This Week and This Week Only Read About:
- a wildly original vision
- a monster flop
- a talented cast
- an egotistic fiasco
- … also a trans double features, a classic doc, toxic fans and music!
Thanks to wallflower, Ruck Cohlchez, Miller, and scb0212 for stepping up to the mic this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
The A.V. Club‘s Jacob Oller makes a compelling comparison between Francis Ford Coppola’s new film and the work of Neil Breen [Note: This article appears in AVC’s Spoiler Space, so be warned… although if anything qualifies as a spoiler for Megalopolis the FAR did not see it here]:
That intimate, sincere, inscrutable individuality is what makes these guardrail-less films endearing. You don’t feel like you could connect all their dots even if you’d spent as much time thinking about them as the auteurs willing them into existence. Breen and Coppola had the necessary funding to platform their idealistic yet vague viewpoints with soapboxed directness. When money is no object, what do you create? The answer, it seems, is something in your image, using the skills and styles at your disposal. Breen’s films are crudely hewn from stock images and free sound effects. Coppola puts a kaleidoscope up to his soul.
David Ehrlich – writing from a Cannes-induced fog months ago for Indiewire – finds things to chew on among the chaos of the movie:
So while it might be tempting to see this kooky, nepotistically cloistered, and unconscionably expensive magnum opus as the self-involved work of a fading artist who’s lost whatever was left of his ability to tell good ideas from bad, “Megalopolis” does everything in its power to remind the audience that we share in the outcome of its demented fever dream. Which isn’t to say that we’re obligated to make this particular movie a success, only that we’d do well to examine the source of whatever hostility it might reflexively produce within us. Why does change scare us so much that we’d sooner forfeit our freedom to imagine a better world than reckon with the possibilities such freedom allows? Quoth Marcus Aurelius again: “The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make of it.”
Writing at SFGate, Drew Margary, uh, disagrees [this one definitely does have spoilers for the movie]:
[P]erhaps those warnings haven’t been enough. Perhaps, like me, you keep a soft spot in your heart for Coppola, a member of the auteur revolution who made a string of masterpieces through the ’70s and ’80s, but has made none since. Perhaps, like me, you were drawn in by a cast that includes Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman, the god Giancarlo Esposito and other luminaries. And perhaps, like me, you’re so worn out by corporate filmmaking that you’re down with any movie that showcases pure artistic ambition, even if the end result is a misfire. Maybe this thing is a disaster, but maybe that’s the fun of it, yeah? Like gawking at a car wreck? Wrong. This movie is unwatchable. It deserves to live in infamy, with its title acting as shorthand for any multimillion-dollar flop borne out of monstrous ego. I took a bullet watching “Megalopolis” for you. An actual bullet would have been kinder.
Megalopolis is but one of three Aubrey Plaza projects that debuted this week (alongside Agatha All Along and My Old Ass). Yet Kyle Buchanan and The New York Times finds the actress insatiable:
“I’m never going to not be hungry to find parts,” she said. “It’s almost a survival thing for me where I need to act or I’ll just die.” There’s humor to be found in the gulf between the grandness of Plaza’s statements and the flatness of her voice. Still, you shouldn’t mistake all she says for sarcasm. “I don’t take anything lightly,” she told me, a mandate she extends to her work. “Even if it’s a comedy, I treat it the same: I’m very intense about whatever I’m doing.” The longer we brunched, the more I agreed. Maybe the popular perception of Plaza has been wrong all along: What so many people describe as her lack of affect may instead be a barely concealed fervor, a tremor beneath the surface threatening to become the Big One if she ever dares to let it emerge.
Enough! On to other business. At WBUR, Sean Burns talks to Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay about their book Corpses, Fools and Monsters and their upcoming programming of trans double features at a local theater – Silence of the Lambs with T-Blockers, and I Saw The TV Glow with Sleepaway Camp:
What’s maybe most impressive about “Corpses, Fools and Monsters” is how even-keeled the book is, approaching sometimes hatefully misguided portrayals of trans people in a good faith attempt to explore the circumstances that produced them….Disreputable is a generous way to describe “Sleepaway Camp,” a nasty little movie that Maclay and Gardner concede they have no great affection for, but one that looms so large in the canon of onscreen trans depictions that it can’t be ignored. “The ending has been discussed for as long as I’ve been a cinephile, which is 20-some-odd years now,” Maclay said. “There are some images that are in communication with one another from ‘Sleepaway Camp’ to ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ that link the teenage experience to dysphoria in a way that I think is really interesting and curious.”
Nick Pinkerton has a lengthy discussion with RaMell Ross about his Hale County This Morning, This Evening at Metrograph:
I think there’s only two or maybe three continuity cuts in the film… I break every rule because rules are just guidelines but, to me, the single unit of the shot is based on photography, which—to be a little reductive, though I think truthful—the single image is about the single image, and the moving image is traditionally about a series of images for a point. The idea of bringing the cinematic universe to a single point, and providing that point with all the meaning possible—which is the difference between the photograph and the moving image. There’s nothing more you can do with the single image, so you have to do your best because the singles stand alone. But the other one, you’re allowed not do it all, you know—so like, “What happens if you do it all in every image, and then you give it time?” was the concept.
For Variety, Adam B. Vary talks to studios about their strategies around the few but vocal shitty fans of franchises:
Those who did talk with Variety all agreed that the best defense is to avoid provoking fandoms in the first place. In addition to standard focus group testing, studios will assemble a specialized cluster of superfans to assess possible marketing materials for a major franchise project. […] Several studio insiders say they often put their talent through a social media boot camp; in some cases, when a character is intentionally challenging a franchise’s status quo, studios will, with the actor’s permission, take over their social media accounts entirely. When things get really bad — especially involving threats of violence — security firms will scrub talent information from the internet to protect them from doxxing.
And finally, enjoy Pitchfork‘s too-early assessment of the best songs and albums of the 2020s (so far):
By the time “I Want You to Love Me” reaches its final chorus, Apple begins to tear down its walls and it all begins to sound like a fever dream; its experimental tendons spasm like an uncanny spell, turning love into something queer and undiscovered. Apple has always been a truth teller, but on “I Want You to Love Me” she transforms into the rare seer, articulating our deepest desires for connection with a wisdom so analog it could break some of the strongest curses of this decade.