Ep.#437 - Megalopolis, with Roman Mars

Hi, floppers.

Before we start this episode, I just wanted to remind you: we are in the middle of Flop TV Season 2.

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This time, it's personal.

On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis.

I got a feeling this is going to be a mega love fest.

That's the good one.

Yum, yum.

Delish.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome to the Flop House.

I'm Dan McCoy.

And I'm Stuart Wellington.

I'm Elliot Kalen.

And I'm Roman Mars.

Wait, what?

Hold on a second.

What?

How did you get here?

How did you get here?

Dan, I told you, you got to have your apartment fumigated.

You got to get a Roman Mars infestation.

Someone much more respectable got in here somehow.

I got on my lit up moving sidewalk and I landed right here.

Wow, in the city of the future, aka the pop-ass.

Yeah, well, we, you know, this is a special movie, a very special movie.

So we had to have a very special guest.

Elliot, why don't you talk a little bit about Roman being on the show?

Because you have been doing some work with, you've been moonlighting, you've been cheating on us with another podcast.

That's right.

It's been so exciting to be discovering new things with another host, discovering new things about myself, showing them things about me that you guys have gotten bored with.

But are you going to be a little bit more like a bad

co-host?

It's made you a better co-host of the Flophouse, honestly.

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's this?

You haven't done this in years.

And I've got a spring in my step and a song in my heart.

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.

And so what better person have come talked to us than Roman Mars, with whom I have been co-hosting the 99% invisible breakdown, The Powerbroker.

All throughout this year, we have been taking on one of the greatest works of nonfiction writing, or I would say writing period in American literature,

The Powerbroker by Robert Carro.

Every month, we break down 100 pages of it.

We just recorded our penultimate.

summary episode where we actually made our way through most of the book at this point.

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.

It is messed up.

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.

But

I thought because we're talking about a movie that's all about New Rome, we would bring in the best Roman we know name-based pun in actual Roman.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

That's right.

No, I'm very, very happy to be here.

Thank you so much for having me.

And I don't think if 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

you wouldn't make this, as I did, the only movie I've seen in the theater for the past couple of days.

That's amazing.

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.

No, I mean,

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.

But then when we all decided to do this together, I'm like, oh, great.

I can see it on a big screen.

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

Yeah.

What was the last one we did in Last Flop House in the Isles we did?

Last Exorcist, I think.

Or Last Exorcism.

The one with Brussels Corruption.

Was Madam Webb

since then?

Oh, Madam Webb was...

Oh, did we?

No, you know what?

It wasn't the theater when we saw it.

Yeah, yeah.

It was the theater movie.

Yeah.

So

we talked about Madam Webb's.

I mean, another title.

Webb connects us all.

Kind of like how Megalon connects all these houses.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

So 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're like, got to see this new Marvel or Star Wars movie or whatever in the theaters.

I'm like, I don't have to because I'll be able to see it on my nicely sized JCV at home.

This movie conceivably could disappear.

It is a Francis Ward Coppola-owned thing.

It's amazing to me that it was a national release movie.

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.

So we had to see it when we could see it.

I guess I see what you're saying in the sense that the response to this was so,

I mean, there are people who are like, wow, big swing.

Love you, Francis.

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

i mean even he doesn't have a vineyard anymore

he only sold part of it he only sold part of the vineyard but if he wants to recoup anything like it has to go to streaming it has to be available

it's more that so it was distributed theatrically by lionsgate but i 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 and maybe it's up on maybe it's francifer coupla's youtube channel that he uploads all of megalopolis to in 10 chapters or something like that but yeah his tick tock channel he just splits it all up.

But, you know, in a way,

didn't Lionsgate also distribute Borderlands this year?

Man, they're having a tough one.

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 are, to have a movie that is one, one, literally one guy paid for it himself.

It is.

Anyway, that's all a long way of saying, like, 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 my only chance to see this movie 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 you know yeah

there was only one theater showing it when I was looking wow

well this it was there was maybe a couple but it was like showing at 3 p.m.

or something at Emery Bay makes sense in the Bay Area tech companies hate this guy

cocoa country that's the Bay Area you know his offices were in San Francisco he lives up over in the Napa area like and then we ended up seeing it at the the kabuki my wife and I saw at 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.

But it was,

it was, it was a weird experience.

That was a weird vibe.

I want to ask,

how does your wife feel about our podcast now that

you compose this?

There was about midway through

the movie where she looked at me and she said,

Why is Francis Ford Coppola doing this to us?

But it it started from the very beginning.

We sat down, empty theater.

It didn't stay empty, but it started empty.

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.

Your wife is a very friendly person.

There's something very welcoming about her.

So I get it.

I was like, and it already started.

I 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.

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 and it just got weirder.

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.

I responded to the picture.

I took your notes in the dark of the Alamo.

Yeah, being able to do that.

Well, I mean, we're going to see how good these notes are.

Since I transcribed them onto note cards, and I'm like, what the fuck does this say?

To be fair, to be fair, truly, it couldn't say that about Claudio.

This is an intricate puzzle box of a movie.

Every link indelibly forged to the next so that it just like it's airtight.

The thing is airtight.

So I'm going to need some help here, guys.

So, Megalopolis.

Movie opens with what?

Like,

but like a title card, right?

That's like Megalopolis a fable.

Yeah, and it like right off the bat is like, hey,

modern society is kind of like Rome if you think about it.

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's not going to make sense.

This is, this is a, this is a, that, that's calling it a fable, really.

It's like when we did North a while back, I was thinking about these, these interviews I've heard with Alan Zweibal, who wrote North, and he just kept saying, it's a fable.

Like, it's a fairy tale.

Why do people dislike it?

It's like, you can't just

bandage over a movie that doesn't make sense by calling it a equivalent of being like, I washed my hands of this at the beginning of the movie.

Well,

it's like when a political candidate says something racist, and they're like, it was a joke.

Come on, everybody.

Like, well, if people have liked it, you wouldn't say it was a joke.

But anyway, that never happens.

So we have to worry about it.

But you're right, Stuart.

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?

And we have to do that.

We have title cards that look like they're chiseled into marble.

So you're like, oh, that's like classic Roman shit.

Okay, so

let's just talk about some of the characters and then we'll get into the plot.

I think that's easy.

It's easier than trying to walk us through

the actual sequence, which is baffling.

Yeah.

Our protagonist is Caesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver.

It's impossible to say this name and not smile.

I mean, come on.

Yeah, he's eating it in Catalina Island.

Uh-huh.

And it's a Caesar salad.

I love it.

He's the ultimate fantasy of eating a Caesar salad on Catalina Island.

Or with Catalina dressing on it.

Oh, yeah.

Stop it.

Stop it, guys.

Turn the cameras off.

It's two type of salads in one.

So he is the

side of a sandwich like this, the ultra salad.

He is the genius head of the design authority of New Rome,

whose task is to design things like buildings and plan plan out the plan out the city right city planning type stuff he is that he is the master builder of new roam he is also the inventor or discoverer of megalon a magic super substance yes and he also

he also has the ability to stop time oh yes and i do not object to this film having a magical realist uh component um 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.

I mean, it's, I would, I met

the

finish, yeah.

But this is a very large, bizarre element to be added to the film with no apparent, like,

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.

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.

And

Adam Driver's character is so clearly a stand-in for the artist and in this case, the filmmaker.

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.

Like he never uses it for anything.

As a plot device, it is like an anti-checkoff's gun.

Like, it never pays off in any meaningful way of how the story goes.

And especially when you're talking about someone who is struggling in a power play, you would, you think, why don't you use some of your time-stopping powers to fucking

stop timing and pull the mayor's pants down so he looks ridiculous when you start timing it.

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?

They'd be like, I know 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.

This show sucks.

I think also, to me, an element 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.

Especially for like a filmmaker like Copla, I'm sure that that's part of it for him.

Well, it reminds me of the, uh, it reminds me of the, 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.

And Kubrick says, you can if you freeze it.

And so 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.

Sorry, I got a leg cramp, so

I'm dancing around my chair.

Okay, 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.

That's Mayor Frank Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, who plays it a little hammy.

I feel like Adam Driver is pretty straight in this one.

I mean,

what about that?

I always say he's straight.

I mean, he's like, Driver is...

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

the best performances in the movie are the biggest performances, I feel like.

Well, I here's what, here's what I'd say.

There are very hammy performances in this movie that are fun to watch because what else are you going to do in a movie called Megalopolis with all this stuff in it than chew the scenery?

And then there's Adam Driver, who magically seems to create a grounded and consistent character despite the movie around him being gibberish.

Like she's amazing.

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.

Natalie Emmanuel is the daughter.

The black is good in other things, but is sort of not served by the scene.

Yeah, do you see her in that John Wu 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 amazing.

It's a solid move.

It's cool.

I mean, if you're not sure what that is, that's why people do it all the time.

That's why it's such a common move.

It's a great move, but you can only do it once.

The drum driver is set up.

It feels like it's set up at at first 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 even though adam driver is kind of a robert most life character it quickly becomes no he's a genius and everyone needs to just like sdf you and let him do whatever he wants to do you know

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.

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.

She can 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 ability or at least intellectual skill that Caesar has.

And then the last 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 what he was doing here.

He brings a lot of juice.

Well, as we'll see, he does deliver the best line in the entire movie

later towards the end of the film.

Yeah, I mean, he's had a lot of practice

both playing and being ritualed assholes.

And Donnery.

Yeah, it's his thing.

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 Reimar shows up, like D.B.

Sweeney shows up.

It's all these well-known faces.

D.B.

Sweeney?

From the cutting edge?

I know.

And like Jason Schwartzman has a very good scene later on where he plays drums.

Yes.

Talia Shire, family member of Francis Ford Coppola, shows up.

But

it feels like one of these movies that is overstuffed with people, and you have to imagine there is is hours and hours of footage.

We didn't even talk about Lawrence Fishburne, who is Lawrence Fishburne, who's the narrator/slash chauffeur.

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

Wow Platinum,

journalist extraordinaire, but

she's very clearly a take on Maria Bartaromo.

Maria Bartaroma, the money bunny, because she calls herself the money honey in this, right?

Or is the other way around?

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.

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.

Listeners write in.

Okay.

Or don't.

But these are, I mean, we'll get like much as is it Jared Leto and Hoseaguchi who, right?

Much as his performance is at the level the movie wants to be at, I feel like these two are at the level the movie wants to be at, which is cartoonish.

Yeah, I mean, it feels very much like Aubrey Plaz is doing a performance of her character, April Ludgate, doing a performance of this character almost.

Yeah.

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 now roman you know you know urban study stuff is this usually how like a new a new city development is 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 yeah it's similar to all the ones i've been to for sure but is it the dramatic lighting all this sort of thing it just

This is for the beginning of the nonsense, especially the big talk with nothing inside of the big talk.

Yeah, well, apparently Adam Driver had a speech that he was supposed to deliver in this scene.

And Coppola, to loosen him him up, said, why don't you just go out there and do the to-be or not-to-be soliloquy from Hamlet?

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.

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?

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.

So we get a little bit of further backstory.

We get, it turns out that Caesar Catalina has a tragic backstory.

His wife was

potentially what, like killed by him.

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, 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, in the drowned car and night of the hunter.

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.

And so, yeah, there's, there's bad blood and he's a bad boy.

It's bad blood over a bad boy.

Now, speaking of bad boy.

Adam Driver, ironically, they said that he drove her to death.

That is ironic.

That's ironic.

Thanks for explaining irony to me.

So he's a bad boy because he's also kind of secretly dating WoW Platinum.

And they have this scene where they are kind of hooking up in a very messy hotel room or apartment.

He kind of

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.

That's the Academy Award winner for the screenplay for Patton who wrote that line.

Shot off your pistols into the air.

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.

And

then Adam Driver is 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?

No, it's kind of, I think it's kind of taken for granted on his part and maybe the movie's part that everyone already kind of has a sense of Megalopolis, his dream city that he wants to build.

But he does not present, I think that was probably the speech he was going to give in the original screenplay.

Well, that's the thing.

Also, you know, look,

casinos are basically never the answer, but the way it's at least presented.

You're the answer to where can I get a cheap steak at three in the morning.

The way it is at least presented here is the mayor is like, hey, you've got all these, you know, pie-in-the-sky ideas, but like they're people who need things right now, and I'm going to give them to them.

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.

Like,

why am I supposed to

sympathize immediately with Adam Driver?

Because he can stop time?

Great.

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, is this casino.

And then, and then Adam Driver offers, right, no counter-argument whatsoever.

So I was trying to get, like, this is my, my, this is the beginning of my frustration with this movie.

Up till now, you were totally on board.

Yeah.

I love it.

I love it.

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?

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,

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 he trying?

What does this utopia mean other than the word utopia?

What is the casino?

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,

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.

That's that.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing kind of Elliot pointed out.

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.

Right.

And that he's at odds with the mayor.

And there's an actual question as to which one, who's right.

But the movie is like, nope, Caesar's right.

Yeah, listen to the smaller.

I'm interested in that.

I really think

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.

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.

And I have this new element, Coppolon.

I mean, Megalon.

Like, that's the only way.

And I don't know if that's a good idea.

It would have been funnier if they called it Copeland.

And I don't know if it's that explicit in his head or if that was his intention, but that's the way I can read it as a metaphor where it starts to make sense.

But that's the only thing that make that's the only thing.

That's the only way it makes sense.

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 I don't, it's one of those things where it's like, obviously populism is bad.

We need a genius who can cut through things.

And it's like, well, that's fascism.

Like that's like, like you're like,

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.

But that's the thing, like as you're doing the synopsis, that the main thing that is like 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.

And instead,

it just moves on.

You know, like, and it's, 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 with a casino?

These ideas, like none of them stick, none of them are consistent.

I think John Carlos Bezita or Mayor Cicero might stick.

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.

Like, I can at least understand that.

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.

Plant buildings, a home for everyone with apparently tons of space now.

I don't know.

I'm like, did half the population die?

Did everybody get

I mean, well, there was a, you'll see, there's a disaster that opens up quite a bit of extra space for 15 minutes to this two and a half.

I'm sorry for moving this backward when we should be moving forward.

So this scene happens.

You realize his relationship with Wild Platinum.

With Wild Platinum.

I kind of enjoyed that name.

That was one where I was like, I'm into that.

I mean,

everything about Aubrey Plaza's performance and character is on the level of a political editorial cartoon, which is kind of weird this movie wants to exist, you know?

And she knows how to play these characters, you know?

Meanwhile, Julia Cicero bluffs her way into the office of Caesar Catalina, and we have a little bit of a verbal sparring between the two of them.

She wants to get in on this Caesar Catalina Department of this design authority stuff.

And he has initially

sent him a letter to insult him, right?

And she wants it back because she doesn't want to embarrass her dad.

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.

This is like

Adam Driver.

Andy looks like Adam Driver, which is where he tells her.

It's not everyone's taste, but you know, most people.

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 like a ton of stuff.

It's a fun reading, is what it is.

It's a funny reading.

He's trying to make fun of the idea of the cool club.

He also, 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 yeah uh it's great um and then he everyone on Twitter yeah it's great he then takes her he then takes her to uh a scale a not probably not perfectly to scale cardboard model of the city and has her walk through it with her eyes closed and she pictures the megalopolis that could be

uh 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-organic It looks like every CGI rendering proposal of a skyscraper in New York when they're like, here's what we're going to 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.

Yeah, it looks like

the cover of a super melodic tech death album cover.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I also hate to slow this down, but in terms of the look of this film, I hate to slow this down, but

I'd like to do the Bob and Ray Slow Talkers of America sketch.

Great sketch.

The look of this movie is all over the place, partly, I assume, because

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.

I mean, even though this is $120 million of his own money, it wasn't enough.

And, like, it's what he could afford in certain scenes.

Like, but I think that there's some scenes that are genuinely like beautiful and visually striking and some of them look like uh you know maybe a c tier uh cgi uh effects companies reel

and some of it looks like they got it off of storybox or something you know which is you know there's some beautiful stuff on there a former uh a former story block says it has a lot of great footage but it's not what you'd expect from a major motion picture yeah it's odd to see what seems to be stock footage just sort of interspersed in this thing this is definitely the story there's a so they were making a documentary about the making this movie at the same time that they're making the movie and it hasn't come out yet.

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.

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 goes, he has a parade and everybody's like mean to him and don't like him.

They're all booing him.

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

I think the tuba player in the marching band.

He gets recruited to go off with Claudio.

And I'm like, I guess this is going to be an important character, but it's not really.

Like, they spend 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.

Okay,

fast forward a little bit.

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.

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, 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.

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 has exhausted itself, that is losing the energy that made it great once.

And I'm like, oh, this is the kind of beautiful, straightforward metaphor that

he's not achieving through most of the movie.

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.

Yeah.

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.

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.

And it just felt that.

That was my favorite visual moment in the whole movie

was the statues and the and the sort of dilapidated parts of New Rome.

That worked on me totally.

And it's, 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.

But that's where it delivers being a fable, is the thing.

That's like, I want it to, yeah.

I want it to be a fable.

Yeah, yeah, when you saw those statues, you're like, we have title finally.

So, Rome,

I have a movie for you called The Fablemans that you might enjoy more.

Yeah, it's a real fable.

Yeah.

Fable-oriented.

It's about a little mouse.

So that's right.

Fable Goes West.

I apologize.

That's an American tale.

Fable Goes West.

Caesar's car stops in front of a mysterious glowing flower stall that appears in the middle of the street.

Julia sees this and says, that doesn't make sense.

And I'm like, it doesn't make sense.

You're right.

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 an appointed like a well-appointed room with attendants and his wife is in the bed.

But in reality, he's just like sitting on a bed, right?

Like there's no wife there at all.

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.

Like she sees reality, but seems to understand, oh, he thinks his wife is there.

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

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

it.

He has like a burn book of all the people he doesn't like and Caesar Catalina's written down yeah maybe that's it this character doesn't need a motivation I mean and Shia LaBeouf I think he's harnessing his natural uh unlikability for this character in a really strong way 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 yeah I just assume that uh Caesar Catalina, like, I don't know, uh, accidentally threw some logs in the fire when they were sitting around the fire and it burned off Shila Buff's eyebrows.

So that's why he hates him because he has he has like painted on eyebrows or something, right?

Yeah, just like Superman allegedly, yeah.

Okay, so

shortly after this, I guess it's like the next day or something,

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, right?

And where they can gaze down upon

all of New Rome and kind of see as everything moves.

Maybe it's sort of like they're hanging out on top of like a mobile, like

you put over either a baby or you'd have in an art gallery on either side of the sort of spectrum of mobiles.

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.

Meanwhile, I think there's a, there's, yeah, there's nothing, in my notes, there's nothing particular.

It just says clocks.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, we get a wedding between Wild Platinum and Crassus the banker guy.

Is that, I don't remember his last name.

Is that his last name?

I think Crassus is his last name.

John Voigt.

Yeah, John Voigt.

Okay.

So this is clearly

Wild Platinum

is this is a power play for her.

She wants access to her.

He's Hamilton Crassus III.

Thank you.

Hamilton Crassus III.

Thank you.

And so we have a big, fancy wedding.

It's a wedding that has everything.

It has gladiators.

It has guys riding chariots around on the inside of a Coliseum.

Caesar shows up and a pop star shows up wearing dress made.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is me.

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, I don't know if they're at the circus now.

I don't necessarily look at it.

Like the Marx Brothers.

It's a celebration of their betrothal, though, right?

I mean, maybe it's for a reception.

Who knows?

Yeah, but that's why they're doing it.

Yeah.

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.

Yes,

this is Vesta Sweetwater.

This Megalon dress is.

perfect camouflage does not matter for later there's no moment where you're like oh you can use uh megalon if if you cover yourself like the Predator can't see you or something.

That doesn't matter.

Nope.

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, that's it.

Just an idea.

Just an effect.

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.

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.

So it's like

to make them like their shoulders very broad, lots of capes and stuff like that.

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,

well, 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.

You know, Roman talked earlier about when the movie started to sort of lose him.

And I want to talk about- I think he meant when he lost himself in the film, right?

He lost himself in the moment.

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.

And that like during this whole circus sequence, I'm like, oh, like it, 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.

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.

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.

It's kind of delivering the bread and circuses that

to placate, you know, people in the audience.

Yeah, I'm one of the idiot idiot rabble.

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

It is throwing a lot.

But it's like,

I think the point, which is easy to get into, is the sneering at

the wealthy and sneering at their excess and stuff like that.

And

it's totally, I mean, it works.

That works.

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.

Meanwhile, scheming little Claudio, who is

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.

And the idea is that she is supposed to be a, like a young virgin right 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 which we learn later yeah this is like statutory rape it seems but it's not actually yeah

but is it the premise of all this like that these old men the old rich oligarchy is betting on her virginity?

Like betting.

Is that happening?

I believe that's true.

Yes.

They're like betting that she's going to keep her promise, right?

Like they're not auctioning off her virginity, right?

I thought that what that was happening there.

Like that, but but you guys took notes.

I did.

Somehow the economy of this city is balanced on her promise of staying a virgin until marriage.

Yeah.

But I thought they were sort of like bidding to keep her a virgin somehow, but I don't know what the mechanics of that are.

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 safety of the spiritual safety of Rome.

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.

Like Rome, yeah, they had a senate.

Yeah, that's true.

But also like religion and politics were the same thing.

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.

In a way, don't we do that these days, though?

Well, you're right, Stu.

I'm the ones being naive.

Yeah.

But I did interpret this as way more sinister than maybe it was.

Yeah, my notes say fundraiser question mark, pledging for purity question mark.

Yeah, I think they are, I think they are, I think it's like a, it's like a marathon fundraiser where like you're pledging someone to run a marathon.

I think they're pledging for her to just stay a virgin.

And so when they see her on tape, supposedly in bed with

Caesar Kettle.

Yeah, they're like, I wasted all that money.

Yeah.

And everybody's like, the underpinning of our city is all wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah, everyone is incensed by this.

Like, the crowd is banging for blood.

This is after her big musical number, though, right?

Yeah, after her big musical number.

I didn't talk about it, but do you want to talk about it lately?

Oh, just that 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 cool thing.

It's bad.

It's a cool looking scene.

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, we'll get to that.

Yeah.

Please get to it because I don't have it written down in my notes.

That's where, okay, when it's, I don't remember if it happens here, but like the scandal comes out that this video has been shown by every to uh,

you know, uh, uh, Shila Buff arranged for this video to be shown on the Jambotron of her in bed with uh with Adam Driver.

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.

And it's so, it feels so much like Francis Fort Coffee is 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.

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

Yeah, I think that that's a little sequence that happens a little bit later, and it's done like a totally like classic MTV news style, like explosion bit, and then like scenes of societal collapse.

Um, okay, uh, Adam Driver Caesar Catalina gets too drunk gets beaten up by some guys.

He gets whisked away.

The cops arrest him for statutory rape because of the video.

But then Julia goes into the archives and finds out actually Vesa Sweetwater is older than she's been telling everybody.

So she exonerates him.

Problem almost immediately solved.

But also don't we find out that the video is fake?

The video is fake and the views.

They like double up the explanations of like why this is fine.

and it feels like it feels like the movie is fainting towards fainting f-e-i-n-t not fainting like oh stars and garters

you know

the vapors yeah it's king a faint towards this guy might be a genius but he's not a good guy 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 said he tells julia you got to pretend to be bad or people lose interest in you or something like that 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 with it.

He's a a stirling saint, you know.

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.

Like Spider-Man, sometimes he loses his powers when he's in a bad mood or depressed.

And then they have a kind of sloppy makeout session.

I thought that was pretty great.

And then we get, and they decide to work together.

And we get a montage of them kind of falling in love and doing some work in the at the design authority um

the which by the way has really boring design like i really wanted those jackets to pop a little bit more they i was really bummed about that because i was like design authority all right let's spend some time with the design authority nothing nothing yeah yeah yeah muglair would be upset um uh robbery moses would be upset he was all about he was say what you will about him in his early work at least he's got a real design eye you know yeah uh claudio uh meanwhile one scheme foiled.

He's got more schemes to be had.

He starts trumpeting it up.

He sees what's going on and he's like, starts getting the getting the masses all angry.

They start backing him.

Later on, there's a scene where he's giving a stump speech, and the stump is literally

carved into the shape of a swastika.

Is that right?

It's pretty messed up.

Okay.

That's it.

I think the movie's pretty subtle.

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 Builder has built a baby.

Mayor Cicero doesn't like this idea.

He doesn't like the idea that they're going to have a kid.

So he tries to 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.

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.

Yeah, okay.

I want to make sure that we get the

full thing.

The full thing.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Because I don't want people to listen to this and be like, this movie doesn't sound that crazy.

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

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.

They're like painted as rocks and and then they sort of move and you see that they're people and I 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.

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.

And then

Megalon, mostly Megalon is like Herbie the robot from the Fantastic Four cartoon, or like, who's the little alien that hung out with the Flintstones?

What was that?

The Great Kazoo?

The Great Kazoo.

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.

And it's like,

it's such a strange, like goofy thing to have.

It's like, oh, yeah, it's this is the miracle medal of the future.

Anyway, I got a lump of it and it just floats around my apartment.

It's kind of 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?

Yeah.

And they're like discussing string theory and shit.

It's like a megaloplas exhibit.

It's like an exhibit of what megalops would be like or something like that.

Yeah.

Does that come after the

destruction of the city?

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.

Okay.

I forgot about that satellite.

There's a Soviet satellite that, yeah, is they're like, anyway, its orbit has decayed.

It's going to hit the city.

And they're like, whoa-oh.

And then they don't do anything about it for a while.

Nothing weird.

I was starting to realize that taking these notes in the dark, it was a lot easier to take notes on Madam Webb, Megalopolis, a more straightforward film that, you know, follows a screenplay formula that has been entrenched in Hollywood.

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 look like.

And the buildings all look like plants.

And the idea is like the buildings grow as people need them.

Like, like it's a, it's a, 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?

Um, yeah.

I mean, has anyone tried that yet, growing buildings?

I mean, in, in a way, like Hunter Vasser was like really into

like mold and letting things grow because it was like true organic space and that the straight line is the godless line.

And you're going to want like

he died from the mold in his lungs, I assume.

Totally.

So there's a lot of, there have been big, lofty ideals about a kind of like organic architecture in a in like in a literal way, like to make it.

And then, and then there's the term organic architecture, like Frank Lloyd Wright style, that is, that just means it's reactive to it, you know, and changes to people's needs.

So that's all kind of that, those ideas are out there.

That is the closest thing this sort of dunderheaded movie gets to an idea.

Like,

um, that it, and, and it's, it's the first time you sort of get to this,

yeah, like, what does this utopia mean?

That it's, that it's like organic and reactive and serves people is actually that, that's an actual idea.

Everything else has just been like glowing walkways and nonsense, like, where I'm like, what is this for?

Like, what do you, you have to have, like, utopias like have to have a concept or something in this.

Like, what is what is the you 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 a magical substance that requires like no thought or care or design or whatever like politics and it just doesn't waste requires no energy to and it just does it all

and this is like like a huge problem like like that that you're gonna use some technology is going to save us rather than people like coming together and actually coming with solutions and working stuff out is like it's just it's just a nonsense idea that you can the thing is you're exploring for a couple of hours i think you say that until megalon does it works its magic yeah 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 yeah okay so this is after

this is then after the city is destroyed by a satellite falling to Earth, right?

Yeah, maybe.

Like this is

an amazingly large thing to happen and then not really be addressed that much.

Like we get some like 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, 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 because people's relationships to each other will change wildly between scenes without explanation.

Like Juan Carlo Exposito was like just saying, like,

you know, trying to pay off Adam Driver to get away from his daughter.

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.

I'm like, okay, well, what happened here?

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.

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 all said.

Please.

And there's also, but you're right, Dan, because like Dustin Hoffman's character, who's an assistant to the mayor, he dies off camera.

We hear about it.

We go, oh, yeah, he's dead.

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.

And Shila Buff 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.

And at the same time, Wow Platinum approaches Catalina and is like, hey, look, why don't 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.

And that's when

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.

Like, there's no way this kid is reading Caesar Catalina's book.

I don't know, man.

Everybody loves Caesar Catalina.

I think that's pretty clear.

Okay.

But then Stewart,

how do they heal him?

How do they hear that?

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.

And he has this like weird death dream, but then they end up healing him by fusing his head with some megalon they just stick megalon on his head on the open skull that's there and this truly is an amazing building material yeah so we uh at this point caesar then goes oh but then having the megalon in his face gives him lots of like new powers and hell yeah like the multiple man yeah he shows up at crassus hamilton crassus's apartment uh

Claudio tries to harass him.

Wild 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.

Especially WoW herself.

And she is, so 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 something.

Force his hands.

And then, yeah, she offers herself again.

But Crassus kind of interrupts it.

But now, who does WoW set her sights on?

If she can't control Caesar Catalina.

Of course, she's going to pick, I guess, the next best thing, and that's Claudio Carassus.

That's right.

Um, and so she, we have a little uh sex scene.

You were probably into this, right, Dan?

It was like a like a like a Game of Thrones style sex position scene.

It was kind of like a Game of Thrones style sex scene where it's all about power, and you feel like, uh, is this, is this what they think sex is like?

Where she's like, stick your face in my butt.

Okay, now go over there, lie down there.

I mean, it can be like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's true.

Yeah, I, I, by the way, I just, I just really love being on this Zoom call and watching Roman's face face as he relives the plot.

Like, he's like, oh, yeah, that did.

That is a thing.

Like, what?

I have been going through that where I was just like, the satellite.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I'd forgotten about the satellite.

That really is, oh, my God.

This is a bunch of nonsense.

Like, I had streamlined it into like a much tighter movie in my memory

than

all this.

I'm just like,

you forgot all the good parts.

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 have, and I think the upshot of that is the idea that it now has opened up even more land 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.

This is just a stew of really, truly problematic and nasty, great man.

like tropes that like that like he's canceled for like 20 seconds but he's such a genius like obviously all that stuff that they say about him is fake you know and 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 nonsense 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 wrong.

You know what I mean?

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.

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.

It feels like something made by somebody very young or very old.

I know.

I feel like I believe in either a very young man or a very old man.

Yeah, I guess.

Or a very stoned man, which apparently he was.

Or a Gary old man.

A Gary old man?

It feels a lot like that.

Gary Old Banana, Gary Old Banana, Gary Old Manana.

Gary Old Bananas?

No, it feels Gary Indiana, but it's Gary Old Manas.

I know what you're singing.

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 Yodorowski Meta Barons book.

And he's like, I'm going to do it like this.

Yeah.

It kind of feels like

he's like, should I read the Powerbroker or The Ink Hall?

I'll read them both.

I'll just alternate pages.

Exactly.

this is so wait i wanted to ask you guys so this next part i want to so stuart summarize it and then i've got a question for everybody okay because i just want to let you know i have a question about i was just talking about wild platinum and claudio scheming to take over the bank uh they do it over sex and then uh crassis collapses yeah i'd like uh i'd like i'd like uh two eggs over sex please yeah

Yeah, yeah.

My Google calendar says sex meeting at 10 o'clock.

Okay.

So,

yeah, so then Crassus collapses.

He seems to have what, like a stroke or a headache.

He has a heart attack or a stroke.

Yeah.

And he collapses, leaving WoW and Claudio in charge.

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.

Thank you.

And marries them.

And then there is.

a montage of December holidays

in this kind of Abel Gans's Napoleon triple screen thing where you and it's suddenly it's winter again and and I was like did I hallucinate that it was spring and now it's winter again I don't know what and and it can't be the next year because the baby is is just is the same age as when they got married but this let's explain so did you guys have any sense of why there's suddenly a montage of winter holidays well um i would have to remember i also have to ask elliot my notes i just wrote down elvis What does that mean?

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,

like pandering to the masses.

I'm not sure, or maybe it's a busker and it's and it's a statement about the plastic artificiality of American values.

Yeah, that happens.

I don't, I'm not quite sure.

I love this new bit, Stuart Deciphers' notes, by the way.

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.

So around that.

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 you know it's like yeah everybody's represented i love it uh well everybody i mean three religions the now the city the city is inflamed with riots the masses are rioting against the mayor inflamed by claudio of course uh the mayor's family has to escape through secret uh secret train car tunnel

um

yep they go through the antique subway car tunnels that have been closed off for for years in the city you know there's that i 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.

I think that it looked like that place.

I wonder if they shot it there.

It's possible.

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.

Pride goeth before more success.

The old aphorism, yeah.

So they go into Hamilton Crassus' bedroom and something's it seems like he's pitching a little tent this is so this is so i want to get roman's take on this

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 and when this line came out i laughed so loud and they and nobody else in the audience reacted and i did not regret it at all and uh so does anyone want to

had been like john voyd has the best line of the movie.

And the whole time, like, did I miss it?

Was it one of those?

Like, was it just a line that is silly because Elliot's smarter than?

Well, I have a tale to tell about that, but let's get Romans.

Well, I don't, I have to be refreshed to the exact line.

I remember the most.

It's roughly, I'm not quoting it directly.

I mean, I'm trying to quote it.

I can quote it directly.

Oh, yeah.

So, say, so this rotation.

Turning to his son and wife,

he says, What do you think of this boner I got?

But then he reveals what the boner is.

It's a crossbow.

It's so funny.

He whips the blanket over and he's got a crossbow.

And it's like, it's so, this is this whole, if the whole movie had been at this level, I would have been like, yes, a thousand percent.

You know, 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 is this movie.

I just can't, I can't get it.

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.

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

To John Boyd's boner, yeah.

Or alleged boner.

He the interesting thing to me is like 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.

You know, like you think a good, you think a gun wouldn't have been able to make enough of a of a tent in the sheets i i mean he's a prime man now that's true so i think there is a my guess

though is 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 uh but also the as as we'll as we're we're recording this before our caddyshack 2 uh flop tv episode a movie which also includes someone getting hit in the butt with an arrow but uh somebody find out on saturday

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 that he's, that he's referencing, since there's so many references in this movie to other things that are floating around in Francis Fort Coppola's head.

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 in history that I would need to understand all of the.

What about their like turtle formation where they lock all their shields together?

You don't ever think about that?

I'm thinking about it now.

They look like a turtle, but with spears.

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.

Rarely.

I think about

ghoulies goes.

Is that a thing you think about?

A lot.

Oh, ghoulies goes to college.

Okay, so that's your Roman Empire.

Movies about small monsters, ghoulies and gremlins and munchies.

Yeah, Frankie Frico available on VOT right now.

Some stealth marketing for Frankie Frico right there, featuring the voices of a lot of people.

It was 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.

Like, I was kind of delighted, but it was like, it was the real classic, just this was so different and shocking.

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, like a real, like, I was like, I was like, oh, I remember that guy.

I like that guy's movies, you know.

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.

Totally.

But the, but.

And then the second greatest guy being shot in the head moment when Mo Green gets killed

at the end of the same movie.

he's really good at shooting people in faces.

And

he was

kind of wasted in this movie, to tell you the truth.

But

that was a moment of delight just because of the shocking violence.

Like I had no idea that that was what was about to happen.

So it was kind of like, all right, this thing's a lot.

But him talking about his boner just left you cold.

Well, no, I mean, I think the boner part was like comment.

It just, 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.

Well, speaking of fearing missing this, I knew that there was this line.

You know, all I had heard about was this line about how John Foy had this great line.

And the movie is very long.

Yeah.

And I...

It's not, well, it's not that long, but it feels long.

It's like about two hours, a little less than 220.

Yeah, okay.

It's longer than,

to my mind, the ideal length of the movie.

It's longer than train and comes into a station.

Two hours.

It's longer than the first movies.

It's longer.

The important thing is, it's longer than my bladder can stand.

So all through this movie, I was like, I got to wait out for this John Voigt line.

And then I finally, like, I'm in physical pain.

Like, I have to, I have to leave the theater.

Are you

pinching it with your...

It's not, no.

You've been literally pinching your urethra shot with your fingers.

Yeah, I was pinching my urethra.

Like you're trying to control a fire hose.

I had to pee so badly.

I was.

I was hurting.

Roman is really rethinking drops.

And I thought

I thought to myself, surely,

surely, it will not happen at this exact moment.

If I run to the restroom, I will not miss this iconic line.

And of course, it is exactly when this happens.

And you came back, and the audience was rolling on the floor laughing.

Well, I mean, fortunately.

Cheering, firing guns into the air, singing all lads.

Yeah, all that.

So I looked up the line, and fortunately, you know, someone had put most of the scene on TikTok, not the boner line.

Like,

I saw the rest of the scene that I had a lot of gold on the table.

Well, then, in the description, it was like,

like, dude, right before this, the guy said this line about his boner

because, like, apparently, like, they whipped out their phone.

They're like, oh man, I missed the key point, but something else crazy has got to happen with this setup.

You know,

because the other thing is, it's not like it's an 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 said by John Voigt in a scene near what you have to assume is the climax of the film.

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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What a, what a performance.

Okay.

So

so as we said, uh, Crassus gets his revenge.

The riots are running wild around New Rome.

Caesar appears as like a hologram or something, and he gives a speech

talking about like time and things like that and calms everybody down and like talk and like shows visions of his utopia.

Is that correct?

Is that what happens?

Yes, this is 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 to decide.

And the speech he gives is so

it's such it's just such vaporware.

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

It's, 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.

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.

What a true leader.

Platitudes.

Yeah.

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

Like, I don't, this doesn't mean anything to me.

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 truly tries to have it both ways.

Like, it, it has great contempt for almost all the rich people, which is fine.

Like, you can hate all the rich people all you want.

The job creators from it?

Crassus just, Crassus totally sucks, and all of Crassus' family sucks.

Obviously, it has this exception for Caesar because it was was sort of genius.

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.

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.

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.

There's no, like, 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.

And that is, and that's, like, I just, I just watched Life Force recently, and that's a movie

about a space vampire, 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.

Well, it's ostensible ideas are about 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 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.

You know, that's fine.

Like, you don't need the commoner has to be represented in every form of shit.

There's tragedies and there is kings and shit.

I'm so desperately trying to think of what Shakespeare title I can turn into a pun.

I've got another word for shit.

But it's just

B.

Emlet.

No, that doesn't work.

What?

I said King Smear.

King Smear works pretty well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Toilets and Cressida.

Does that work?

Yeah.

Why did we go down this road of all the roads?

Okay, speaking of roads, so Caesar promises these magical, floating, glowing robes that are all like the Rainbow Road and Super Mario.

Claudio's mob turns on him.

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 the fan and his family join

Caesar on this voyage.

They stand upon this glowing bridge.

People are all very excited.

They're celebrating.

And he manages to stop time for everyone except for little baby Caesar and Julian Caesar's baby.

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.

This is also, this is such an upsetting moment.

I think it's supposed to be a a moment of like

hope for the future, like this, this, this ability to exist outside of time and be a creative genius is now in their child as well.

But it's like, time is stopped except for this baby.

Who's going to feed this baby?

Like, who's going to unstop time?

Not since Under the Skin have I been more worried about an on-screen child who's being abandoned in front of me.

But the baby is the one stopping time, right?

Maybe.

It must be because she's the ones moving in every way.

But I thought she, but I thought, doesn't Julius hate to tell caesar to stop time maybe i'm maybe i'm misremembering it i don't know but then they're frozen like i mean i think she does but it doesn't the baby that does it well the baby doesn't know what she's doing it's very it's very upsetting to me it's very upsetting in the movie the feeling i get is that they're leaving the future for the next generation For the sequel, Megalopolis 2, Babyopolis.

My notes then say pledge allegiance.

Did something happen after this?

Was there like a speech or something?

There's a title card, and I think it's the narration, the narration read by children.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

And it's like we pledge allegiance to the human race or something like that.

I pulled this up in front of me because I wanted to make sure we had it.

It meant so much.

You printed it out and laminated it.

You 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.

the kids.

So stick that on a placard in front of your house for the next election about the values in this house.

Yeah.

Look,

the problem with that is that it comes at the end of Megalopolis.

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 paying education.

It doesn't fit with this movie, which this movie is about.

It doesn't really.

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 best for them.

And someone needs to make the decision.

It is a movie that I think is the person making it thinks they are making a pro-democracy, pro-equality justice movie, 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.

And I'm just, and maybe I'm just mad because I realized I should have said Toilet Sandronicus, because Toilets and Crestva is a poem, right?

Like it's not a play.

No, Toilet Supresta is a play.

Is it play?

What am I thinking?

What's his epic poem then?

I don't know.

I'm less familiar with it.

Viewers, Shakespeare, if you're listening, write in and tell us which play you want to have.

What English majors on this podcast?

Yeah, I mean, we're getting into the Final Judgments 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.

Guys, Toils and Cressed, I was thinking of the poem by Chaucer and then Shakespeare playing it.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah.

But so Toilets and Cressida work.

Thank you.

Let me just amend the scoreboard.

Okay, get it out.

On further review, the call against Toilets and Cressida has been overturned.

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 can read this is Francis Ford Coppola being like, geniuses are good and above everyone, and they shouldn't be questioned.

And maybe I'm one.

You'd strike that maybe from the record when he's talking.

Politically, it's all over the place.

It doesn't make any sense.

It's not staking out any particular

understandable philosophy.

It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

So instead of a fable, it should say a bunch of, megalopolis, a bunch of stuff that happened.

Yeah.

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 Farcopola should have made that Dogman movie.

Stuart, what do you think?

Dogman, yeah.

I think he should have made that movie.

Is that where

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 I mean, that's kind of like a what, like a sinusopholic or canosophol.

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.

Dogman man is about a he's a police officer with a dog's head who

oh that's

we should get into

a book of a series of books for children we should get into our final judgments but before we do i just want to i thought we had started already i want to give stewart some plaudits for uh how he he handled that that's cool anyone else want to give me plaudits 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 uh you got us through you

have to pass the trick the trick is uh forgetting things like satellites falling on yeah

um but of course this is where we give our final judgments whether we thought that Michaelopoulos 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

I am gonna say

good bad in the sense that

you so rarely get something this personal and big.

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 got to do Megalopolis.

I want to hear what you say about Megalopolis.

But part of me was like, well, I don't want to

take someone down for like- I want to give the masses what they want.

I'm a genius.

I know better than they do.

Well, I feel bad about like taking like a passion project down.

Like, even if it's misbegotten like

i do appreciate the swing um

i don't think that this movie is successful and there's large chunks of it that are boring but i say good bad in the sense that like i would not discourage anyone with any curiosity about curiosity about this movie from seeing this movie because it is quite an experience.

You know, if you're interested, if you're willing to commit the time, yeah, sure, watch it because because there's going to be some stuff in it.

It's going to have you grasping your head and shaking your fist to the heavens.

So that's what I say.

Suer, what do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I feel I have less of an issue with like targeting passion projects because 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.

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.

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

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 that this, I'm glad this movie exists.

And I feel like if you're interested in it, you should check it out.

It's got, it's a mess.

I feel similar to Stewart.

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'm

glad to have seen, you know, even if I'm never going to watch it again, probably.

And I feel, I think you're right there.

Not with your kids.

Now,

well, eventually, eventually.

Dad, can we watch Megalopolis?

You're not ready ready yet.

You wouldn't understand.

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

But

there's, 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 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.

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.

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.

Here's the not so good things in them.

I think it'll be kind of like that.

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 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?

Like, what, why is he doing that?

Like, and there's, 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 their.

the shares they sold in their winery where their mouth is, you know?

Roman, what do you think?

You loved it, right?

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.

Roman, I've seen things you couldn't imagine.

Crap movies glittering off the shoulder of officer or whatever it is.

Here's the thing.

I think this is a bad, bad movie.

And I think that if you compare it to other, this is a, This is like a false premise of like, it is interesting, whereas all like superhero movies are boring.

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.

It is occupying the space of like,

take time to stare at a loved one's face for two hours or something like that.

And if that's the way you think,

you're never going to be able to do that.

I wasn't ever going to do that.

That's the thing.

Literally do anything.

Learn a language.

I mentioned it.

Certainly there are better ways to use the limited time you have on Earth, for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's just if it, 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.

Like, I think that they actually are pernicious, like, like, that make the world a worse place.

That's why I like, I kind of, I was, I was almost wooed by this idea of like the passion project that you don't want to take on and criticize,

except for that the passion project is kind of this weird, like

defensive, great man genius, that

this idea of this fake populism of like caring about the people, and that even the movie cares about people and serving people, but then ignores them, ignores their needs.

Like that there's this

like phony, like kind of me too crisis in the middle of this thing that's completely dashed by like facts that make that exonerate this man, you know, like all that sort of stuff.

Like if it was, if, if the underlying core of this was, was sort of more benign or innocuous, I would have more charity towards its big swings.

Um, but I think that it actually has terrible ideas at its core.

Like,

I feel like that almost makes it more interesting.

I get that, yeah.

And so, like, if you're like, again, in case you're worried that this movie is going to sway people, right?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think it is either, but I just feel like, I feel like it should be held accountable for

its dumbness.

You know, like, I would argue it does because he

spent so much of his money for a huge flop that is being publicly pilloried.

Yeah, he owned himself.

But you know, but you know, and I know this too, because we went, we're all, like, I'm a little older than you guys are, but like

you've watched.

But

thank you.

But like you've watched like really

misguided millennials and 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.

Like,

you have to trust this on this.

The book is closed on that matter.

And you're right.

This is going to be resurrected and people are going to find things in it.

And

it's just going to be just...

That's going to be such an irritating process to witness in 20 years

because it truly is like of the moment, just to take it in the moment, it is dealing with these ideas of populism and politics and

greatness and being sort of

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.

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, it is, it is full, like this moment of like billionaires and so-called geniuses and bad populism and pretending to serve people.

Like this, these are bad ideas to play with poorly right now.

And

I think that's the part that really like incenses me about it as a movie.

You've given the passionate swaying the masses speech that the movie fails to give.

Yeah, that's fair.

I'm one of the dumb masses.

I want to follow this guy.

Tell me about your utopia, Roman.

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 most,

the miracle of this movie is that I think Adam Driver at the center of this comes out pretty unscathed.

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, he sounds like he just leans into it, but he's not hammy.

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

Well, it's something that we see a lot in the movies on the podcast is that when you're 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.

Like, I think one of 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.

And I think you're right.

He comes out of it very, I mean, I feel like there's, there's most of the main performances come out pretty well.

You know, they're goofy and stuff, but I'm just surprised like how he comes out.

Like

there's a lesson in here with like watching him and maybe that's worth watching, which is like,

Even in life or in a movie or as a piece of art or whatever, just lean in and do the thing.

You will be cooler if you just do it rather than try to resist.

Well, that's also like, from what I understand from hearing people talk about it, like 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 like, you know,

if you don't want to lean into that, that's fine because it sounds like this was not a good working experience for all people.

If you don't want to be like, told to do something different every single moment and then Facebook

suddenly kiss you or harass you.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm not, I'm not necessarily making an argument to ignore that, but I am saying that he, 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.

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 Fericopola 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, true.

And he saw, and he loved 65.

So he saw that and he was like,

you were shooting dinosaurs.

No, no, Francis, those weren't real dinosaurs.

He'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 Grippel is watching his own movie.

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 going to happen.

And he's like,

I don't think so.

I don't know how you did it.

It doesn't seem like my movie.

Yeah.

I mean, my movies are good.

This one, I don't know.

I mean, what if it was like Severance, where when he went to set, he had a different personality than when he left set.

I have one more thought about Francis Forcopola here.

And that is, I think this blank slate that he's given here is his real downfall.

It's like one of the great things about Francis Forcopola, I think when he's when he hits, is he's more of a documentarian than a ground-up filmmaker.

Like even like the Conversation movie, I love.

And it's a movie that kind of doesn't have an ending, but it's just sort of like, it's assembled in a way by different performances and having him like surface meaning through this.

And I think that he, he, and the reason why, like, you know, kind of like, like even Apocalypse Now, one of the reasons why it works is like he's just there documenting documenting.

And he turns it into a thing.

But if he has a green screen capability and he's writing from the ground up, he's like, he's a good writer of other, of, he's a good writer of taking things that he's filmed and assembling into things that matter and have meaning and are great.

But if he's starting from a type of Rasa,

he just doesn't have,

there's, there are no foundational good ideas here.

Even like Ram Stoker's Dracula, he's operating with a book, an existing book.

Yeah, hopefully he's that he's he all of it.

I mean, his greatest movies, aside from the conversation, they're all adaptations of something, you know?

Right.

And I think you're right that his, his, one of his great strength, like that opening sequence in The Godfather, the thing that the power of it is you feel like you're there.

Like you feel like you, and it feels like he just had a, he hosted an Italian wedding and you in the 40s and you were there, you know?

I would love to see his late stage documentary.

Like there, there is something about his mind.

It's about adaptation and filming and putting stuff together and creating meaning.

But the idea of him starting from from zero, the reason why he's, I think he's written something that is extremely juvenile is it feels like he's writing something for the first time.

But he has the ideas and calcification of his brain of an older man.

And

yeah, that's why it really doesn't work and why he can be great in this one area, which is

this kind of like interesting narrative filmmaker of pastiche rather than this whole thing that he creates this whole cloth and white.

It's a big green screen nonsense, you know?

And it's clearly been through like so many drafts that I imagine that he's like all this stuff that should be explained that we don't understand in it like he's like he's lived with it so long he's like oh the audience knows like he doesn't he no longer

is to realize what hasn't been told to them but anyway this is a this this is this thing's a mess

that's what our opening should have been more like missalopolis

You never know what you'll learn more about on the celebrity trivia show go fact yourself.

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And we've got another Jumbotron, this one of a little bit more personal nature than the last one.

This is a message for Bryce, and the message comes from Josh.

And the message reads as follows.

Hello, Bryce.

Yes, you, Bryce, your brother Josh, bought a Jumbotron for your birthday, and now one of the floppers is talking directly to you.

Is it blowing your mind?

I bet it is.

I bet you're super distracted now, and you messed up that piece of steel you were cutting with a laser, whatever it is you do.

Anywho, happy birthday, bra.

What a sweet and also taunting Jumbotron.

I thought it was funny when I was handing these out.

You know, I gave this to you because you could roll into the next thing, but I was like, I want to hear Elliot say bra too.

That's also part of

my personal joy.

Yeah, it's what I call my own brother, not.

That's not what I really call him.

You're like, hey, Brosario Dawson.

That's what I call him.

Yeah, yeah.

I call him Broseph of Arimathea.

Yeah.

But hey, we got one more thing to mention.

This is a flop house thing.

You heard about it at the very top of the show, and you're going to hear it about it again now.

That's flop TV.

That's right.

Flop TV is back the one hour televised, by which I mean video on your computer, version of the flop house.

It's like getting a whole TV show of the flop house every first Saturday of the month.

We've been doing it from September through February.

And the next one is coming up the day after we record this.

So it will have happened a week ago when you hear this episode.

Did you miss it?

That's okay.

The video for the episode is still going to be up online.

And if you buy a season pass or a ticket, you'll be able to watch it.

So this season is all about sequels because it's our second season, Flop TV Season 2, the sequels.

We talked about RoboCop 2.

We talked about Break and 2.

And as of the time this episode comes out, we'll have just talked about Caddyshack 2.

We're doing it the first Saturday of every month at 9 p.m.

Eastern, 6 p.m.

Pacific.

And you can either buy tickets for individual shows if there's a favorite movie that you just love and you do not want to hear the others.

Or here's my recommendation.

Get a season pass.

It's six episodes for the price of five.

That's a little tip from Elliot.

You know, you just don't tell anybody I told you that.

Go to theflophouse.simpletics.com.

Again, that's theflophouse.simpletics.com and get your tickets.

We got a lot of great movies coming up.

We've got Highlander 2, Ski School 2, and then, of course, we round out the season with Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ewes.

It's going to be too wonderful.

Right, guys?

Too wonderful.

That was like a ghost was repeating me.

Yeah.

Let's answer a couple of questions from listeners.

This one is from Nylo Last Name With Hell.

This is from FF Coppola.

Uh-oh.

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?

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.

Yep.

Yeah, everybody, everybody's gagging for it.

Everyone wants that.

Look up.

Finally, the real moon is going to get the just desserts that the full moon gets.

Finally, the stand-up and cheering moment of the year.

But what else?

Moonfall, maybe?

I was going to say Akira for that scene when Tetsuo blows up part of the moon.

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.

you can tune your radio to a certain like frequency 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 uh once it's projected on the moon one week by buster key

yeah yeah sure yeah i mean

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

worse things you can go with than toy story no it's going to be some pixart movie that you can bring all the kids to and that's it.

Well, listen, I want it 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,

what shouldn't they see?

It's on the list.

I mean, I don't think they're ready for a Kira.

Well, when are your kids going to be ready for a Kira at LA?

Daddy, Daddy,

why is Tetso expanding into a techno-organic mass?

I mean,

why is he crushing Cowrie when he's trying to love her?

One of these crimes of the future.

So, Dan, that's your vote is crimes of the future.

What are you saying, Roman?

Sorry.

I said, 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.

I mean, that's a money, yeah.

I like it.

This second and final

letter is from Anne-Marie, who writes, hey, y'all.

And this is clearly in response to our recent break-in two

Flop TV

episode we had.

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.

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.

So there's another.

Yeah, that's how bugs stick to things.

Alternative.

That's a good theory.

Well, it's not really

how they stick to it.

That's how it how it works in Inception, too, right?

Is the is Chris, Chris, Chrissy Nolan just smeared sticky stuff all over the ceiling and yeah, yeah, Joseph Gordon Lovett bounced off of it.

Yep.

So was there a question there, Dan?

No, it was just a sharing an idea.

This is a charming tale of a

child's imagination.

Sort of like, you know, I don't know, E.T.

I guess it's not imagination, but it sparks imagination.

Anyway, I mean, I love old, old special effects are great.

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 the thing that's wowed me the most for a while.

There's also a scene, a woman goes from nice-looking to evil-looking in-camera in a movie called Shh the Octopus in a way that uses mic up that only shows up on certain colors of light, and they had a gel they're moving forward.

And that effect, it's from a movie from the 30s, and the effect looks amazing.

Yeah, I think started writing a bike history

uh effect is uh that scene where the guy falls over in the movie the gate and he turns into a bunch of little guys that's pretty good yes that's pretty amazing

i follow and also there's the moment in uh in throne of blood when tashir mufuni gets an arrow through the neck and i'm always like did they really kill him

um

on that note of credulity let's actually elliot i just checked to shira mifune's dead oh no they did it officer arrest akira Kurosawa.

We've solved the cold case.

Let us move on to our final segment, our final regular segment of the show, which is...

Dan, I'm looking at as you scan through your letterbox.

I see Dick's the musical on there.

That scene with Nathan Lane

spitting lunch meat on those puppets.

Isn't that great?

I appreciate the spirit of Dix 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, which is...

I'm just looking over Dan's shoulder.

We're recommending

letterboxed.

We're recommending movies that we have seen of late or just like that might be a better use of your time than, say, Megalopolis.

Take Roman's advice, either stare at your loved one's face or watch one of these.

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

They'll be like, What are you doing?

Can you stop that?

Um, is Megalopolis showing on my face?

Uh, I recently

just re-watched Lost Highway, which I hadn't seen since around the time it was new, David Lynch's Lost Highway.

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, which is not to say it's not valuable in its own right, but it's like, oh, okay, like you're revisiting so many of the themes.

And 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.

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

Is that road Mulholland Drive?

Yeah.

Disassociation after

sort of a horrible event,

trying to make sense of your life through these like sort of fantasies.

Lost Highway was his first trip down that lost highway.

to Mulholland Drive.

Now you're going to want to go down Lost Highway.

You're going to take a turn onto Mulholland Drive.

Yeah.

if you want it's gonna get you to the inland empire, yep.

If you want to see Bill Pullman just wail on a saxophone as well, yes, that's your best chance.

Um, I don't know, some would say your only chance.

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 not a big part of it.

But if you're like a huge Robert Blake fan, yeah, but not as movies, more as personal ideas.

Not his eyebrows.

I love Robert Blake.

I just hate when he has hair below his forehead.

Is there a movie, Marie?

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?

Scathing.

They were scathing because it had a like a non-linear, not totally rational plot.

But you watch it now and you're like, oh, like, now I know what Lynch does.

I understand what he's doing.

And I, honestly, the fact that film reviewers saw it the time and weren't like, oh, it's a David Lynch movie.

I have to watch it through David Lynch glasses.

Yeah.

I don't know if I ever told this story, but I remember seeing it at like the very small independent theater in my hometown.

And it was a late screening.

And we got out and I was driving my friends home.

And I remember, you know, driving up to a red light.

The light turned green.

And then it turned red again.

And I had just sat there the whole time because my brain was processing what I just watched.

Yeah.

A lot.

Let's go in the same order we did our judgment.

Stuart, what do you think?

Okay.

I'm going to recommend a movie I saw a couple of weeks back.

I saw Anora, 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.

There's a scene where they fucking go to Tatiana's in Brighton Beach, and I I was like, whoa, I go there.

And yeah, I mean, it is.

I'm like a Nora.

Yeah, I'm like a Nora.

It,

yeah, I mean, I feel like it really captures the like rush and craziness of like love and hope

and also like hoping against the crushing power of capitalism and shittiness.

And then, of course, it's things start to, you know, come back to earth and things get a little bit rough.

It's got, you know, an incredible central performance performance by Mikey Madison as the title character.

Yeah, I think I thought it was great.

I love it.

Yeah, check it out.

Cool.

I'm also going to recommend an offbeat comedy romance, but not the same one.

This is a, I'm going to recommend the movie You and Me from 1938.

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.

And Sylvia Sidney is a woman who works at a department store.

The department store makes a point of hiring ex-convicts to give them a second chance uh at life and george raft is one of those ex-convicts and they fall in love 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 and so that she has to hide from him that she is also a convict and that the uh 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.

And it also has some musical numbers in it with some of the music written by Kurt Vile.

So it's a like, it's a, 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.

But I really loved it.

I really enjoyed it.

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.

It could have been a pretty down-the-middle movie, but there's some great scenes in it.

And,

you know, Sylvia Sidney's been on my mind since there's that new Beetlejuice Beetlejuice movie.

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.

Play Juno.

Yeah.

I, I was, I was, having a hard time thinking what to recommend, but I think the one I'd settle on is Hearts of Darkness of Filmmakers Apocalypse, which is the documentary Eleanor Coppola made of Francis For Copla making Apocalypse now.

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.

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, this he did what he wanted to.

It's all okay.

I, you know, like, and and uh 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 a movie.

It's just like has so much drama.

It's so fascinating.

I really love Hearts of Darkness.

I saw it as a kid.

Well, not a kid.

I guess I was pretty soon after it came out.

I guess I was 15 or 16.

And

Hearts of Darkness, not Apocalypse Now, I had not seen Apocalypse Now.

I caught this like on HBO or something.

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 of Apocalypse Now in a lot of ways.

But I

love this.

And it's one of the reasons why I love documentaries.

I think it's just expertly and beautifully made.

So hard to see.

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.

I know it's a good documentary and it is a testament to it like even without having seen the movie i'm like this is this is fascinating in its own right and then gets richer once you've seen the film or like most people you've probably seen apocalypse now first and then catch it i mean it's weird i mean i think people it take things in a lot differently now and like you never know but but i i think this movie is great i think it's actually better than apocalypse now but you know but that's my own flavor of of you know that that that to me is not not defensible that's just taste you know that's 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.

Yeah, for sure.

These days.

I thought you were about to mention a documentary about the making of space balls.

I'm like, that'll be fascinating.

Let people see May the Schwartz be with you a filmmaker's journey before they see Stars.

Is that what Balls of Fury was?

Yeah.

How'd they rig up that bit where Rick Moranis goes flying through the

documentary to find out?

Was that real?

Did they kill Rick Moranis?

All right.

Well, we should wrap this up with a big thank you.

Now, wait, sorry, now I want to see sketching 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 till the end of the shooting because you're going to die when you do it.

The only way to get the shot is to kill you while you do it.

Oh, 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 to shot the rest of the movie already.

We shot it already.

We're done.

You know, we're wrapped on that.

So this is your last thing you have to do.

We'll be covered.

Before I say, before we say goodbye,

I want to just say thank you to Roman 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.

Delight.

Longtime fan and supporter.

I'm so happy to be here.

It makes me very, very happy.

What are you going to say?

If you want more shenanigans like this, just tune in to the 99% Invisible Breakdown, the Power Broker.

Exactly the same.

It's exactly like this show.

It's just like it.

Yeah.

Just cutting it up.

Before we go, thank you to our producer, Alex Smith.

He goes by the name Howell Dotty on the internet.

He does music.

He does Twitch streams.

He does a lot of stuff.

Look him up.

Thank you to our network, Maximum Fun.

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 McCoy.

I'm Stuart Wellington.

I'm Elliot Kalen.

I'm Roman Mars.

I'm going to take that again.

I'm Roman Mars.

Look at that.

That's it.

What a professional.

Bye.

Bye.

Professionalism undone.

Roman's like, let me make sure I say that the right way.

And then Stuart's like,

on this episode, we discuss Megalopolis.

Do you want me to have one?

Do you have

one?

Story leans in like you had one when you started saying

we're embarrassing ourselves in front of Roman.

Okay.

No, no, no.

No, Roman knows a romance.

This is the whole experience.

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