A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #456 - PINOBERTELLI - Megalopolis (2024), by Francis Ford Coppola (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Hollywood cinema (badly plagiarized from every corner of the Earth) is a 
whore without a sidewalk... and Francis Ford Coppola is its prophet... 
except for I'm Not Coming Home Tonight (1969), The Conversation (1970), 
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), films where Coppola manages to build a 
cross-section of the American dream shipwrecked in the deserts of 
necessity and woven into the conscience of the present... the 
Oscar-winning director and author of some of the most overrated films in 
the history of cinema, such as the saga of The Godfather (1972-1990), 
Apocalypse Now (1979) or Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)... has measured 
himself with the dystopian tale of Megalopolis and delivered his most 
ephemeral merchandise to the mediocrity of liquid cinema. When you 
create genius you need to have the madness of genius, not of the cult of 
the goods dispensed by the masters of the imagination.

Megalopolis tells the hallucinations of New Rome, a modern New York 
integrated into ancient Rome... among the skyscrapers there is a 
Colosseum, chariots and wrestling matches... the city is governed by an 
elite of patrician families who enjoy everything and the poor "Romans" 
live in poverty. The architect Cesar Catilina won the Nobel Prize for 
inventing Megalon, a material resistant to time, and even manages to 
stop it... he is one of the personalities who dominate the city... an 
alcoholic, immersed in guilt for his wife's suicide and for which he was 
investigated by the corrupt district attorney Francis Cicero, now mayor 
of New Rome... Cicero tries to counter the new urbanization of the 
architect's city, using Megalon, and instead found a large casino... the 
billionaire Hamilton Crassus III wants to help his nephew Catilina 
realize his project... the banker's other nephew is Clodius, an 
unfortunate depraved man, in love with Cicero's daughter, Julia.

Catilina's young lover, Wow Platinum, a showgirl, leaves him because he 
is too busy with his work and the memory of his wife... the architect 
and Julia meet on a live TV show with Cicero and become lovers. Wow 
marries the elderly Crassus III... Clodius tries to steal the bank from 
his uncle... manipulates a video in which Catilina has sex with an 
underage singer... Cicero has the architect arrested but it turns out 
that the girl is twenty-three years old and he is released. Meanwhile, a 
Soviet satellite crashes into Earth and destroys part of New Rome. 
Catilina, with the wealth of his family, begins to build Megalopolis on 
the ruins of the city... in a press conference he claims that his 
architectural/artistic intentions are aimed at creating a better 
world... but poverty in the streets increases, Clodius sets himself up 
as a populist leader and encourages the Roman municipalities to oppose 
the grandiose project of Magalopolis.

Julia becomes pregnant with Catilina and takes her father to see the 
construction site of Megalopolis... the architect's utopianism does not 
impress her and she asks him to leave Julia. Catilina and Julia's 
daughter, Sunny Hope, is born. Wow tries to force Catiline to break up 
with Julia and marry her... he freezes the account at Crassus Bank and 
convinces Clodius to seduce Crassus III into giving him control of his 
activities... the banker discovers his nephew's double-cross and becomes 
very ill... Clodius hires an assassin and has Catiline killed... the 
doctors reconstruct his skull with Megalon and bring him back to life.

Clodius' supporters start a riot and try to storm Megalopolis and the 
town hall... Clodius and Wow mock Crassus III who is now bedridden... 
the old banker takes up a crossbow, kills Wow and wounds Clodius. 
Catiline and Cicero join forces against the rioters... Catiline gives a 
speech to the crowd about achieving a more beautiful city for all, the 
people rebel against Clodius and hang him upside down. Crassus III 
supports the financing of Megalopolis... on New Year's Eve Catilina and 
Julia stop time and it turns out that Sunny Hope is the only one not 
influenced by such power: the future debuts on the birth of a city in 
the hands of a banker, a mayor and an architect, all members of the same 
family... now there are three godfathers (maybe Coppola was fascinated 
by the mafia in his early childhood?!)... a perfect oligarchy... and the 
poor, the spectators, the accomplices?... it is enough for them to 
religiously obey the idols of contemporaneity and align themselves on 
the ruins of freedom of thought, to be condemned to imposed happiness.

What can we say?... at this point we are amazed by such a 
fantasy-hodgepodge that we burst out laughing over a canapé of idiotic 
words or we are offended by the mystique of imbecility that comes to us 
from placing a paper bomb in the cinema... and going to talk to a 
drunken tramp about the melancholy of nightingales in public gardens, 
who forge their incomparable songs about a rose that blooms in the May rain.

Let's start from the bottom... to finance Megalopolis, Coppola sells 
some vineyards from his company in California and collects 120 million 
dollars, he says... a sum that would be enough to throw the Israeli 
fascists out of Palestine... the film has it all... Metropolis (1927) by 
Fitz Lang, Atlantis (1932) by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, The Life After 
Tomorrow (1933) by William Cameron Menzies, The Fountainhead (1949) by 
King Vidor... the ideas of the controversial urban planner, civil 
servant, politician, Robert Moses (responsible for the restructuring of 
New York between 1930 and 1970)... Coppola also throws in Shakespeare, 
Hobbes, Voltaire, Goethe, Freud, Marcus Aurelius... and James Bond, 
Batman, Duckburg, Mouseton, Broadway... all ghostly in the scenographic 
opulence of Beth Mickle and Bradley Rubin, in the video game photography 
of Mihai Malaimare Jr., in the incongruous editing of Cam McLauchlin, 
Glen Scantlebury, Robert Schafer and, together with the music of Osvaldo 
Golijov and Grace Avery VanderWaal, encase the film in an aesthetic of 
fatality that leads to an ecstatic butchery closer to saints and 
assassins than to the subversive leprosy of the damned poets of the 
machine/cinema. Cinema deserves to be experienced only for the delights 
that blossom from its disintegrations.

Coppola's film architecture is a long commercial for a science fiction 
toymaker, a sort of Eden forged on the happiness of fools... the acting 
of Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, 
Shia Saide LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, Grace 
Avery VanderWaal, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman... 
is a wax museum catwalk... everyone seems to be there by chance... 
corpses resigned to the burial of the spirit... they float in a 
disposable film, with the predilection of arousing clamor and consensus 
at the box office... they seem more foolish than a politician who 
flatters the crowds to peace and then becomes an accomplice of the arms 
dealers who bankroll his government. It's one thing to discover cinema 
through Nothingness and another thing to discover Nothingness through 
cinema.

Megalopolis is a story overloaded with pretexts, vanity, postmodern 
nihilism that falls into the halo of the financial economy, in 
utilitarian prayer and political corruption bent to the stench of the 
spectacular society, where the rich will be increasingly richer and the 
poor more impoverished. The funereal horizon of colors, sounds and 
dialogues overflows into an infinite daily life that preludes new gods 
and plague spreaders who remedy all the sins of man and hang them like 
coffins on bank counters and the tyranny of profit... only an eternal 
subversion of the make-up-free moments can distance us from the autumn 
of categories and make the models of life widowers... in order not to go 
mad with disappointment, we must choose between murder and dreams, be 
more sincere than angels and work like moles enlightened by the 
resurrection of disgust, to the overthrow of an upside-down world.

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