00:44:54 Speaker_02
And it's so, it feels so much like Francis Ford Coppola's like, who are the scenes into? Taylor Swift? What does she do? Okay, I'll do something. This is my understanding of what that is.

00:45:02 Speaker_02
And it happens so, it's like the movie suddenly turns into an advertisement for something else, for some other movie.

00:45:09 Speaker_07
Yeah. I think that that's a little sequence that happens a little bit later and it's done like totally like classic MTV news style, like explosion bit. And then like scenes of societal collapse. Um, okay.

00:45:19 Speaker_07
Uh, Adam driver, Caesar Catalina gets too drunk, gets beaten up by some guys. Uh, he gets whisked away. The cops arrest him, uh, for statutory rape because of the video.

00:45:31 Speaker_07
Um, but then Julia goes into the archives and finds out actually Vesta Sweetwater is older than she's been telling everybody. So it, She exonerates him, problem almost immediately solved.

00:45:42 Speaker_10
But also- And don't we find out that the video is fake later on too?

00:45:45 Speaker_05
The video is fake too. They like double up the explanations of like why this is fine.

00:45:51 Speaker_02
It feels like the movie is fainting towards, fainting F-E-I-N-T, not fainting like, oh, stars and- Gardner's, you know, the vapors. Yeah. It's taking a feint towards this guy might be a genius, but he's not a good guy.

00:46:03 Speaker_02
But instead the movie is very quickly be like, no, no, no. He's a good guy pretending to be a bad guy. And he says, he tells Julia, you got to pretend to be bad or people lose interest in you or something like that.

00:46:12 Speaker_02
And they're like, not only was she not a minor, he also didn't have sex with her anyway. So it's fine. He's double good. He's nothing to do. He's just, he's a Sterling Saint, you know?

00:46:21 Speaker_07
So around now we have Caesar and Julia meeting on top of his girder watch ledge and they have a conversation and with her help he's able to stop time again. He had kind of lost his powers for a little bit.

00:46:34 Speaker_02
Like Spider-Man, sometimes he loses his powers when he's in a bad mood.

00:46:37 Speaker_07
And then they have a kind of sloppy makeout session. I thought that was pretty great. And then we get and they like decide to work together and we get a montage of them like kind of falling in love and doing some work at the design authority.

00:46:53 Speaker_06
The, which by the way has really boring design. Like I really wanted those jackets to pop a little bit more. I was really bummed about that cause I was like design authority. All right, let's spend some time in the design authority. Nothing, nothing.

00:47:07 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:47:07 Speaker_07
Yeah. Yeah. Mugler would be upset. Um, uh, would be upset.

00:47:11 Speaker_02
He was all about, say what you will about him in his early work. At least he's got a real design eye, you know?

00:47:17 Speaker_07
Yeah. Uh, Claudio, meanwhile, one scheme foiled. He's got more schemes to be had. He starts trumping it up. He sees what's going on and he's like, starts getting the getting the masses all angry. They start backing him.

00:47:31 Speaker_07
Later on, there's a scene where he's giving a stump speech and the stump is literally charred, carved into the shape of a swastika. Is that that right? It's pretty messed up. Okay. I think that movie's pretty subtle.

00:47:43 Speaker_07
I don't know if something like that would happen in this movie. We find out that Julia is pregnant. Uh-oh, there's a baby on the way. Master builders, build a baby. Mayor Cicero doesn't like this idea.

00:47:57 Speaker_07
He doesn't like the idea that they're gonna have a kid. So he basically tries to buy off Caesar. He's like, hey, you can do whatever you want, just don't, Like, leave my daughter out of this. Get out of this.

00:48:10 Speaker_02
Stuart, you're doing a great job of condensing this movie. Did you skip over the part where the mayor has a dream where a cloud with a hand grabs the moon and his wife accurately says that that's an omen? Probably. Yeah, okay. Probably.

00:48:22 Speaker_02
I just want to make sure that we get the full. Oh, I'm sorry. I don't want people to listen to this and be like, this movie doesn't sound that crazy.

00:48:29 Speaker_02
And it's like, oh yeah, what about the scene where the mayor has his dream about a cloud grabbing the moon?

00:48:33 Speaker_05
Yeah, it doesn't really figure it into much, but it looks cool. I don't know when it happens in the movie. So I just want to say the visual that has stuck with me, there's like, they're under the water and there's some like people who are rocks.

00:48:48 Speaker_05
They're like painted as rocks and then they sort of move and you see that they're people. And it is like, just like half a second. But I was like, that's a really gorgeous image right in the middle of this thing that I'm not sure what it's saying.

00:49:02 Speaker_07
Yeah. And there's like tons of stuff in here. Like there's moments where Caesar is like, has like a floating mirror that shows his memories made out of Megalon. Yes. Um, and then.

00:49:14 Speaker_02
Megalon mostly Megalon is like Herbie, the robot from the fantastic four cartoon or like, uh, who's the little alien that hung out with the Flintstones? What was that guy's name? The Great Kazoo.

00:49:24 Speaker_02
The Megalon is just kind of a lump that kind of floats in the air around Caesar's apartment and does stuff sometimes, but he'll just be working and the Megalon will kind of float too close to him and have to push it out of the way because it's getting too close to his face.

00:49:35 Speaker_02
And it's like, it's such a strange, like goofy thing to have. It's like, oh yeah, this is the miracle metal of the future. Anyway, I got a lump of it and it just floats around my apartment.

00:49:43 Speaker_07
It's kind of irritating. And they have like a family dinner at one point where they invite the mayor and his wife and they're like playing cards in this like weird magical Megalon house, right?

00:49:54 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:49:54 Speaker_07
And they're discussing string theory and shit.

00:49:57 Speaker_02
It's like a Megalopolis exhibit. It's like an exhibit of what Megalops would be like or something like that.

00:50:03 Speaker_05
Yeah, does that come after the destruction of the city?

00:50:07 Speaker_02
That's before the destruction of the city, but after we learn that a Soviet satellite is falling to earth and will crash into the city. Why? I forgot about that satellite.

00:50:18 Speaker_02
There's a Soviet satellite that, yeah, they're like, anyway, its orbit has decayed. It's going to hit the city. And they're like, uh-oh. And then they don't do anything about it for a while.

00:50:27 Speaker_07
Man, I'm starting to realize that taking these notes in the dark, it was a lot easier to take notes on Madame Webb.

00:50:33 Speaker_05
A more straightforward film that, you know, follows a screenplay formula that has been entrenched in Hollywood.

00:50:42 Speaker_02
So yeah. By this point, I think we've also, Adam Driver has also kind of shown us his, some of the visual visions of what Megalops will look like. And the buildings all look like plants. And the idea is like the buildings grow as people need them.

00:50:54 Speaker_02
Like there's homes for everybody because the buildings can grow and change with the needs of the people, which is a beautiful idea. Roman, how close are we to that? Yeah, I mean- Has anyone tried that yet, growing buildings?

00:51:08 Speaker_06
I mean, in a way, like Hunter Vosser was like really into like mold and letting things grow because it was like true organic space and the straight line is the godless line and you're gonna want like- Oh, Jeff VanderMeer.

00:51:22 Speaker_05
Of course, he died from the mold in his lungs, I assume.

00:51:25 Speaker_06
Totally.

00:51:26 Speaker_06
So there's a lot of, there have been big lofty ideals about a kind of like organic architecture in it, like in a literal way, like to make it, and then there's the term organic architecture, like Frank Lloyd Wright style, that just means it's reactive to, you know, and changes to people's needs.

00:51:43 Speaker_06
So that's all kind of, those ideas are out there. That is the closest thing this sort of dunderheaded movie gets to an idea. And it's the first time you sort of get to this, yeah, like, what does this utopia mean?

00:52:00 Speaker_06
That it's like organic and reactive and serves people is actually, that's an actual idea. Everything else has just been like glowing.

00:52:10 Speaker_06
walkways and nonsense like where I'm like what is this for like what do you have to have like utopia is like have to have a concept or something and this one like what is what is the new part of the topia like what does it do yeah it really is it's it's it was it's really weird but that's one idea like that'd be great like having uh

00:52:29 Speaker_06
a magical substance that requires like no thought or care or design or whatever, like politics and it just does its thing.

00:52:36 Speaker_07
Creates no waste, requires no energy and it just does it all.

00:52:40 Speaker_06
And this is like a huge problem, like that you're going to use some technology that's going to save us rather than people like coming together and actually coming with solutions and working stuff out is like, it's just a nonsense idea that you're exploring for a couple of hours.

00:52:57 Speaker_07
You say that until Megalon works its magic, yeah.

00:52:59 Speaker_07
Speaking of Megalon working its magic, at this point, Caesar Catalina, probably right on the verge of explaining everything about his utopia, meets with a young 12-year-old fan who actually turns out to be a hired assassin and shoots Caesar in the face.

00:53:14 Speaker_05
Yeah. Okay, so this is after... This is then after the city is destroyed by a satellite falling to Earth, right? Yeah, maybe. This is an amazingly large thing to happen and then not really be addressed that much.

00:53:31 Speaker_05
We get some scenes of catastrophe, like shadows being cast on the wall. The reason I bring it up is just because that card game, I was wondering about, one of the things that strikes me about this movie is,

00:53:45 Speaker_05
As we said, this is a movie that Coppola has been writing for decades and decades. I can only assume that the screenplay grew and grew and grew. And at certain points, it feels like they just shot every other 20 pages of it.

00:54:01 Speaker_05
Because people's relationships to each other will change wildly between scenes without explanation. Like, Juan Carlos Esposito was just saying, you know, trying to pay off Adam Driver to get away from his daughter.

00:54:15 Speaker_05
And then like in the next scene, they're all sort of like, you know, they don't love each other, but they're having a genial card game together. And I'm like, okay, well, what happened here?

00:54:23 Speaker_05
And the only thing I can think of is like, oh, the city was destroyed, so they all came together. But it's not said or anything.

00:54:30 Speaker_02
I'm looking at my, because I wasn't sure if I was going to have to do the summary today or not. So I took some notes also. Please, yeah. But you're right, Dan, because like Dustin Hoffman's character, who's an assistant to the mayor, he dies off camera.

00:54:41 Speaker_02
We hear about, oh yeah, he's dead now.

00:54:42 Speaker_05
We get one scene of like a thing toppling and falling on him, and I'm like, that had to have been a whole sequence.

00:54:48 Speaker_02
And Shia LaBeouf runs for his position of alderman, and his guy, and then it's after that that the mayor goes to Caesar and says, if you leave my daughter, I'll give you the evidence that I lied when I was prosecuting you, and you'll be able to destroy me, and I'll put my support behind your projects.

00:55:06 Speaker_02
And at the same time, Wow Platinum approaches Kelly, and it's like, hey, look, you come back, be with me again, and you can have all of Crassus's money. Everyone wants to be in the Caesar Catalina business. And he's like, no, no, no.

00:55:17 Speaker_02
And that's when- Real Catalina caper. And she seems to hypnotize Crassus into giving her control over the bank. And then Caesar is shot in the head by this child who, he should have been suspicious when a kid asked him to sign his book for him.

00:55:33 Speaker_02
Like, there's no way this kid is reading Caesar Catalina's book.

00:55:35 Speaker_07
I don't know, man. Everybody loves Caesar Catalina. I think that's pretty clear. Um, okay.

00:55:39 Speaker_02
But then how do they, how do they heal him?

00:55:42 Speaker_07
So he has this moment at this point, I don't know about you guys. I'm like, wow, they killed him. That's crazy. Uh, and he has this like weird death dream, but then they end up healing him by fusing his head with some Megalon.

00:55:52 Speaker_02
They just stick Megalon on his head on the open skull that's there. And this truly is an amazing building material.

00:55:59 Speaker_07
So we, uh, at this point, Caesar then goes, oh,

00:56:03 Speaker_02
Having the Megalon in his face gives him lots of like new powers and things like that.

00:56:06 Speaker_07
Like the Marvel man. Yeah, he shows up at Krasus, Hamilton Krasus' apartment. Claudio tries to harass him.

00:56:15 Speaker_07
Wow Platinum tries to make a move on him, but he reveals his Megalon, half human, half Megalon face and it causes multiple images and everybody is wowed by the majesty of his face.

00:56:28 Speaker_02
Especially Wow herself. Exactly. He's going there because she's frozen all of his bank accounts using her power at the bank in order to force him to do something. Force his hand, yeah.

00:56:37 Speaker_02
And then, yeah, she offers herself again, and Krasus kind of interrupts it, but now who does Wow set her sights on? If she can't control Caesar, Catalina.

00:56:46 Speaker_07
Of course, she's going to she's going to pick, I guess, the next best thing. And that's Claudio Carassus. That's right. And so she we have a little sex scene. You're probably into this, right, Dan?

00:56:55 Speaker_07
It was like a like a like a Game of Thrones style sex position scene.

00:57:00 Speaker_02
It was kind of like a Game of Thrones style sex scene where it's all about power. And you feel like, oh, is this is this what they think sex is like? Or she's like, stick your face in my butt. OK, now go over there. Lie down there.

00:57:11 Speaker_05
I mean, it can be like that.

00:57:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, you're doing it right.

00:57:13 Speaker_05
That's true.

00:57:14 Speaker_08
Yeah.

00:57:15 Speaker_05
By the way, I just really love being on the Zoom call and watching Roman's face as he relives the plot. Like, he's like, oh yeah, that did, that is a thing. Like, what?

00:57:27 Speaker_06
I have been going through that where I was just like, the satellite, yeah. Oh my God, yeah. Yeah, I'd forgotten about the satellite. That really is, oh my God, this is a bunch of nonsense.

00:57:35 Speaker_06
Like I had streamlined it into like a much tighter movie in my memory than all this, I'm just like. Yeah, you missed all the good parts, you forgot all the good parts. Long, winding road.

00:57:46 Speaker_02
Here's my note for that satellite, I wrote, the mayor learns the Soviet satellite may crash into the city, dash, and then it does, question mark. So it did happen, and I think the upshot of that is the idea that it now has opened up even more land

00:57:58 Speaker_02
for building on. In real life, the real Robert Moses had to evict people. He didn't have Soviet satellites doing the job for him.

00:58:03 Speaker_06
This is just a stew of really truly problematic and nasty great man, like tropes, that like he's canceled for like 20 seconds, but he's such a genius.

00:58:16 Speaker_06
Like obviously all that stuff that they say about him is fake, you know, and should be forgiven in the first place because he's so great, or is all made up and a bunch of these Me Too made up nonsenses.

00:58:27 Speaker_06
is coming after him and trying to take him down. All the people are conspiring in these like horrible ways and there's no notion that Adam Driver is just... You know what I mean?

00:58:39 Speaker_06
And also the idea of like, of what comes, like how necessary destruction is to build something. And then there's this God particle that fixes everything so that no one has to have like actually hard thought and compromise.

00:58:53 Speaker_06
It's just, it's just, it's just, it's just bad stuff. I mean, this is, this is real, like, like 13, 14 year old. Like, I can't believe an old man wrote this. You know what I mean? Like, this is like, this is what,

00:59:05 Speaker_07
It feels like something made by somebody very young or very old.

00:59:08 Speaker_02
I know, I feel like I believe in either a very young man or a very old man.

00:59:12 Speaker_05
Yeah, I guess that's right. Or a very stoned man, which apparently he was.

00:59:15 Speaker_02
Or a Gary old man.

00:59:17 Speaker_07
A Gary old man?

00:59:19 Speaker_02
It feels a lot like somebody like... Gary old banana, Gary old banana, Gary old banana.

00:59:25 Speaker_05
Gary old bananas? It feels like somebody was like, I know what you're saying.

00:59:29 Speaker_07
Somebody was like, I want to like, Coppola's like, I want to make a movie about city planning. And then he got high and read like one, uh, Yodorovsky meta barons book. And he's like, I'm going to do it like this.

00:59:41 Speaker_02
Yeah, it kind of feels, yeah, he's like, should I read The Power Broker or The Ink Hall? I'll read them both, I'll just alternate pages. Exactly, okay.

00:59:50 Speaker_02
So wait, I wanted to ask you guys, so this next part, so Stuart, summarize it, and then I've got a question for everybody, okay?

00:59:54 Speaker_07
Because I just want to let you know I have a question about- Well, I was just talking about Wow Platinum and Claudio scheming to take over the bank. They do it over sex, and then Crassus collapses- A sex meeting.

01:00:05 Speaker_02
Yeah. I'd like two eggs over sex, please.

01:00:09 Speaker_07
Yeah. Yeah, my my Google calendar says sex meeting. OK, so. Yeah. So then Crassus collapses. He seems to have what, like a stroke or.

01:00:21 Speaker_02
He has a heart attack or a stroke. Yeah.

01:00:23 Speaker_07
And he collapses, leaving Wow and Claudio in charge.

01:00:27 Speaker_02
Now, then it seems like spring comes, you see flowers blooming, and Catalina and Julia get married in their car. Lawrence Fishburne sits in the driver's seat and they sit in the back, not Adam driver's seat, but the driver's seat in the car.

01:00:39 Speaker_02
And marries them. And then there is a montage of December holidays in this kind of Abel Gantz's Napoleon triple screen thing, and suddenly it's winter again. And I was like, did I hallucinate that it was spring and now it's winter again?

01:00:53 Speaker_02
I don't know what, and it can't be the next year because the baby is just, is the same age as when they got married. But this, let's explain. Did you guys have any sense of why there's suddenly a montage of winter holidays?

01:01:05 Speaker_05
Well, I would have to remember.

01:01:06 Speaker_07
I also have to ask Elliot, my notes, I just wrote down Elvis. What does that mean?

01:01:12 Speaker_02
Yes. So an Elvis impersonator is out on the street singing America the beautiful. I think as part of Claudio's like, Claudio's like, like, um, like pandering to the masses. I'm not sure.

01:01:22 Speaker_02
Maybe it's a busker and it's, and it's a statement about the, the plastic artificiality of American value. Yeah, that happens. I don't, I'm not quite sure.

01:01:30 Speaker_05
I love this new bit. Stuart deciphers his notes, by the way.

01:01:33 Speaker_07
Jesus. Christ, what did I write? Yeah, I don't know what's going on with that. I mean, I did write winter holiday montage in my notes. Yeah, that happens.

01:01:43 Speaker_02
And it goes on for a while. It goes on for a while that we're watching people opening presents, people spinning dreidels, people celebrating Ramadan.

01:01:51 Speaker_07
You know, it's like, yeah, everybody's represented. I love it.

01:01:54 Speaker_02
Well, everybody, I mean, three religions.

01:01:56 Speaker_07
Now, the city, the city is inflamed with riots. The masses are rioting against the mayor, inflamed by Claudio, of course. The mayor's family has to escape through a secret train car tunnel.

01:02:09 Speaker_02
Um, yeah, they go through the antique subway car tunnels that have been closed off for three years in the city.

01:02:14 Speaker_02
You know, there's that I looked like I think it was the subway station that is beneath city hall that has been closed ever since September 11th. I mean, it's not been in use for a long time, but it was closed to tours and things after September 11th.

01:02:25 Speaker_02
I think that it looked like that place. I wonder if they shot it there. It's possible.

01:02:29 Speaker_07
This is around when Wow Platinum and Claudio are celebrating their good fortune. They have successfully taken out their rivals. Nothing bad could ever happen to them. And they wander into the bedroom of Hamilton Crassus III.

01:02:42 Speaker_02
You know the old saying, pride goeth before more success.

01:02:45 Speaker_07
The old, the old, the old aphorism. So they go into Hamilton Crassus's bedroom and something, it seems like he's pitching a little tent.

01:02:54 Speaker_02
This is, so this is, so I wanna get Roman's take on this. This is by far the best, I saw this movie in a theater, it was just me and four other people, not strangers, not people I knew. They were watching the movie stone-faced, very serious.

01:03:07 Speaker_02
And when this line came out, I laughed so loud and nobody else in the audience reacted and I did not regret it at all.

01:03:14 Speaker_07
And so, does anyone want to say what- Well, Elliot had been like, Jon Voight has the best line of the movie. And the whole time, I'm like, did I miss it? Was it one of those? Like, was it just a line that is silly because Elliot's smarter than me?

01:03:26 Speaker_06
Well, I haven't told us all about that, but let's get Roman's- Well, I don't- I have to be refreshed to the exact line. I remember the moment.

01:03:34 Speaker_02
It's roughly- I'm not quoting a direct- I mean, I'm trying to quote- I can quote a direct. Oh yeah, so this you wrote down in your notes.

01:03:39 Speaker_07
So turning to his son and wife, he says, what do you think of this boner I got?

01:03:48 Speaker_05
But then he reveals what the boner is.

01:03:50 Speaker_07
It's a crossbow.

01:03:52 Speaker_02
It's so funny. He whips the blanket over and he's got a crossbow. And it's like, it's so, this is, if the whole movie had been at this level, I would have been like, yes, a thousand percent, you know?

01:04:03 Speaker_02
But the last thing I expected was him to say, hey, what do you think of this boner I got? Seemingly totally sincere. You don't know it's a trap at that moment. And I was like, this movie, I can't, I can't.

01:04:13 Speaker_07
And they're so shocked, he shoots Wow and kills her, and then he shoots Claudio and hits him in the ass, and Claudio manages to escape, only to eventually be beaten up by his own mob.

01:04:25 Speaker_05
Well, we'll get back to, of course, the most important thing, Roman's reaction again in a moment.

01:04:30 Speaker_02
To Jon Voight's boner, yeah. Or alleged boner.

01:04:34 Speaker_05
The interesting thing to me is this is a world where guns exist, because we saw Adam Driver get shot in the head. So he made a real choice, I'm going to kill these people with a crossbow so I can do this boner bit.

01:04:46 Speaker_02
You think a gun wouldn't have been able to make enough of a tent in the seats?

01:04:51 Speaker_05
I mean, he's a prideful man. No, that's true. So I think there is a theatricality of it, though.

01:04:58 Speaker_02
I think it's the theatricality. I think my guess is he needed a way for Claudio to survive and escape. And an arrow to the butt is a classic slapstick way to get somebody to leave a room.

01:05:08 Speaker_02
But also, as we're recording this before our Caddyshack 2 Flop TV episode, a movie which also includes someone getting hit in the butt with an arrow.

01:05:17 Speaker_07
Somebody find out on Saturday.

01:05:20 Speaker_02
I mean, find out on Saturday before this episode comes out. But there's also a, I assume, I wonder if there's something he's playing off of, some either ancient thing or some story he knows that involves an arrow.

01:05:32 Speaker_02
that he's referencing, since there's so many references in this movie to other things that are floating around in Francis Ford Coppola's head.

01:05:39 Speaker_05
Yeah, that's the problem with this movie for me. Well, one of the many problems, but I'm apparently an atypical man in that I think of the Roman Empire almost never, so I don't have the background.

01:05:52 Speaker_05
in history that I would need to understand all of the... What about their like turtle formation where they lock all their shields together?

01:05:58 Speaker_07
You don't ever think about that? I'm thinking about it now. It's pretty cool. They look like a turtle, but with spears.

01:06:05 Speaker_02
Dan, how often do you think about the Civil War? Because that's the other thing I feel like American men think about a lot.

01:06:10 Speaker_05
Rarely. I think about... Do you think about goolies?

01:06:14 Speaker_02
Is that a thing you think about? Oh, goolies goes to college. So that's your Roman Empire.

01:06:19 Speaker_05
Movies about small monsters, ghoulies and gremlins and munchies. Yeah, Frankie Frico, available on VOD right now.

01:06:28 Speaker_02
Some stealth marketing for Frankie Frico right there. Featuring the voices of the blockbusters.

01:06:32 Speaker_06
It's pretty open. To answer your question, Elliot, when this happened in the movie theater, it was when Audrey Plaza got shot, actually, where I was like, I was like, oh, I was like, all right, you know, like something's happening.

01:06:45 Speaker_06
Like I was kind of delighted, but it was like, it was the real classic. Just this was so different and shocking.

01:06:52 Speaker_06
I mean, the, you know, when Caesar got shot in the face, that was a little shocking because it had a real pop sound, like, like a Godfather movie pop. You know, like a real, like, I was like, oh, I remember that guy.

01:07:04 Speaker_06
I like that guy's movies, you know?

01:07:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, like the guy who directed maybe the greatest person being shot in the head scene in any movie ever made, you know, that whole sequence.

01:07:12 Speaker_02
Totally, but the- And then the second greatest guy being shot in the head moment when Mo Green gets killed. At the end of the same movie.

01:07:19 Speaker_06
He's really good at shooting people in faces. I mean, he was, in 1972. It's kind of wasted in this movie, to tell you the truth. But that was a moment of delight, just because of the shocking violence.

01:07:31 Speaker_06
I had no idea that that was what was about to happen. So it was kind of like, all right, this thing's alive.

01:07:36 Speaker_02
But him talking about his boner just left you cold.

01:07:38 Speaker_06
Well, no, I mean, I think the boner part was like, it really happens kind of all at once. There's not a lot of time in between, so I didn't have processing time. Yeah, I was taking a big slurp of my soda and just spit it all over everyone.

01:07:51 Speaker_05
Speaking of fearing missing this, I knew that there was this line, you know, all I'd heard about was this line about how John Foy had this great line. And the movie is very long. Yeah.

01:08:01 Speaker_02
And I, it's not, well, it's not that long, but it feels long. It is. It's like about two hours, a little less than two 20, you know?

01:08:07 Speaker_05
Yeah. Okay. It's, it's, it's longer than, to my mind, the ideal length of a movie, which is less than two hours. It's longer than the first movies. It's longer. The important thing is it's longer than my bladder can stand.

01:08:22 Speaker_05
So all through this movie, I was like, I got to wait out for this John Voight line. And then I finally, like, I'm in physical pain. Like I have to, I have to leave the theater. Were you pinching it with your... It's not, no.

01:08:36 Speaker_02
You were literally pinching your urethra shut with your fingers?

01:08:38 Speaker_05
Yeah, I was pinching my urethra shut. Like you're trying to control a fire hose? I had to pee so badly. I was hurting. Roman is really rethinking dropping this into the 99 CFE. I thought to myself, surely, surely it will not happen at this exact moment.

01:08:55 Speaker_05
If I run to the restroom, I will not miss this iconic line. And of course, it is exactly when this happens.

01:09:01 Speaker_09
Oh no.

01:09:01 Speaker_05
And then- And you came back and the audience was rolling on the floor laughing.

01:09:04 Speaker_02
Well, I mean, fortunately- They were cheering, firing guns into the air, singing all that. Yeah.

01:09:09 Speaker_05
So I looked up the line and fortunately, you know, someone had put most of the scene on TikTok, not the boner line. Like, Well then in the description it was like like dude right before this the guy said this line about

01:09:30 Speaker_05
Because apparently they whipped out their phone and they're like, oh man, I missed the key point, but something else crazy has got to happen with this setup.

01:09:38 Speaker_02
Because the other thing is, it's not a funny line in and of itself. What is funny is that it is appearing in this otherwise serious-minded allegorical movie set by Jon Voight in a scene What you have to assume is the climax of the film.

01:09:52 Speaker_02
It is such a, it's such a, it's, there's something about how it is the least eloquent thing I think a character has said in any movie I've seen in years.

01:10:03 Speaker_05
Yeah.

01:10:03 Speaker_07
Yeah. What a performance. Okay. So, so as we said, Crastus gets his revenge. The riots are running wild around New Rome. Caesar appears as like a hologram or something.

01:10:18 Speaker_07
And he gives a speech, uh, talking about like time and things like that and calms everybody down and like talk and like shows visions of his utopia. Is that, is that correct? Is that what happens?

01:10:31 Speaker_02
This is the, this scene. So this is the classic, the man of genius comes out and he gives a speech that enthralls the crowd and calms their passions and wins them decide. And the speech he gives is so, It's just such vaporware.

01:10:43 Speaker_02
It's such empty, conceptual nonsense. And it does not speak to any of the actual needs that these people have shown up to this point and why they're reacting.

01:10:53 Speaker_02
It's like, say what you will about Donald Trump, the terrible, terrible person, just an evil, bad man. But when he speaks, he is directly reacting to the needs he feels in the audience members that he is talking to, the ones he wants to appeal to.

01:11:07 Speaker_02
Whereas Adam Driver, when he's giving the speech, I'm like, I don't even know. I don't know who you're, I don't know who you're winning over with what with this. And so to see the audience kind of, the crowd be like, you're right. You're right.

01:11:18 Speaker_05
What a true leader.

01:11:21 Speaker_02
As an audience member in the theater, I was like, I don't understand what he's saying.

01:11:23 Speaker_04
Like, I don't, this doesn't mean anything to me.

01:11:25 Speaker_06
And this is another part where I'm just like, so I'm so out with this movie where it's like, where it's like, it really tries to have it both ways. Like, it has great contempt for almost all the rich people, which is fine.

01:11:39 Speaker_06
Like, you can hate all the rich people all you want. The job creators from it? Crassus totally sucks, and all of Crassus' family sucks. Obviously, it has this exception for Caesar because it was sort of genius.

01:11:52 Speaker_06
And what it rests on is this idea that you have to serve the people, give the people what they need, but it has complete contempt for the people.

01:12:00 Speaker_06
They're just this dumb mass of people that follow Claudio, or they're this dumb mass of people that are just like wooed by nonsense language. I mean, there's no actual common people represented at all in the movie.

01:12:13 Speaker_02
Yeah, there's no, the only characters we see who come close to being actual on the ground people are that one guy who plays the tuba in the marching band in that one scene, and the kid who shoots Caesar in the face, I guess, but you're right.

01:12:28 Speaker_02
There's no ordinary citizen point of view ever presented in this, a movie where you have to assume hundreds, if not thousands of people are killed by a falling satellite that devastates the city.

01:12:41 Speaker_02
I just watched Life Force recently, and that's a movie about a nude space vampire that sucks the life out of people. And that showed more feeling for the ordinary, everyday English person than this movie shows for the people of New Rome.

01:12:56 Speaker_06
It's ostensible ideas are about like serving people in the public and how to make a society and society is completely unrepresented in any realistic or meaningful way. They're all just.

01:13:06 Speaker_06
They're all really just pawns who are like dumbasses who follow Claudio or sort of dumbasses that are wooed by nonsense language. It's just like, it's weird. Like, I totally get that. You can have Shakespeare plays that are all about kings and shit.

01:13:19 Speaker_06
You know, that's fine. Like, you don't, the commoner has to be represented in every episode.

01:13:25 Speaker_05
The tragedies and there was kings and shit.

01:13:28 Speaker_02
I'm so desperately trying to think of what Shakespeare title I can turn into a pun about another word for shit.

01:13:34 Speaker_04
But, but it's just, it's the emblet. No, that doesn't work. King smear. Yeah.

01:13:38 Speaker_02
Yeah. Toilets and Cressida, does that work?

01:13:47 Speaker_05
Why did we go down this road of all the roads?

01:13:49 Speaker_07
Okay, speaking of roads, so Caesar promises these magical, floating, glowing robes that are all like the Rainbow Road in Super Mario. Claudio's mob turns on him.

01:14:00 Speaker_07
Crassus is overcome by the glory of Caesar's vision, so he leaves all of his riches to Caesar Catalina. So that's going to allow him to build this utopia. Mayor Cicero and his family join Caesar on this voyage. They stand upon this glowing bridge.

01:14:25 Speaker_07
People are all very excited. They're celebrating. And he manages to stop time for everyone except for little baby Caesar, Julian Caesar's baby.

01:14:35 Speaker_05
And let's say this is a very strange looking shot too. This is shot from below. They're all like standing on glass or something and they're shooting through it. And there's like green screen behind them.

01:14:46 Speaker_02
This is also, this is such an upsetting moment. I think it's supposed to be a moment of like, hope for the future. Like this ability to exist outside of time and be a creative genius is now in their child as well.

01:14:59 Speaker_02
But it's like, time has stopped except for this baby. Who's gonna feed this baby? Like who's gonna unstop time? Not since under the skin have I been more worried about an onscreen child who's being abandoned in front of me.

01:15:10 Speaker_06
But the baby is the one stopping time, right?

01:15:12 Speaker_05
Maybe. It must be because the others are frozen. Because she's the one moving and everyone.

01:15:16 Speaker_02
But I thought she, but I thought, doesn't Julius hate to tell Caesar to stop time? Maybe I'm misremembering it, I don't know.

01:15:22 Speaker_05
But then they're frozen. Like, I mean, I think she does, but it doesn't really make sense. Oh, it's the baby that does it. Well, the baby doesn't know what she's doing. It's very upsetting to me. It's a very upsetting way to end the movie.

01:15:31 Speaker_07
The feeling I get is that they're leaving the future for the next generation.

01:15:35 Speaker_02
for the sequel, Megalopolis 2, Babyopolis.

01:15:37 Speaker_07
My notes then say, pledge allegiance. Did something happen after this?

01:15:41 Speaker_06
Was there like a speech or something? There's a title card, and I think it's the narration read by children. Oh, yeah.

01:15:50 Speaker_02
And it's like we pledge allegiance to the human race or something like that.

01:15:54 Speaker_06
I pulled this up in front of me because I wanted to make sure we had it.

01:15:57 Speaker_02
Because it meant so much to you. You printed it out and laminated it.

01:15:59 Speaker_06
Put it up on the wall. I pledge allegiance to our human family and to all the species that we protect, one earth, indivisible, with long life, education, and justice for all, is what the kids say.

01:16:12 Speaker_02
So stick that on a placard in front of your house for the next election about the values in this house. Yeah.

01:16:18 Speaker_05
I... Look, the problem with that is that it comes at the end of Megalopolis.

01:16:25 Speaker_05
I do like the idea of a pledge that is not a nationalistic sort of just like- Oh, I think we can all stand behind the values of the human race and everybody getting justice and education.

01:16:38 Speaker_02
It doesn't fit with this movie, which this movie is about.

01:16:41 Speaker_05
No, no, the movie doesn't really.

01:16:42 Speaker_02
It's a real it's a real Robert Moses viewpoint movie where it's like the people don't know what they want. The people are sheep. They have to be shown by a genius what is best for them. And someone needs to make the decision.

01:16:52 Speaker_02
It is a movie that I think is the person making it thinks they're making a pro

01:16:58 Speaker_02
democracy pro-equality justice movement, but they are making a, essentially in many ways, a fascist movie about, because there is one man who understands and he needs to take control and you should not question him and eat no matter what he does.

01:17:10 Speaker_02
And I'm just, and maybe I'm just mad because I realized I should have said Toilets Andronicus because Toilets and Cress is a poem, right? Like it's not a play.

01:17:18 Speaker_05
No, Toilets and Cress is a play.

01:17:20 Speaker_02
Is it a play? What am I thinking? What's the, what's his epic poem then?

01:17:23 Speaker_05
I don't know. I am less familiar with the viewers, right?

01:17:27 Speaker_02
Shakespeare, if you're listening, write in and tell us only you want to have English majors.

01:17:35 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, we're getting into the Final Judgment sort of area, but there's much that is striking about this movie. There are parts of it that sort of took me sort of in spite of myself, but you're right.

01:17:48 Speaker_02
Guys, Toilets and Cressida, I was thinking of the poem by Chaucer and then Shakespeare. Oh, okay. That's right, yeah, yeah. So Toilets and Cressida work.

01:17:56 Speaker_07
Okay, let me just amend the scoreboard. Okay, get it out.

01:18:00 Speaker_02
On further review, the call against Toyotz and Cressida has been overturned.

01:18:08 Speaker_05
You've crystallized something for me, Elliot. Like the only thing that makes sense to me about this movie as a statement, the only way I could read this is Francis Ford Coppola being like,

01:18:20 Speaker_05
Geniuses are good and above everyone and they shouldn't be questioned and maybe I'm one Because maybe from the record when he's talking yeah politically it's all over the place doesn't make any sense.

01:18:33 Speaker_05
It's not staking out any particular Understandable philosophy, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened

01:18:43 Speaker_02
So instead of a fable, it should say a bunch of, Megalopolis, a bunch of stuff that happened.

01:18:47 Speaker_05
Yeah.

01:18:47 Speaker_02
Which is literally like the fifth chapter in every Dogman book. It's called chapter five, a bunch of stuff that happened or a bunch of stuff that happened next. So maybe Francis Ford Coppola should have made that Dogman movie.

01:18:56 Speaker_07
Stuart, what do you think? Dogman, yeah. I think he should have made that movie. Is that, is that where...

01:19:02 Speaker_07
Are those, are those the guys, the player character race you can play in riffs that have the body of a human, but like the head and some of the traits of a dog, is that?

01:19:11 Speaker_02
I mean, that's it. That's kind of like a, what, like a sinusophilic or kinesophilic. That's the kind of thing you see sometimes in old tales of the saints. Some of them have dog heads, but no, that's not what dog, dog man is about.

01:19:20 Speaker_02
He's a police officer with a dog's head. Oh, that's too bad. And it's his bestselling book, a series of books for children.

01:19:27 Speaker_05
We should get into our final judgments, but before we do, I just want to give... Oh, I thought we'd started already. I want to give Stuart some plaudits for how he handled that... That's cool.

01:19:36 Speaker_07
Anyone else want to give me plaudits?

01:19:37 Speaker_05
Earlier... All the plaudits. No, I just, you know, I was keeping an eye on time, and early on, I'm like, oh, man, we're never... This is going to be a four-hour episode, but, Stuart, you got us through. You planned a plan. You hacked a path.

01:19:51 Speaker_07
You did it. The trick is forgetting things like satellites falling on me.

01:19:54 Speaker_05
Yeah. whether we thought that Michaelopolis was a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie we kind of liked. Is it a movie where you get some joy out of its badness? No joy to be found in Mudville, or did we actually like it a bit?

01:20:16 Speaker_05
I am gonna say good, bad in the sense that, I mean, You so rarely get something this personal and big.

01:20:26 Speaker_05
Like, I kind of, in a weird way, didn't know whether we should do this at first, like, until, you know, like, we got so many people, you gotta do Megalopolis. I wanna hear what you say about Megalopolis.

01:20:37 Speaker_05
But part of me was like, well, I don't wanna, like, take someone down for, like, a passion.

01:20:42 Speaker_02
I wanna give the masses what they want. I'm a genius. I know better than they do.

01:20:45 Speaker_05
Well, I feel bad about, like, taking, like, a passion project down. Like, even if it's misbegotten, Like, I do appreciate the swing. I don't think that this movie is successful, and there's large chunks of it that are boring.

01:21:05 Speaker_05
But I say good, bad in the sense that I would not discourage anyone with any curiosity about this movie from seeing this movie, because it is quite an experience.

01:21:16 Speaker_05
If you're interested, if you're willing to commit the time, yeah, sure, watch it, because there's going to be some stuff in it that's going to have you grasping your head and shaking your fist to the heavens. Uh, so that's what I say.

01:21:27 Speaker_05
So what do you think?

01:21:28 Speaker_07
Uh, yeah, I mean, I feel I have less of a issue with like targeting passion projects. Cause I feel like passion projects often suffer from a certain amount of like great man syndrome and delusion of genius. Um, but I don't know.

01:21:45 Speaker_07
I feel like this movie would fall somewhere in the like, between a good, bad movie and almost like there's parts of it that are a movie I kind of like. I mean, it's, uh, I feel like time is going to be kinder to this than at least current critics are.

01:22:00 Speaker_07
I feel like it reminds me in a lot of ways of either a Neil Breen movie or if Neil Breen had directed the Star Wars prequels, um, because it feels a lot like those movies. Like they're, they're like,

01:22:14 Speaker_07
At least it doesn't feel like mass produced garbage, but it is still kind of like garbage. So I guess that's not a direct answer, but like, I'm glad I'm glad this movie exists. And I feel like if you're interested in it, you should check it out.

01:22:30 Speaker_07
It's got it's a mess.

01:22:32 Speaker_02
I feel similar to Stuart. I think it's good, bad with it. There's some things about it that I like that are enough to make it a movie I am glad to have seen, you know, even if I'm never gonna watch it again, probably.

01:22:44 Speaker_02
And I feel, I think you're right there. Not with your kids. Well, eventually, eventually. Dad, can we watch Megalopolis? You're not ready yet. You wouldn't understand.

01:22:51 Speaker_02
Meanwhile, I'm trying to get them to watch Metropolis, another kind of politically mushy movie set in the city of the future, and they have no interest, even though that's a great movie.

01:22:59 Speaker_02
But I think the future film critics will look back on it knowing what it is and being able to pick out the few kind of pearls that are in the morass of sludge rather than

01:23:11 Speaker_02
us looking at it now expecting something different than it is, which is a, what we're expecting is a coherent story with interesting characters.

01:23:20 Speaker_02
And instead, future generations will be like, well, that was a fascinating capstone to Francis Ford Coppola's career. And now we can look the same way that I just finished reading Patrick McGilligan's biography of Alfred Hitchcock.

01:23:33 Speaker_02
And in that he's able to treat Hitchcock's later movies, which at the time were considered abysmal and which are certainly not among his best. But now you can look at them and be like, here's the good things in them.

01:23:43 Speaker_02
Here's the not so good things in them. I think it'll be kind of like that.

01:23:46 Speaker_02
But at the moment, it's kind of nice to watch this movie now at a moment when you're, it's rare that I see a movie that has this level of production behind it and this level of artistic vision behind it where I'm like, What? Like, what is he doing?

01:23:58 Speaker_02
Like, why is he doing that?

01:24:00 Speaker_02
And that's something I like you're saying, Stuart, in an era of mass-produced, you know, casinos made for the people by the mayor, you know, that's something to be at least glad that someone's willing to put the shares they sold in their winery where their mouth is, you know?

01:24:16 Speaker_02
Roman, what do you think? You loved it, right?

01:24:19 Speaker_06
I think that, you know, what is it, like, 15 years of watching bad movies has rotted y'all's brain, because this is a bad, bad movie.

01:24:31 Speaker_02
Roman, I've seen things you couldn't imagine. Crap movies glittering off the shoulder of...

01:24:39 Speaker_06
Here's the thing, I think this is a bad, bad movie. And I think that if you compare it to other, this is like a false premise of like, it is interesting, whereas all like superhero movies are boring.

01:24:50 Speaker_06
At least this thing exists and it has some kind of vision or whatever. But that is not what you are, what this thing is occupying space of.

01:24:57 Speaker_06
It is occupying the space of like, take time to stare at a loved one's face for two hours or something like that.

01:25:04 Speaker_09
Oh, Roman, Roman, if that's the way you think, you're never gonna get it.

01:25:07 Speaker_06
You're never going to be able to make it in this business. I was never going to do that. That's the thing. Literally do anything else. Learn a language.

01:25:14 Speaker_02
I meant to. Certainly there are better ways to use the limited time you have on Earth, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

01:25:20 Speaker_06
I mean, it's just, if it had this vision and was messy and was chaotic and whatever. But it's just like, as you dig into the ideas of the movie, I think those ideas are bad and dangerous ideas.

01:25:34 Speaker_06
Like, I think that they actually are pernicious, like, that make the world a worse place. That's why, like, I kind of, I was almost wooed by this idea of, like, the passion project that you don't want to take on and criticize.

01:25:46 Speaker_06
Except for that the passion project is kind of this weird, like,

01:25:51 Speaker_06
defensive, great man, genius, that this idea of this fake populism of caring about the people, and that even the movie cares about people and serving people, but then ignores them, ignores their needs, that there's this phony, kind of Me Too crisis in the middle of this thing that's completely dashed by facts that exonerate this man, all that sort of stuff.

01:26:17 Speaker_06
If it was, if the underlying, core of this was sort of more benign or innocuous, I would have more charity towards its big swings. But I think that it actually has terrible ideas at its core.

01:26:33 Speaker_06
I feel like that almost makes it more interesting to this guy. I get that, yeah.

01:26:39 Speaker_02
In case you're worried that this movie is going to sway people.

01:26:42 Speaker_06
I mean, I don't think it is either, but I just feel like it should be held accountable for its dumbness.

01:26:49 Speaker_07
But I would argue it does, because he spent so much of his money for a huge flop that is being publicly pillory.

01:26:57 Speaker_05
You're saying he owned himself.

01:26:59 Speaker_06
But you know, and I know this too, because we're all, I'm a little older than you guys are, but like, You've watched... You look great. Thank you.

01:27:10 Speaker_06
But, like, you've watched, like, really misguided millennials in Gen Z resurrect the Star Wars prequel trilogy and talk about its secret genius. And you're like, no, you don't understand. We were there. It's fucking awful.

01:27:25 Speaker_06
Like, you have to trust us on this. The book is closed. on that matter. And you're right, this is going to be resurrected and people are gonna find things in it.

01:27:36 Speaker_06
And it's just gonna be just, that's gonna be such an irritating process to witness in 20 years.

01:27:43 Speaker_06
Because it truly is like, of the moment, just to take it in the moment, it is dealing with these ideas of, you know, populism and politics and, you know, like, and greatness and being sort of,

01:27:58 Speaker_06
you know, great men being sort of, like, somehow thwarted in their great, you know, like... What's so crazy about the movie is, like, with all this crazy stuff that happens, like, you know, everything is just given to Caesar.

01:28:11 Speaker_06
Like, he, you know, he has this magic particle that heals his face. Like, the richest man in the world gives him all the money he needs to do his thing. A satellite clears the land for him to build his thing. It's just like...

01:28:25 Speaker_06
It is full, like, this moment of, like, billionaires and so-called geniuses and bad populism and pretending to serve people. Like, these are bad ideas to play with poorly right now.

01:28:39 Speaker_06
And that's what I think, that's the part that really, like, incenses me about it as a movie.

01:28:46 Speaker_05
You've given the passionate, swaying-the-masses speech that the movie fails to get.

01:28:51 Speaker_07
Yeah, that's fair.

01:28:52 Speaker_05
I'm one of the dumb masses.

01:28:54 Speaker_07
I want to follow this guy. Tell me about your utopia, Roman.

01:28:59 Speaker_06
But I want it to be so much better. Like, I can deal with all the nonsense of it. In fact, one of the things I think is the miracle of this movie is that I think Adam Driver, at the center of this, comes out pretty unscathed.

01:29:12 Speaker_06
Like, he is, he commits to this nonsense in this way that is almost, I just don't even know how he does it. Like, he, you know, he sounds like he just leans into it, but he's not hammy.

01:29:26 Speaker_06
It's just like, that's the part where I'm like, I liked him more coming out of this movie than, not than I ever have, but like, it just added to my esteem of him.

01:29:35 Speaker_02
Well, it's something that we see a lot in the movies on the podcast is that when you are an actor who's in a movie that doesn't make sense or is not good, you never win points by being openly disdainful of the movie or by acting like you know it is.

01:29:49 Speaker_02
Like, I think one of the things that helps with Adam Driver's performance is when he's saying nonsense or he's doing things that doesn't make sense, he is still acting as if the things that he's doing make sense and are rational and coherent.

01:30:00 Speaker_02
And I think you're right. He comes out of it. I mean, I feel like there's most of the main performances come out pretty well.

01:30:06 Speaker_06
They're goofy and stuff, but I'm just surprised how he comes out. There's a lesson in here with watching him, and maybe that's worth watching, which is even in life or in a movie or as a piece of art or whatever, just lean in and do the thing.

01:30:19 Speaker_06
You will be cooler if you just do it rather than try to resist it.

01:30:23 Speaker_05
Well, that's also, from what I understand from hearing people talk about it, he had a much better sort of experience on the movie because he leaned into the working process of the movie. And I understand that

01:30:36 Speaker_05
If you don't want to lean into that, that's fine, because it sounds like this was not a good working experience for a lot of people.

01:30:43 Speaker_02
If you don't want to be, like, told to do something different every single moment, and the difference will suddenly kiss you. Or harass.

01:30:48 Speaker_05
Yeah, yeah. So I'm not necessarily making an argument to ignore that, but I am saying that he seemed to embrace, like, okay, like, as an artistic thing, I'm going to roll with this and be, like, collaborative and, like, really, like, commit to it.

01:31:04 Speaker_02
And that's probably part of why he does come out feeling like he... I mean, we also, I don't think we need to get into it, but I'm sure there was also an element of Francis Ford Coppola probably treating him better than he treated other people, you know, because he's the star that he identifies with in the movie, you know.

01:31:19 Speaker_02
And he loved 65, so he saw that and he was like, you were shooting dinosaurs.

01:31:25 Speaker_05
No, no, Francis, those weren't real dinosaurs.

01:31:27 Speaker_02
It's like, I saw that movie you made where you got away from that comet that hit the Earth with the dinosaurs. So I'm having a satellite hit the city. Let's see if he can get away from that one. And then Francis Cripple is watching his own movie.

01:31:36 Speaker_02
He's like, son of a bitch did it again. He got away from another thing falling out of the sky. And Adam Driver's like, Francis, you made this movie. Like, you knew it was gonna happen. I don't think so. He's like, I don't think so.

01:31:47 Speaker_02
I don't know how you did it, but it doesn't seem like my movie.

01:31:52 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, my movies are good. This one, I don't know.

01:31:55 Speaker_02
I mean, what if it was like Severance, where when he went to set, he had a different personality than when he left set?

01:31:59 Speaker_05
Probably, it'd be... Let's answer a couple of questions from listeners. This one is from Nilo, last name withheld.

01:32:21 Speaker_02
This is from FF Coppola, uh-oh.

01:32:24 Speaker_05
Or perhaps Nilo, I don't know. But they write, intergalactic greetings, floppers. I have a gigantic projector built in space capable of projecting a movie onto the moon. What should I show on it?

01:32:37 Speaker_05
And of course, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is from the earth to the moon. You want to see that. Moon Man get, you know, a rocket in his eye. Yeah, everybody's gagging for it. Everyone wants that.

01:32:54 Speaker_02
Finally, the real moon's going to get the just-desserts that the film moon got.

01:32:57 Speaker_07
Finally, the stand-up-and-cheer moment of the year. Well, what else? A moonfall, maybe? I was going to say Akira for that scene when Tetsuo blows up part of the moon.

01:33:07 Speaker_02
I mean, so I'm going to think about this a little more practically. We don't have sound, right? Because it's just being projected.

01:33:12 Speaker_06
You have to tune your radio to a certain like frequency.

01:33:16 Speaker_02
Oh, maybe, yeah. I'm trying to think of something that would be kind of like that the visuals would pull all of humanity together as one shared family. Yeah. Once it's projected on the moon.

01:33:26 Speaker_05
One Week by Buster Keaton.

01:33:28 Speaker_06
I don't know.

01:33:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, sure. Yeah.

01:33:31 Speaker_06
I mean, you're basically talking about the biggest movie in the park that you can imagine for the summertime. And so it's going to be like Toy Story.

01:33:37 Speaker_02
I don't think it's going to work. Worst things you can go with than Toy Story.

01:33:41 Speaker_06
It's going to be some Pixar movie that you can bring all the kids to and then and that's it.

01:33:45 Speaker_02
Well, listen, I wanted to be family friendly because if my kids are out looking at the moon, I don't want them seeing something that they shouldn't see. Yeah.

01:33:54 Speaker_07
What shouldn't they see? It's on the list.

01:33:56 Speaker_09
I mean, I don't think they're ready for Akira.

01:34:00 Speaker_07
Well, when are your kids going to be ready for Akira?

01:34:04 Speaker_02
Daddy, daddy, why is Tetsuo expanding into a techno-organic mass?

01:34:10 Speaker_07
I mean, why is he crushing Kaori when he's trying to love her?

01:34:14 Speaker_05
One of these crimes of the future.

01:34:19 Speaker_06
I saw Paris is burning and Lincoln Center outside and that was a lovely experience. So, you know, that could be one that you could do.

01:34:31 Speaker_05
I like it. Uh, this second and final. letter is from Anne-Marie who writes, hey y'all, and this is clearly in response to our recent break into Flop TV episode we had.

01:34:48 Speaker_02
Tickets and season tickets available now for Flop TV season two.

01:34:52 Speaker_05
I wanted to add an additional theory about how someone could dance on the ceiling. A few years ago, I played dancing on the ceiling for my then four-year-old niece, and she said it was her favorite song.

01:35:03 Speaker_05
I showed her the music video, and she kept asking, how did he do that? And then posited that he had sticky stuff on the ceiling so he could stick to it like a bug.

01:35:13 Speaker_07
So, there's another- Yeah, that's how bugs stick to things.

01:35:16 Speaker_05
Alternative- That's a good theory.

01:35:17 Speaker_09
Well, it's not really- Feeling dancing. I don't think it's really how they stick to stuff.

01:35:20 Speaker_07
That's how it works in Inception too, right? Is Chrissy Nolan just smeared sticky stuff all over the ceiling and- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joseph Gordon-Levitt bounced off of it.

01:35:31 Speaker_05
Yeah. So, was there a question there, Dan? No, it was just sharing an idea. This is a charming tale of a child's imagination. Sort of like, you know, ET, I guess it's not imagination, but it sparks imagination anyway.

01:35:46 Speaker_06
I mean, I love old, old special effects are great. My, the greatest special effect of all time is Kermit riding a bike. It'll never be beaten. It'll be the greatest. Like that's, that's the thing that's wowed me the most for.

01:35:58 Speaker_02
There's also a scene, a woman goes from nice-looking to evil-looking in camera in a movie called The Octopus, in a way that uses makeup that only shows up on certain colors of light, and they had to gel their wig in front of the light, and that effect, it's from a movie from the 30s, and the effect looks amazing.

01:36:13 Speaker_07
Yeah, I still think the best special effect is that scene where the guy falls over in the movie The Gate, and he turns into a bunch of little guys. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty amazing.

01:36:24 Speaker_02
And also, there's the moment in Throne of Blood when T'shir M'fune gets an arrow through the neck. And I'm always like, did they really kill him?

01:36:32 Speaker_05
On that note of credulity, let's move on.

01:36:38 Speaker_07
Actually, Elliot, I just checked.

01:36:39 Speaker_05
T'shir M'fune's dead.

01:36:41 Speaker_02
Oh, no, they did it. Officer, arrest Akira Kurosawa. We've solved the cold case.

01:36:47 Speaker_05
Let us move on to our final segment, our final regular segment of the show, which is... Dan, I'm looking as you scan through your letterbox.

01:36:54 Speaker_07
I see Dix the musical on there. That scene with Nathan Lane spitting lunch meat on those puppets, isn't that great?

01:37:03 Speaker_05
I appreciate the spirit of Dicks the Musical. I didn't enjoy it as much as I think you did. So why are you recommending it, Dan? I'm not. This is, again, I haven't even introduced the segment. I'm just looking over Dan's shoulders.

01:37:15 Speaker_05
We're recommending movies that we have. scene of late or just like that might be a better use of your time, then say Megalopolis, take Roman's advice, either stare at your loved one's face or watch one of these.

01:37:30 Speaker_02
Just stare at their face for the full runtime of Megalopolis, which is like two hours and 18 minutes.

01:37:34 Speaker_05
They'll be like, what are you doing? Can you stop that?

01:37:38 Speaker_02
Is Megalopolis showing on my face?

01:37:43 Speaker_05
I recently, I just rewatched Lost Highway, which I hadn't seen since around the time it was new. David Lynch's Lost Highway.

01:37:53 Speaker_05
And, you know, because I'd seen it when it was new, it kind of had never struck me like, oh, how much this is a dry run for Mulholland Drive.

01:38:03 Speaker_05
Which is not to say it's not valuable in its own right, but it's like, oh, OK, like you're revisiting so many of the themes. I didn't even think about that of sort of, you know, Lynch's films. I think it's a bad idea to try and just decode them.

01:38:18 Speaker_05
But if you're going to go down that road, like there's a lot about sort of.

01:38:21 Speaker_09
Is that road Mulholland Drive?

01:38:23 Speaker_05
Yeah. Disassociation after sort of a horrible event, trying to make sense of your life through these sort of fantasies. Lost Highway was his first trip down that lost highway to Mulholland Drive.

01:38:39 Speaker_02
And you're going to want to go down Lost Highway. You're going to take a turn onto Mulholland Drive.

01:38:43 Speaker_05
Yeah.

01:38:45 Speaker_02
It's going to get you to the Inland Empire.

01:38:46 Speaker_05
Yep. If you wanna see Bill Pullman just wail on a saxophone as well, that's your best chance. I don't know.

01:38:54 Speaker_02
Some would say your only chance.

01:38:57 Speaker_05
There's not much to say about it. I mean, if you like Lynch and you haven't seen it, that's strange. If you haven't watched it, if you're not a Lynch person, maybe it's okay to start with.

01:39:07 Speaker_07
What if you're like a huge Robert Blake fan?

01:39:09 Speaker_05
Yeah, but not his movies, more his personal life.

01:39:12 Speaker_06
Not his eyebrows.

01:39:16 Speaker_02
Like, I just hate when he has hair below his forehead. Is there a movie for me? That's one of those movies, I feel like Lost Highway is the opposite of Megalopolis in that it is a movie that when it came out, I remember the reviews were like, what?

01:39:32 Speaker_02
They were scathing because it had a nonlinear, not totally rational plot, but you watch it now and you're like, oh, now I know what Lynch does. I understand what he's doing.

01:39:42 Speaker_02
Honestly, the fact that film reviewers saw it at the time and weren't like, oh, it's a David Lynch movie. I have to watch it through David Lynch glasses.

01:39:47 Speaker_07
Yeah. I don't, I don't know if I ever told this story, but I remember seeing it like the very small independent theater in my hometown.

01:39:54 Speaker_07
Uh, and it was a late screening and we got out and I was driving my friends home and I remembered, you know, driving up to a red light, the light turned green and then it turned red again.

01:40:04 Speaker_07
And I had just sat there the whole time because my brain was processing what I just want. Yeah. A lot. Let's go in the same order. We did our judgment store. What do you okay? I'm gonna recommend a movie I saw a couple weeks back.

01:40:18 Speaker_07
I saw a Nora the new Sean Baker movie. It's a I guess a offbeat comedy love story about a young sex worker who marries the son of an oligarch in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. It's a very New York movie in that way.

01:40:41 Speaker_07
There's a scene where they fucking go to Tatiana's in Brighton Beach. And I was like, Whoa, I go there. And yeah, I mean, it has aura. Yeah, I'm like a Nora.

01:40:50 Speaker_07
Um, it, uh, yeah, I mean, I feel like it really captures the like rush and craziness of like love and hope, uh, and also like hoping against, uh, the crushing, uh, power of capitalism and shittiness.

01:41:05 Speaker_07
Um, and then of course, uh, it's things start to, uh, you know, come back to earth and things get a little bit rough. It's got, you know, an incredible central performance by Mikey Madison as the title character. Yeah, I think I thought it was great.

01:41:19 Speaker_07
I love it. Yeah, check it out.

01:41:21 Speaker_02
I'm also going to recommend an offbeat comedy romance, but not the same one. This is, I'm going to, I want to recommend the movie You and Me from 1938.

01:41:29 Speaker_02
This is a movie directed by Fritz Lang, director of Metropolis, the movie I mentioned earlier, but it's a very different movie than Metropolis.

01:41:36 Speaker_02
And Sylvia Sidney is a woman who works at a department store and the department store makes a point of hiring ex-convicts to give them a second chance at life. And George Raft is one of those ex-convicts and they fall in love.

01:41:48 Speaker_02
She doesn't want him to know she's also an ex-convict because when you're on parole, you're not allowed to fall in love and you're not allowed to get married.

01:41:54 Speaker_02
And so she has to hide from him that she is also a convict and that the repercussions of that involve him getting back involved in crime. And it's a surprisingly sweet movie for a movie about criminals directed by Fritz Lang.

01:42:10 Speaker_02
And it also has some musical numbers in it with some of the music written by Kurt Weill. So it's a real strange movie. It's this kind of, somewhat anti-capitalist romance, drama, comedy, crime movie with Sylvia Sidney and George Raft.

01:42:26 Speaker_02
But I really loved it. I really enjoyed it.

01:42:27 Speaker_02
It's the kind of movie that you could crank out in the 30s because they were making so many movies that sometimes one of these popped out where it was like, this is kind of a stranger movie than it had any right to be.

01:42:37 Speaker_02
It could have been a pretty down the middle movie, but there's some great scenes in it. And, you know, Sylvia Sidney has been on my mind since there's that new Beetlejuice movie.

01:42:44 Speaker_02
She's not in the new one, but you know, since she was in the old one, you know. So that's you and me.

01:42:50 Speaker_06
Play Juno. Yeah. I was having a hard time thinking of what to recommend, but I think the one I'd settle on is Hearts of Darkness of Filmmaker's Apocalypse, which is the documentary Eleanor Coppola made of Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now.

01:43:08 Speaker_06
One of the things that ends the movie, Megalopolis, is at the very end, it says, for Eleanor, which is sort of like this moment where I'm feeling like kind of seething for this thing.

01:43:21 Speaker_06
And then there's a sweet moment of their long-term relationship and how she was such a gifted filmmaker, as evidenced by this piece, that did, like, make me think, okay, he did what he wanted to. It's all okay.

01:43:34 Speaker_06
I, you know, like, and that was a nice sort of, like, homage to her. But she was an extremely good documentary filmmaker. It made me appreciate Apocalypse Now so much more. It gave you so much insight into making

01:43:50 Speaker_06
a movie it's just like has so much drama it's so fascinating i i really love hearts of darkness i i saw it as a kid we're not a kid i guess i was pretty soon after it came out i guess i was 15 or 16 and um uh hearts of darkness not apocalypse now i had not seen apocalypse now i caught this like on hbo or something

01:44:09 Speaker_06
And then I saw it afterward. I'd kind of heard about Apocalypse Now. And it just, it gave me the blueprint for appreciating another sort of like good mess of a movie. You know, that's a, I think that's a good mess, Apocalypse Now, in a lot of ways.

01:44:22 Speaker_06
But I love this. It's one of the reasons why I love documentaries. I think it's just expertly and beautifully made, so.

01:44:29 Speaker_05
I think I also saw it before I saw Apocalypse Now. I saw it with my like college girlfriend. We were at her house in Cleveland and we went to like, it was just like young, like film buffs. And we're like, what arty thing can we get? We'll get this.

01:44:42 Speaker_05
I know it's a good documentary. And it is a testament to like, even, without having seen the movie.

01:44:47 Speaker_05
I'm like, this is fascinating in its own right, and then gets richer once you've seen the film, or like most people, you probably see Apocalypse Now first and then Catch Up.

01:44:55 Speaker_06
Well, I mean, it's weird. I mean, I think people take things in a lot differently now, and like, you never know, but I think this movie is great.

01:45:03 Speaker_06
I think it's actually better than Apocalypse Now, but that's my own flavor of, you know, that to me is not defensible. It's just taste, you know, it's...

01:45:13 Speaker_02
That's just a personal choice. Dan, there are people who saw Spaceballs before Star Wars. People watch things in all sorts of crazy orders, you know? Yeah.

01:45:19 Speaker_05
Yeah. These days.

01:45:21 Speaker_07
I thought you were about to mention a documentary about the making of Spaceballs. That would be fascinating.

01:45:26 Speaker_02
People see May the Schwartz be with you in a filmmaker's journey.

01:45:29 Speaker_07
That's not what Balls of Fury was? Yeah. How'd they rig up that bit where Rick Moranis goes flying through the... Was that real?

01:45:42 Speaker_05
Did they kill Rick Moranis?

01:45:43 Speaker_02
Did they kill Rick Moranis in that moment?

01:45:45 Speaker_05
All right, well, we should wrap this up with a big thank you.

01:45:49 Speaker_02
Now I want to see a comedy sketch in a show where they're like, okay, they're trying to lead actor on a movie set, and they're like, we saved this last stunt to the end of the shooting because you're going to die when you do it.

01:45:57 Speaker_02
The only way to get the shot is to kill you while you do it. Okay, that's why we shot all your scenes ahead of time. So I don't know if that's a good idea. No, it's okay, we shot the rest of the movie already. We shot it already, we're done.

01:46:07 Speaker_02
You know, we're wrapped on that. So this is your last thing you have to do. We'll be covered.

01:46:12 Speaker_05
Uh, before I say, before we say goodbye, uh, I want to just say thank you to Roman, uh, for being on this episode. We all know how busy you are. And so we're always charmed when you make time for our shenanigans. Long time fan and supporter.

01:46:29 Speaker_05
I'm so happy to be here.

01:46:30 Speaker_06
It makes me very, very happy. What were you going to say, Ali?

01:46:33 Speaker_02
If you want more shenanigans like this, just tune into the 99% Invisible Breakdown, The Power Broker.

01:46:37 Speaker_05
Exactly the same.

01:46:38 Speaker_02
It's exactly like this show. It's just like it.

01:46:41 Speaker_05
Yeah. Just cutting it up. Before we go, thank you to our producer, Alex Smith. He goes by the name HowlDotty on the internet. He does music, he does Twitch streams, does a lot of stuff. Look him up. Thank you to our network, Maximum Fun.

01:46:57 Speaker_05
If you go to maximumfun.org, there are a lot of great other podcasts you can listen to about culture, about comedy. You'll find something you like. But that's it for this episode. For The Flophouse, I've been Dan McCloy. I'm Stuart Wellington.

01:47:12 Speaker_09
I'm Elliot Kalin.

01:47:13 Speaker_06
I'm Roman Mars. I'm going to take that again. I'm Roman Mars. Like that. That's it.

01:47:20 Speaker_02
What a professional. Bye!

01:47:22 Speaker_05
Professionalism undone.

01:47:26 Speaker_02
Roman's like, let me make sure I say that the right way.

01:47:28 Speaker_08
And then Stuart's like.

01:47:40 Speaker_05
On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis.

01:47:47 Speaker_08
Do you want me to have one?

01:47:48 Speaker_05
Do you want me to do one?

01:47:48 Speaker_08
No, I'll just start it over again. Stuart, you leaned in like you had one.

01:47:51 Speaker_05
I didn't say anything. We're embarrassing ourselves in front of Roman. Okay, no, no, no. Roman knows we're cool. This is the whole experience.

01:48:04 Speaker_06
You can listen and subscribe to The Flophouse wherever you get your podcasts. And after all that, if you still somehow want to watch Megalopolis, it's now available on VOD.