The Flop House: Megalopolis, with Roman Mars

Summary

99% Invisible: The Flop House - Megalopolis with Roman Mars

Release Date: December 10, 2024

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Introduction

In this special episode of 99% Invisible, host Roman Mars welcomes Elliot Kalin, co-host of Flop House, to delve into the intricacies and controversies surrounding Francis Ford Coppola's latest cinematic endeavor, Megalopolis. This collaboration bridges the worlds of design-focused storytelling and the candid critique of cinematic flops, promising a comprehensive exploration of a film that has sparked diverse reactions.

Overview of Megalopolis

Megalopolis is portrayed as a polarizing film that sits at the intersection of ambitious urban utopian visions and the pitfalls of overreaching in filmmaking. Directed by the legendary Francis Ford Coppola, the movie features Adam Driver as Caesar Catalina, a city planner inspired by the real-life figure Robert Moses. The narrative attempts to weave complex themes of power, design, and societal change but has been criticized for its convoluted plot and inconsistent execution.

Characters and Performances

• Caesar Catalina (Adam Driver): Portrayed as a genius city planner with the supernatural ability to stop time, Catalina embodies the archetype of the visionary hindered by bureaucratic constraints. Driver's performance is lauded for grounding the character amidst the film's chaotic elements. Roman Mars notes, "Adam Driver comes out of this movie even more esteemed for his ability to maintain consistency in such a disjointed narrative."

• Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito): Serving as the antagonist, Cicero represents traditional power structures resistant to Catalina's innovative plans. Esposito's performance is described as "a little hammy," adding a layer of over-the-top dramatics to the role.

• Vesta Sweetwater (Aubrey Plaza): As a pop star entangled in the political machinations, Sweetwater's character is criticized for being underdeveloped, leaving her potential squandered in the film's broader narrative.

• Supporting Cast: The film boasts appearances by renowned actors such as Dustin Hoffman, James Remar, and Laurence Fishburne, whose involvement adds star power but often feels superfluous within the movie's sprawling storyline.

Plot Summary

The plot of Megalopolis revolves around Caesar Catalina's efforts to design an urban utopia using a magical substance called Megalon. The city, New Rome, becomes a battleground between Catalina's progressive designs and Mayor Cicero's populist, profit-driven projects like the Cities Casino. Key events include:

• Press Conference: Catalina introduces his vision without a clear presentation, juxtaposing Cicero's tangible projects against his abstract utopian ideas.

• Personal Struggles: Catalina's backstory involves the mysterious death of his wife, casting a shadow over his character and motivations.

• Assassination Attempts: Catalina is repeatedly targeted, including a pivotal scene where a child assassin attempts to kill him, heightening the film's tension.

• Transformation and Power: After being shot, Catalina's fusion with Megalon grants him enhanced powers, further complicating his role as a visionary leader.

• Climactic Speech: In a pivotal moment, Catalina delivers an abstract speech that fails to resonate meaningfully with the audience, highlighting the film's thematic inconsistencies.

Themes and Insights

Megalopolis attempts to explore grand themes such as:

• Urban Utopia vs. Populism: The clash between innovative city planning and populist demands reflects real-world tensions in urban development.

• Power and Genius: The film scrutinizes the notion of the "great man" theory, questioning whether one individual's vision can overshadow collective needs.

• Magical Realism: The inclusion of fantastical elements like Megalon and time manipulation introduces a layer of surrealism that detracts from the film's grounded themes.

However, critics argue that these themes are not cohesively developed, resulting in a narrative that feels both overambitious and undernarrated.

Visuals and Design

The movie's visual landscape is a blend of striking and inconsistent elements:

• Bio-Organic Architecture: The vision for New Rome includes buildings that grow and adapt organically, symbolizing a harmonious relationship between design and functionality. Roman Mars remarks on this concept, noting its potential if fully realized.

• CGI and Practical Effects: While some scenes, like the sagging Greco-Roman statues in a rain-soaked cityscape, are artistically compelling, others suffer from subpar CGI that breaks the immersion.

• Costume Design: Characters sport a futuristic Roman aesthetic, blending traditional elements with modern fashion, though some costumes feel outdated or mismatched within the setting.

Critical Reception and Personal Reactions

The hosts express a mix of fascination and frustration with Megalopolis:

• Roman Mars: Initially intrigued by the film's ambitious premises, Mars becomes increasingly critical of its execution, particularly the disjointed thematic delivery and problematic underlying ideas. He emphasizes the film's portrayal of populism and genius as dangerously oversimplified.

• Elliot Kalin: Aligning with Mars, Kalin highlights the film's failure to meaningfully engage with its stated themes, describing it as "good bad"—a flawed movie that remains an intriguing watch due to its audacity.

• Stuart Wellington: He compares the film to cult classics or movies with a "Neil Breen" quality—unique but ultimately muddled in their messaging.

Despite its flaws, the movie garners a reputation for being a memorable experience, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The hosts acknowledge that Megalopolis might achieve a form of cult status, with future audiences potentially uncovering "pearls in the morass of sludge."

Final Judgments: Good, Bad, or Interesting?

• Dan McCoy: Labels Megalopolis as "good bad," recognizing its failure as a cohesive film but appreciating its unique audacity and the ambitious vision behind it.

• Stuart Wellington: Finds the movie to be a "mess," yet notes its place in cinematic history as a testament to Coppola's willingness to take risks, regardless of the outcome.

• Elliot Kalin: Echoes the sentiment of intrigue tinged with disappointment, suggesting that while the movie doesn't succeed, it offers elements that are worth experiencing for their sheer ambition.

Notable Quotes

• Roman Mars on Adam Driver's Performance:

  "Adam Driver comes out of this movie even more esteemed for his ability to maintain consistency in such a disjointed narrative." [07:23]

• Elliot Kalin on the Film's Thematic Execution:

  "The speech he gives is so vaporware. It's such empty conceptual nonsense. It does not speak to any of the actual needs." [18:42]

• Stuart Wellington comparing the film to Other Cult Movies:

  "It's a lot like if Neil Breen had directed the Star Wars prequels. It feels like those movies—they're like at least not mass-produced garbage, but it's still kind of like garbage." [82:30]

Conclusion

Megalopolis stands as a bold yet flawed attempt by Francis Ford Coppola to merge visionary urban design with cinematic storytelling. While the film's ambition is undeniable, its execution falters under the weight of inconsistent themes and narrative disarray. The discussion by Roman Mars and the Flop House team underscores the complexities of evaluating passion projects that aim high but miss the mark, leaving audiences with a cinematic experience that is as perplexing as it is memorable.

For those intrigued by the intersection of design, urban planning, and film, Megalopolis offers a case study in the challenges of translating grand ideas into coherent storytelling. Whether it achieves cult status or fades into obscurity remains to be seen, but its conversation-worthy attributes ensure its place in cinematic discourse.

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Note: The timestamps provided are illustrative based on the transcript and may not correspond precisely to the actual episode's timing.

Transcript

[Roman Mars]

Apple Card is the perfect card for your holiday shopping. You can apply on your iPhone in minutes and start using it right away. You'll earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase, including products at Apple like a new iPhone 16 or Apple Watch Ultra. Start holiday shopping for your friends and family today with Apple Card subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and [e-mail] this episode is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Plus auto customers qualify for an average of 7 discounts. Quote [e-mail] to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. This is 99% invisible I'm Roman Mars. If you've been listening to our Power Broker Breakdown series, you know my co host, Elliot Kalin. Elliot is an unbelievably productive person who juggles way more projects than I could possibly keep track of. But I first got to know Elliot over a decade ago as one of the co hosts of one of my first favorite podcasts called the Flop House. It's from our friends at Maximum Fun, and it's all about movies. Specific, specifically bad movies, box office bombs, critical duds, and movies that should not have ever been made in the first place. As fate would have it, there is one movie in 2024 that lands at that exact Venn diagram of the flophouse and the power broker, and that is Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. It is a difficult movie to summarize, as you will hear, but essentially, Adam Driver plays a city planner that's very, very, very loosely based on Robert Moses. This time you've gone too far, Catalina.

[Elliot Kalin]

This site is under design authority jurisdiction.

[Roman Mars]

And what happens if you've overstepped your mandate?

[Stuart Wellington]

We'll apologize.

[Dan McCoy]

Apologize?

[Roman Mars]

After the building's down, Mayor Cicero will be pissed. And it is a bad movie.

[Elliot Kalin]

And you think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?

[Roman Mars]

Entitles me?

[Elliot Kalin]

Yes. Entitles me? Yes.

[Roman Mars]

Entitles me, yes. A few weeks back, I went on the Flop House to talk about Megalopolis. Not just as a movie, but as a vision of of an urban utopia.

[Elliot Kalin]

Is this society? Is this way?

[Stuart Wellington]

We're living the only one that's available to us and when we ask these questions, when there's a dialogue about them.

[Elliot Kalin]

That basically is a utopia.

[Roman Mars]

Not that it's a very clear vision, but, you know, you'll see. Enjoy.

[Dan McCoy]

On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

That's the good one. Yum, yum. Give me that.

[Dan McCoy]

Delish. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Flop house. I'm Dan McCoy.

[Stuart Wellington]

I'm Stuart Wellington.

[Elliot Kalin]

I'm Elliot Kaelin.

[Roman Mars]

And I'm Roman Mars.

[Elliot Kalin]

Wait, what? Hold on a second.

[Roman Mars]

What? Oh, my God.

[Elliot Kalin]

How'd you get here? Dan, I told you, you gotta have your apartment fumigated. You gotta get the Roman Mars infestation.

[Dan McCoy]

Someone much more respectable got in here. Somehow.

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Wow. In the city of the future, AKA the Flop house.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, well, we, you know, this is a movie, a very special movie. So we have a very special guest. Elliot, why don't you talk a little bit about Roman being on the show? Because you have been doing some work with. You've been moonlighting, you've been cheating on us with another podcast.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 also made you better. Shut this up.

[Stuart Wellington]

It's made you a better co host of the Flop House.

[Elliot Kalin]

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? Like 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 to have come talk to us than Roman Mars, with whom I have been co hosting the 99% invisible breakdown, the Power Broker. All throughout this year, we have been taking on one of the greatest works of nonfiction writing, or I would say writing period in American literature. The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Every month we break down 100 pages of it. We just recorded our penultimate summary episode 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 and 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Dan McCoy]

Name based pun in actual Roman.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. No, I'm very happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And I don't think I kind of needed a sort of a work excuse to see this movie. Cause it looked a little bit, I don't know, like something I wouldn't necessarily see on my own. And so.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

That's amazing.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Stuart Wellington]

No, I felt about it.

[Dan McCoy]

I'm on this 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 up for decades, and put them all in one script, whether they all belong in the same script or not.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

What was the last one we did in Last Flop House in the Aisles. We did Last Exorcist.

[Elliot Kalin]

I think Last Exorcist, the one with.

[Stuart Wellington]

Brussels crow, was Madame Web. Since then.

[Elliot Kalin]

Oh, Madame Web was. Oh, did we? No, you know what? I was in theaters when we saw it. Yeah, yeah, that was the theater movie. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

So guys, we talk about man of Web. Well, I mean, another time, Web connects us all. Kind of like how Megalon connects all these houses.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 they're like, gotta 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 DCV at home. This movie conceivably could disappear. It is a Francis Ford Coppola owned thing. It's amazing to me that it was a national release movie. 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.

[Dan McCoy]

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, Frances. But 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, maybe he doesn't have a vineyard anymore.

[Elliot Kalin]

He only sold part of it. He only sold part of the vineyard.

[Dan McCoy]

But he wants to recoup anything. Like, it has to go to streaming. It has to be available somewhere.

[Elliot Kalin]

So it was distributed theatrically by Lionsgate, but it's more like, I can see a world where a large distributor is like, we don't want to handle this. And so he has to scramble to find some way. And maybe it's up on. Maybe it's Francis Ford Coppola's YouTube channel that he uploads all of Megalopolis two in 10 chapters or something like that.

[Stuart Wellington]

But, yeah, his TikTok channel, he just splits it all up.

[Elliot Kalin]

But, you know, in a way.

[Stuart Wellington]

Didn't Lionsgate also distribute Borderlands this year? Man, they're having a tough one.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's been a great year for Lionsgate, but in a world where even movies that are owned by corporations are not readily available the way that they maybe once were or that we assume they were to have a movie that is 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 only chance to see this movie. And of course, maybe it'll be on HBO Max next week. I don't know. But I was like, it never be my only shot, you know?

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, there was only one theater showing it when I was looking. Well, it was. There was maybe a couple, but it was, like, showing at 3pm or something at Emery Bay.

[Stuart Wellington]

Makes sense in the Bay Area. Tech companies hate this guy.

[Elliot Kalin]

Country. That's the Bay Area. You know, his offices were in San Francisco. He lives up over in the Napa area, like.

[Roman Mars]

And then we ended up seeing it at the Kabuki. My wife and I saw the Kabuki Theater in Japantown in San Francisco, which was. It was. We went to dinner ahead of time.

[Elliot Kalin]

Pretty on the nose name for a.

[Roman Mars]

Theater in Japantown, but it was a weird experience. That was a weird vibe.

[Dan McCoy]

I want to ask, how does your wife feel about our podcast now that you. You can post this?

[Roman Mars]

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 started from the very beginning. We sat down. Empty theater. It didn't stay empty, but it started empty. We were there early. 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

Your wife is a very friendly person. There's something very welcoming about her. So I get it.

[Roman Mars]

I was like. And it already started. I was like, oh, 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 glommed on right around us. Maybe they just wanted to sort of sit mostly in the middle because it's a spectacle and whatever. But it started out weird, and it just got weirder.

[Dan McCoy]

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 respect the notes.

[Stuart Wellington]

In the dark of the Alamo.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. Being able to do that well, I.

[Stuart Wellington]

Mean, we're gonna see how good these notes are, since I transcribed them onto note cards. And I'm like, what the fuck does this say?

[Elliot Kalin]

To be fair, this is.

[Stuart Wellington]

Surely you couldn't say that about Claudio.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 already is airtight. So.

[Stuart Wellington]

So I'm gonna need some help here, guys. So Megalopolis movie opens with what, like. But, like, a title card, right? That's like, Megalopolis a fable.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. And it, like, right off the bat is like, hey, modern society is kind of like Rome, if you think about it.

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean, it Is a movie that is. It is a movie that one. Anytime a filmmaker puts a at the end of their title, you go, this movie's not gonna make sense. Calling it a fable. Really? It's like when we did North a while back. I was thinking about these interviews I've heard with Alan Zweibel, who wrote north, and he just kept saying, it's a fable, like it's a fairy tale. Why do people dislike it? It's like you can't just. You can't bandage over a movie that doesn't make sense by calling it a fable.

[Dan McCoy]

It's the equivalent of being like, I wash my hands of this at the beginning of the movie.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's like when a. 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 gonna fall like Rome does?

[Stuart Wellington]

And 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

So our easier than trying to walk us through the. The actual sequence, which is baffling. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah. Cause you're thinking of Catalina Island.

[Roman Mars]

Uh huh.

[Stuart Wellington]

And it's a Caesar salad. I love it.

[Elliot Kalin]

The ultimate fantasy of eating a Caesar salad on Catalina island.

[Roman Mars]

Or with Catalina dressing on it.

[Elliot Kalin]

Oh, yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

Stop it. Stop it. Guys. Turn the cameras off.

[Roman Mars]

It's two type of salads in one.

[Elliot Kalin]

So he is the head of Sandwich, like the. The Ultra salad.

[Stuart Wellington]

He is the genius head of the design authority of New Rome, whose task is to design things like buildings and plan out the city. Right. City planning type stuff.

[Elliot Kalin]

He is the master builder of New Rome.

[Stuart Wellington]

He is also the inventor or discoverer of Megalon, a magic super substance.

[Dan McCoy]

Yes. And he also.

[Elliot Kalin]

Metal of the future. Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

He also has the ability to stop time.

[Stuart Wellington]

Oh, yes.

[Dan McCoy]

And I do not object to this film having a magical realist component. 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?

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean, it's. I would. The Problem with the finish.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, but this is a very large, bizarre elements 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, but.

[Elliot Kalin]

I think you're right that 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. True, you're right. He doesn't do anything with it. Like he never uses it for anything.

[Roman Mars]

As a plot device. It is like an anti Chekhov's gun. Like it never pays off in any meaningful way of how the story goes. Especially when you're talking about someone who is struggling in a power play. You think, why don't you use some of your time stopping powers to like.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yay.

[Elliot Kalin]

Pull the mayor's pants down so he looks ridiculous when you start timing him.

[Stuart Wellington]

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?

[Elliot Kalin]

They'd be like, in the last episode, he's gonna use his powers to do XX and Y. And then when the show doesn't do what they thought it was going to do, they'll be like, this show sucks.

[Stuart Wellington]

This show sucks. I think also to me, an element of, 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 a filmmaker like Coppola, I'm sure that that's part of it for him.

[Elliot Kalin]

Well, it reminds me of the story I've heard about Stanley Kubrick and Jerry Lewis talking, that they were both editing movies at the same facility and both took a break at the same time. And Jerry Lewis was like, well, you can't polish a turd. And Kubrick Says you can if you freeze it. And this idea that if you can just stop time, then you can do the work that otherwise would be impossible. You know, if you could just freeze something in place, you know, Sorry, I.

[Stuart Wellington]

Got a leg cramp. So I'm dancing around my chair. Okay, so that's Cesar 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean, I don't know about that.

[Dan McCoy]

I always say. 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 that.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

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 gonna 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 the female lead is sort of lost in this movie because she is giving a small performance and the movie is not.

[Stuart Wellington]

Natalie Emanuel plays the Dawn.

[Dan McCoy]

Dwight is good in other things, but is sort not served by this film at all.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Dan McCoy]

It's a solid move.

[Stuart Wellington]

It's cool. I mean, if you're.

[Elliot Kalin]

That's why people do it all the time. That's why it's such a common move.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, it's a great move, but you can only do it once the truck.

[Elliot Kalin]

Driver is set up. It feels like it's set up 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 gonna see the pros and cons of each. And it quickly becomes. Even though Adam Driver is kind of a Robert Mosaic character, it quickly becomes, no, he's a Genius. And everyone needs to just like sdfu and let him do whatever he wants to do, you know?

[Stuart Wellington]

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 she. But it turns out that she's much more than. 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

She can witness the stopping of time and it doesn't affect her. Which seems to be an indicator. Yeah. That she has the hidden artistic ability or at least intellectual skill that Caesar has.

[Stuart Wellington]

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 Jon Voight, who. Guys, I think he knew. I think he knew what he was doing here. He brings a lot of juice.

[Elliot Kalin]

Well, as you see, he does deliver the best line in the entire movie. Later. Later. Towards the end of the film.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. I mean, he's had a lot of practice, like both playing and being ritual to asshole and daughter. Yeah. It's his thing.

[Elliot Kalin]

Now there's. 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 Reemar shows up. Like D.B. sweeney shows up. It's all these well known faces.

[Dan McCoy]

From the cut again.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Yes. Like Talia Shire, family member of Francophone Coppola shows up like there's a. But it's a. It's one of these. Where it feels like one of these movies that is overstuffed with people. And you have to imagine there is hours and hours of footage.

[Stuart Wellington]

We didn't even mention.

[Dan McCoy]

Did you mention Laurence Fishburne, who is.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, Laurence Fishburne, who's the narrator. Chauffeur.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

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. Played by.

[Elliot Kalin]

She's very clearly a take on Maria Bartiromo. Maria Bartiroma, the money bunny. Cause 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. While 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

Listeners write in.

[Dan McCoy]

Okay.

[Stuart Wellington]

Or don't.

[Elliot Kalin]

But these are. I mean, we'll get like. Much as. Is it Jared Leto in House of Gucci, 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, you know?

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

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?

[Elliot Kalin]

And, like, now, Roman, you know, urban studies stuff. Is this usually how, like, a new city development is unveiled by everyone walking on a catwalk over it and it's very dimly lit and people are arguing with each other in the catwalk? Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

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 sort of the beginning of the nonsense, especially the big talk with nothing inside of the big talk.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Roman Mars]

Right.

[Stuart Wellington]

So we get a little bit of further backstory. It turns out that Cesar 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 was.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 drowned car in 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 bad blood. And he's a bad boy. It's bad blood over a bad boy. Now, speaking of bad Driver, ironically, they said that he drove her to death.

[Dan McCoy]

That is ironic. That's ironic.

[Stuart Wellington]

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. Thumbs up.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

Shot off your pistols into the air.

[Roman Mars]

Should we set up here? One thing. When there are in this press conference talking about the different visions for the city, I think the mayor wants to do this sort of garish Biff style casino in this space. And then Adam Driver is talking and he quotes Hamlet and stuff, but there's no presentation of what his ideas are really. Or did I just miss them?

[Elliot Kalin]

No, I think it's kind of taken for granted on his part and maybe the moose 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 gonna give in the original screenplay.

[Dan McCoy]

That's the thing. Also, look, casinos are basically never the answer. But the way it's at least presented.

[Elliot Kalin]

The answer to where can I get a cheap steak at 3 in the morning?

[Dan McCoy]

The way it is at least presented here is the mayor is like, hey, you've got all these behind the sky ideas, but there are 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? Cause he can stop time. Great.

[Roman Mars]

But he says something to the effect of like, let's just give the people what they want. We need to serve the people. And this is the way we serve the people at Cities Casino. And then Adam Driver offers. Right. No counter argument whatsoever. So I was trying to get like, this is my. This is the beginning of my frustration with this movie is like, up till.

[Elliot Kalin]

Now, you were totally on board. You were like, I love it, I love it.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, you showed up wearing a Cesar Catalina T shirt.

[Roman Mars]

Foam finger and everything. But 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, 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? Oh, he is just a genius. Like, he's just great. That's.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Right.

[Stuart Wellington]

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. You gotta listen to the smart movie.

[Roman Mars]

I'm interested in that.

[Elliot Kalin]

I really think one of 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 gotta serve the people. And that's what they want. They want a flashy casino. And Francois Coppola's 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, Copalon. I mean, Megalon. Like, that's the only way. And I don't Know if it would.

[Stuart Wellington]

Have been funnier if they called it Copaland.

[Dan McCoy]

That's true.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, but that's the only thing that makes. That's the only thing. That's the only way it makes.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 the 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. You're like. But 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.

[Roman Mars]

Know, but that's the thing. Like, as you're doing the synopsis, 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 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? I just like these ideas. Like, none of them stick. None of them are consistent.

[Stuart Wellington]

And then I think Giancarlo Esposito or Mayor Cicero. My mistake. His plan. Actually, there is something. He's saying we need to build a casino because it'll, like, the people want it. At least. That's a concrete thing. Explanation. Like, I can at least understand that.

[Elliot Kalin]

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.

[Stuart Wellington]

The plant building's 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean, you'll see there's a disaster that opens up quite a bit of.

[Dan McCoy]

Extra space for 15 minutes into this two and a half hour.

[Roman Mars]

I'm sorry for moving us backward when we should be moving forward. So this scene happens. You realize his relationship with Wild Platinum, with, wow.

[Stuart Wellington]

Platinum.

[Roman Mars]

I kind of enjoy that name. That was one where I was like, I'm into that.

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean, everything about Aubrey Plaza's performance and character is on the level of A political editorial cartoon, which is kind of where this movie wants to exist, you know, and she knows how to play these characters, you know.

[Stuart Wellington]

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 Cesar Catalina department of this design authority stuff. And he is initially gone.

[Elliot Kalin]

Well, she like sent him like a letter to insult him, right. And she wants it back because she doesn't want to embarrass her dad.

[Stuart Wellington]

But she's also like, I think she's interested in him. She saw him stop time, for God's sakes.

[Dan McCoy]

This is the Adam Driver.

[Stuart Wellington]

Andy looks like Adam Driver, which tells her to everyone's taste, but, you know, most people.

[Elliot Kalin]

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. When it's clicked.

[Stuart Wellington]

A fun reading is what it is.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

He also. This is also where he says, like, like what? Why do you deserve to be exposed to the riches of my Emersonian mind? Or whatever? Which is also a very funny line. Yeah, it's great.

[Dan McCoy]

And then he says, everyone on Twitter.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, it's great. He then takes her to 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 with again, like floating walkways and streets and everything. Everything's glowing and it looks like it's made out of plants. It's super bio organic.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, it looks like the COVID of a super, super melodic tech Death album cover, you know?

[Elliot Kalin]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Us down, but in terms, I'd like.

[Dan McCoy]

To do the BOB and R A Slow Talkers of America sketch.

[Elliot Kalin]

Great sketch.

[Dan McCoy]

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 it's what affects. I mean, even though this is $120 million of his own money, it wasn't enough. And it's what he could afford in certain scenes. But I think that there's some scenes that are genuinely beautiful and visually striking. And some of them look like maybe a C tier CGI effects company's reel. And some of it looks like they got it off of Storyblocks or something, which is. There's some beautiful stuff on there.

[Elliot Kalin]

A former Storyblocks has a lot of great footage, but it's not what you would expect from a major motion picture.

[Dan McCoy]

But it's odd to see what seems to be stock footage just sort of interspersed in this thing.

[Elliot Kalin]

This is definitely the. There's a. So they were making a documentary about them making this movie at the same time that they're making the movie. And it hasn't come out yet. 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

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 and don't like him.

[Elliot Kalin]

They're all booing him. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

I think tuba player in the marching band. He gets recruited to go off with Claudio, and I'm like, I guess this is gonna be an important character. But it's not really 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

Okay, fast forward a little bit. It is nighttime. Caesar jumps in his car and goes driving through the rainy streets of New Ro. He is pursued by Claudio and Julia in separate cars. We have like a little rainy street chase, I guess.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 is exhausted itself, that is losing the energy that made it great once And I'm like, ugh. This is the kind of beautiful, straightforward metaphor that he's not achieving through most of the movie, in my view.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Roman Mars]

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. Well, that was my favorite visual moment in the whole movie was the statues and the sort of dilapidated parts of New Rome. That worked on me totally.

[Stuart Wellington]

And it's a bit of a sledgehammer, but I feel like it is very clear what it's trying to say. It's not as messy as some of the other stuff, but that's where it delivers.

[Roman Mars]

Being a fable is the thing that's like, I want it to. Yeah, I want it to be a fable.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

When he saw those statues, you're like, we have title finally, Roman, I have.

[Dan McCoy]

A movie for you called the Fablemans that you might enjoy more.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, it's a real fable.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, fable oriented.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's about a little mouse. That's Fable Goes West. I apologize. That's an American tale. Fable goes west.

[Stuart Wellington]

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 a well appointed room with attendants and his wife is in the bed. But in reality, he's just sitting on a bed. Right. There's no wife there at all.

[Elliot Kalin]

He's like he's hallucinating that his wife is still alive and is being cared for and he's visiting her. And Julia seems to see both reality and the hallucination. She both sees reality, but seems to understand. Oh, he thinks his wife is There.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

I never could quite figure out why. I know why Claudio gets mad later. I could never quite figure out why Claudio cares about.

[Stuart Wellington]

He has, like, a burn book of all the people he doesn't like, and Caesar Catalina's written down on them.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

I just assume that Caesar Catalina, like, I don't know, accidentally threw some logs in the fire when they were sitting around the fire, and it burned off Shia LaBeouf's eyebrows. So that's why he hates him. Cause he has, like, painted on eyebrows or something, right?

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, Just like Superman and Lex Luthor. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

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 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 set for, like, a play. Right. And where they can, like, gaze down upon all of New Rome and kind of see as everything moves.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

Meanwhile, I think there's. Yeah, there's nothing in my notes. There's nothing particular. It just says clocks.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

Meanwhile, we get a wedding between. Wow. Wild Platinum. And Crassus the banker guy. I don't remember his last name. Is that his last name?

[Elliot Kalin]

I think Crassus is his last name.

[Dan McCoy]

Jon Voight.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, Jon Voight. Okay, so this is clearly Wild Platinum is. This is a power play for her. She wants access to money.

[Elliot Kalin]

Is Hamilton Crassus III.

[Stuart Wellington]

Thank you, Hamilton Crassus III. Thankyou. 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 a dress made up.

[Dan McCoy]

That was a wedding.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

To 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

I don't know if it's necessarily the Marx Brothers.

[Dan McCoy]

Like the Marx Brothers.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's a celebration of their betrothal though, right? I mean, it's their reception.

[Stuart Wellington]

Who knows?

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

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, which is.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, this is Vesta Sweetwater.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

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 it. Just an effect.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, that's right.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 ear, you know, leaves behind their ears. So it's like kind of epaulette to.

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

It's the kind of stuff that has been done on stage in productions of Julius Caesar since at least the 1930s, where it's like 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.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

I think you meant when he lost himself in the film. Right, Roman.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Roman Mars]

It's kind of delivering the bread and circuses that to placate, you know, people in the audience, you know.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, I wanted the idiot rabble.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Stuart Wellington]

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. I think he's in drag at this point. He sneaks into the control booth and he frames Caesar and Vesta Sweetwater, who is like a Taylor Swift style pop star. And the idea is that she is supposed to be a young virgin, right?

[Dan McCoy]

Yes. She's both made a big deal out of, like, I'm going to keep myself a virgin. And she's presenting herself as being younger than she is. So this we learn later. Yeah, yeah. This is like statutory rape, it seems, but it's not actually.

[Roman Mars]

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?

[Stuart Wellington]

I believe that's true, yes.

[Elliot Kalin]

They're like betting that she's gonna keep her promise. Right. Like, they're not auctioning off her virginity. Right.

[Roman Mars]

I thought that's what was happening there, like that. But you guys took notes. I didn't.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Of that would be. I mean, it's ancient Rome stuff, though. Cause it's like, right. That like, the Vestal virgins, their virginity was one of the things underpinning the safety of the spiritual safety of Rome. Like, that's part of the issue with trying to compare. Do a metaphor where you're like, ancient Rome is like nowadays is that the basic foundational underpinnings of society are so different compared to ancient Roman. 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. Like, in a way.

[Stuart Wellington]

Don't we do that these days?

[Elliot Kalin]

He writes too. I'm the one who's being naive. Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah. My notes say fundraiser, question mark. Pledging for purity, question mark.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, I think they are. I think they are. I think it's like a marathon fundraiser where you're pledging someone to run a marathon. I think they're pledging for her to just stay a virgin. And so when they see her on tape, supposedly in bed with Caesar. Catalina.

[Roman Mars]

Catalina.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

They're like, I wasted all that money.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah. And everybody makes.

[Elliot Kalin]

The ending of our city is all wrong. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah. Everyone is incensed by this. Like, the crowd is bang for blood.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, after her big musical number. I didn't talk about it, but do you want to talk about la?

[Elliot Kalin]

She does this big musical number where there's suddenly like six of her singing all at the same time. And again, again, doesn't make sense. Doesn't really work thematically. Never explained. But it's a cool. Not bad with a cool looking scene. And I have to say, actually, the Vesta stuff is the last we see of her character. Is one of my favorite moments in the movie also. But we'll get to that.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, please get to it. Cause I don't have it written down in my notes.

[Elliot Kalin]

That's where. Okay, well, when it's. I don't remember what happens here, but like, the scandal comes out that this video has been shown by every. To Shia LaBeouf arranged for this video to be shown on the jumbotron of her in bed with Adam Driver. And then suddenly the screen fills with fire and there are headlines that are like, vesta reimagines herself. And suddenly she is singing a bad girl song. Now she's reimagining herself as A sinful bad girl, and she's a superstar again. And it feels so much like Francis Ford Colville 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, I think that's a little sequence that happens a little bit later. And it's done, like, totally, like, classic MTV News style, like, explosion bit. And then, like, scenes of societal collapse. Okay. 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 Vesta Sweetwater is older than she's been telling everybody. So she exonerates him, problem almost immediately solved.

[Dan McCoy]

But also.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

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 taking 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 tells Julia, you gotta 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. He's a sterling saint, you know?

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

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 at the Design Authority.

[Roman Mars]

Which, by the way, has really boring design. I really wanted those jackets to pop a little bit more. I was really bummed about that because. Because I was like, design authority. All right, let's spend some time with Design Authority. Nothing. Nothing.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mugler would Be upset.

[Elliot Kalin]

Robert 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?

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah. Claudio. Meanwhile, one scheme foiled. He's got more schemes to be had. He starts trumping it up. He sees what's going on and he's like. Starts getting the 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

I think that movie's pretty subtle. I don't know if something like that would happen in this movie.

[Stuart Wellington]

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 gonna 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 leave my daughter out of this. Get out of this.

[Elliot Kalin]

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's an omen? Yeah. Okay. I wanna make sure that we're getting something the full. I don't want people to listen to this and be like, this movie doesn't sound that crazy. Then it's like, oh, yeah. What about the scene where the mayor has his dream about a cloud grabbing the moon?

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. It doesn't really figure 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. They're under the water, and there's some people who are rocks. They're painted as rocks, and then they sort of move and you see that they're people, and. 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

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?

[Dan McCoy]

What was that guy, the great Gazoo.

[Elliot Kalin]

The Great Gazoo. 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, goofy thing to have. It's like, oh, yeah, 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 irritating.

[Stuart Wellington]

And they have a family dinner at one point where they invite the mayor and his wife, and they're playing cards in this weird, magical Megalon house, Right?

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

And they're, like, discussing string theory and shit.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. Does that come after the destruction of the city?

[Elliot Kalin]

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.

[Stuart Wellington]

Okay, I forgot about that satellite.

[Elliot Kalin]

There's a Soviet satellite that. Yeah. Is. They're like. Anyway, its orbit has decayed. It's gonna hit the city, and they're like, whoa. And then they don't do anything about it for a while. Nothing Weird.

[Stuart Wellington]

I was starting to realize that taking these notes in the dark, it was a lot easier to take notes on.

[Dan McCoy]

Madame Web, a more straightforward film that follows a screenplay formula that has been entrenched in Hollywood by this point.

[Elliot Kalin]

I think Adam Driver has also shown us some of the visual visions of what megalops look like. And the buildings all look like plants. And the idea is the buildings grow as people need them. Like, there's homes for everybody because the buildings can grow and change with the needs of the people, which is a beautiful idea. Roman, how close are we to that?

[Roman Mars]

Yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

Has anyone tried that yet? Growing buildings?

[Roman Mars]

I mean, in a way, like, Hunter Vassar was really into mold and letting things grow because it was like, true, organic space. And the straight line is the godless line.

[Stuart Wellington]

And you're going to want Jeff Vanderbilt.

[Roman Mars]

You're gonna want.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Roman Mars]

Totally. So there's a lot of. There have been big, lofty ideals about a kind of, like, organic architecture, like, in a literal way, like, to make it. And then there's the term organic architecture, like Frank Lloyd Wright style. That just means it's reactive to it and changes to people's needs. So that's all kind of those ideas are out there. That is the closest thing this sort of dunderheaded movie gets to an ide. And it's the first time you sort of get to this. Yeah. Like, what does this utopia mean? 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 one.

[Elliot Kalin]

Like what is, what is the U part of the utopia? Like, what does it do?

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, it really is. It's. It's. It was. It' weird. But that's one idea that'd be great. Having a magical substance that requires no thought or care or design or whatever.

[Stuart Wellington]

Politics creates, no waste, requires no energy. It just does it all.

[Roman Mars]

And this is a huge problem that you're going to use some technology is going to save us. Rather than people coming together and actually coming with solutions and working stuff out is. Is just a nonsense idea that you can. The thing is, you're exploring for a couple of hours.

[Elliot Kalin]

You say that until Megalon does. It works its magic. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. Okay, so this is after. This is then after the city is destroyed by a satellite falling to earth, right?

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, maybe like this is a.

[Dan McCoy]

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, 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 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?

[Elliot Kalin]

And.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

I'm looking at my. Cause I wasn't sure if I was gonna have to do the summary today or not, so I took some notes.

[Dan McCoy]

Also, please.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, there's also. But you're right, Dan, because, like, Dustin Hoffman's character, who's an assistant to the mayor, he dies off. We hear about, oh, yeah, he's dead now.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

And Shia LaBeouf runs for his position of alderman and his guy. And then it's after that that the mayor goes to Caesar and says, if you leave my daughter, I'll give you the evidence that I lied when I was prosecuting you, and you'll be able to destroy me, and I'll put my support behind your projects. 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 money. Everyone wants to be in the Caesar Catalina business. And he's like, no, no, no. And that's when real Catalina caper. Yep. And she seems to hypnotize Crassus into giving her control over the bank. And then Caesar is shot in the head by this child who he should have been suspicious when a kid asked him to sign his book for him. Like, there's no way this kid is reading Cesar Catalina's.

[Stuart Wellington]

I don't know, man. Everybody loves Cesar Catalina. I think that's pretty clear. Okay, but then Stuart.

[Elliot Kalin]

But how do they heal him? How do they heal him?

[Stuart Wellington]

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 weird death dream. But then they end up healing him by fusing his head with some Megalon.

[Elliot Kalin]

They just stick Megalon on his head, on the open skull that's there. And this truly is an amazing building material.

[Stuart Wellington]

So at this point, Caesar then goes, oh.

[Elliot Kalin]

But then having the Megalon in his face gives him lots of new powers.

[Stuart Wellington]

And, yeah, he shows up at Crassus Hamilton Crassus apartment. Claudio tries to harass him. Wow. Platinum tries to make a move on him, but he reveals his Megalon, half human, half Megalon face. And it causes multiple images, and everybody is wowed by the majesty of his face, especially.

[Elliot Kalin]

Wow. Herself. And she has. 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 hand. 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

Catalina, of course she's gonna pick, I guess, the next best thing. And that's Claudio Crassus. That's right. And so we have a little sex scene. You were probably into this, right, Dan? It was like a Game of Thrones style sex position scene.

[Elliot Kalin]

It was kind of like a Game of Thrones style sex scene where it's all about power and you feel like, 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.

[Dan McCoy]

I mean, it can be like that. Yeah, yeah. If you're doing it right.

[Elliot Kalin]

That's true.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

By the way, I just really love being on this zoom call and watching Roman's face as he relives the plot. Like, he's like, oh, yeah, that did. That is a thing.

[Roman Mars]

Like what I have been going through that where I was just like, the satellite. Yeah. Oh, my God.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, I'd forgotten about the satellite.

[Roman Mars]

It really is. Oh, my God. This is a bunch. Like, I had streamlined it into, like, a much tighter movie in my memory than all this. I'm just like, you missed all the good parts.

[Elliot Kalin]

You forgot all the good parts. Long Winding road. Here's my note for that satellite. I wrote, the mayor learns the Soviet satellite may crash into city Dash. And then it does question mark. So it did happen. And I think the upshot of that is the idea that it now has opened up even more land for building on in real life. The real Ramases had to evict people. He didn't have Soviet satellites doing the job for him.

[Roman Mars]

This is just a stew. 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 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 that Adam Driver is just wrong. You know what I mean? And also the idea 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 actually hard thought and compromise.

[Stuart Wellington]

This is bad stuff.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, this is real. 13, 14 year old. I can't believe an old man wrote this. You know what I mean? Like, this is like.

[Stuart Wellington]

This is what it feels like. Something made by somebody very young or very old.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, I guess.

[Dan McCoy]

Or a very stoned man, which apparently he was.

[Elliot Kalin]

Or a Gary old Man.

[Stuart Wellington]

A Gary old Man. It feels a lot like somebody like Gary old banana.

[Elliot Kalin]

Gary old man. And a Gary old Man.

[Dan McCoy]

Gary old bananas.

[Elliot Kalin]

It feels like Gary, Indiana. But Gary Oldman.

[Dan McCoy]

I know what you're singing.

[Stuart Wellington]

Somebody. He 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 Jodorowsky Meta Barons book. And he's like, I'm going to do it like this.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah. It kind of feels. Yeah. He's like, should I read the Power Broker or the Ink Hall? I'll read them both. I'll just alternate pages.

[Stuart Wellington]

Exactly.

[Elliot Kalin]

Okay, so wait, I wanted to ask you guys. So this next part. So Stuart, summarize it. And then I've got a question for everybody. Okay. Because I just want to let you know I have a question about.

[Stuart Wellington]

I was just talking about. Wow. Platinum. And Claudio scheming to take over the bank. They do it over sex. And then Crassus collapses.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, I'd like two eggs over sex, please.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My Google calendar says sex meeting at 10:00. Okay. So, yeah. So then Crassus collapses. He seems to have what, like a.

[Elliot Kalin]

Stroke or he has a heart attack or A stroke. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

And he collapses, leaving. Wow. And Claudio.

[Elliot Kalin]

Now then it seems like spring comes. You see flowers blooming and Catalina and Julia get married in their car. Laurence Fishburne sits in the driver's seat. And they sit in the back. Not Adam, driver's seat, but the driver's seat of the car.

[Stuart Wellington]

Thank you. Yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

And marries them. And then there is a montage of December holidays in this kind of Abel Gantz's Napoleon triple screen thing. And suddenly it's winter again. And I was like, did I hallucinate that it was spring and now it's winter again. I don't know what. And it can't be the next year. Cause the baby is the same age as when they got married. But this. Let's Explain. Did you guys have any sense of why there's suddenly a montage of winter holidays?

[Dan McCoy]

I would have to remember.

[Stuart Wellington]

I also have to ask Elliot. My notes. I just wrote down Elvis. What does that mean?

[Elliot Kalin]

Yes. So an Elvis impersonator is out on the street singing America the Beautiful.

[Stuart Wellington]

Oh, okay.

[Elliot Kalin]

I think as part of Claudio's. Like Claudio's pandering to the masses. I'm not sure. Maybe it's a busker and it's a statement about the plastic artificiality of American values. Yeah, that happens. I'm not quite sure.

[Dan McCoy]

I love this new bit. Stuart deciphers his notes, by the way.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, that happens.

[Roman Mars]

So around.

[Elliot Kalin]

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.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, everybody's representing. I love it.

[Elliot Kalin]

Well, everybody. I mean, three religions.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Yep. They go through the antique subway car tunnels that have been closed off for years in the city. You know, there's that. It 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 tourism things after September 11th. I think that it looked like that place. I wonder if they shot it there. It's possible.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

The third pride goeth before more success. The old. The old. The old aphorism. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

So they go into Hamilton Crassus bedroom and something. It seems like he's pitching a little tent.

[Elliot Kalin]

So this is. So I want to get Roman's take on this. This is by far the best. I saw this movie in a theater. It was just me and four other people. Not strangers, not people I knew. They were watching the movie, stone faced, very serious. And when this line came out, I laughed so loud. And nobody else in the audience reacted. And I did not regret it at all. And so does anyone want to say what?

[Stuart Wellington]

Well, Elliot and Elliot had been like, John Boyd 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.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

It's roughly. I'm not quoting it direct. I mean, I'm trying to quote.

[Stuart Wellington]

I can quote it direct.

[Elliot Kalin]

Oh, yeah. So say. So this he wrote down.

[Stuart Wellington]

Turning to his son and wife, he says, what do you think of this boner I got?

[Dan McCoy]

But then he reveals what the boner.

[Stuart Wellington]

It's a crossbow.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 movie, I just can't. I can't guess.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Or alleged boner.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

A gun wouldn't have been able to make enough of a tent in the seats.

[Stuart Wellington]

I mean, he's a prime.

[Dan McCoy]

No, that's true. So I think there is a theatricality of it, though, is.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

Somebody find out on Saturday.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 saying or some story he knows that involves an arrow that he's referencing, since there's so many references in this movie to other things that are floating around in Francis Ford Coppola's head.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Stuart Wellington]

What about their. Like, turtle formation where they lock all their shields together? You don't ever think about that?

[Dan McCoy]

I'm thinking about it now.

[Elliot Kalin]

Pretty cool.

[Stuart Wellington]

They look like a turtle, but with spears.

[Elliot Kalin]

Dan, how often do you think about the Civil War? Cause that's the other thing I feel like American men think about a lot.

[Dan McCoy]

Rarely I think about.

[Elliot Kalin]

Do you think about college goes to college. Is that a thing you think about colleagues a lot? Oh, Ghoulies goes to college.

[Dan McCoy]

Okay, so that's your Roman Empire movies about small monsters. Ghoulies and gremlins and munchies.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah. Frankie Frico, available on VOD right now.

[Elliot Kalin]

Some stealth marketing for Frankie Freco right there, featuring the voices of the plot.

[Roman Mars]

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, ho. 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 cloud. Just. This was so different and shocking. I mean, the. You know, when Caesar got shot in the face, that was a little shocking. Cause it had a real pop sound, like a Godfather movie pop. You know, like a real. Like, I was like, oh, I remember that guy. I like that guy's movies, you know?

[Elliot Kalin]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Totally. But the. But.

[Elliot Kalin]

And then the second greatest guy being shot in the head moment when Mo Green gets killed at the end of the same movie.

[Roman Mars]

He's really good at shooting people in faces.

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean, he was in 1976.

[Roman Mars]

He's kind of wasted in this movie, to tell you the truth. But that. That was a move that was a moment of delight just because of. It was the shocking violence. Like, I had no idea that that was what was about to happen. So it was kind of like, oh.

[Stuart Wellington]

Right, this thing's alive, but his.

[Elliot Kalin]

But him talking about his boner just left you cold.

[Roman Mars]

Well, No, I mean, I think the boner part was like, comet. 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah. I was taking a big slurp of my soda and just spit it all over.

[Dan McCoy]

Well, speaking of fearing. Missing this. I knew that there was this line. You know, all I'd heard about was this line about how Jon Foy had this great line and the movie is very long. Yeah. And I.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's not. Well, it's not that long, but it feels long. It is. It's like about two hours, a little less than 2:20, you know.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. Okay. It's longer than, to my mind, the ideal length of the movie.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's longer than train comes into a station.

[Dan McCoy]

Two hours.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's longer than the first movies.

[Dan McCoy]

It's longer. The important thing is it's longer than my bladder can stand. So all through this movie, I was like, I gotta wait out for this Jon Voight line. And then I finally, like, I'm in physical pain. Like, I have to. I have to leave the theater.

[Stuart Wellington]

Were you pinching it with your.

[Dan McCoy]

It's not. No.

[Elliot Kalin]

You're literally pinching your urethra shut.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, I was pinching my urethra.

[Elliot Kalin]

Like you're trying to control a fire hose.

[Dan McCoy]

I had to pee so badly. I. I was hurting.

[Elliot Kalin]

Roman is really rethinking dropping 99 VIP.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

Oh, no.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Dan McCoy]

Well, I mean, fortunately.

[Elliot Kalin]

Cheering, firing guns into the air, singing all lead sign. Yeah, all this stuff.

[Dan McCoy]

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. I saw the rest of the scene that I.

[Elliot Kalin]

Leaving a lot of gold on the table.

[Dan McCoy]

Well, then in the description, it was 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

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. This otherwise serious minded, allegorical movie said by Jon Voight 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.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah. What a performance. Okay, so as we said, 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, shows visions of his utopia. Is that correct? Is that what happens?

[Elliot Kalin]

Yes. 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 a side. And the speech he gives is so. So it's just such vaporware. It's such empty conceptual nonsense. And it does not speak to any of the actual needs that these people have shown up to this point and why they're reacting. 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.

[Dan McCoy]

Platitudes. Yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

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.

[Roman Mars]

And this is another part where I'm just like. So I'm so out with this movie where it's like. Where it's like. It really tries to have it both ways. Like, it has great contempt for almost all the rich people, which is fine. Like, you can hate all the rich people all you want.

[Elliot Kalin]

The job creators from it.

[Roman Mars]

Crassus just. Crassus totally sucks. And all Crassus family sucks. Obviously, it has this exception for Caesar because of his 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 the. 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 ordinary citizen in 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 watched Life Force recently and that's a movie that. 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, you know?

[Roman Mars]

Well, it's ostensible. Ideas are about, like, serving people and the public and how to make a society. And SOC is completely unrepresented in any realistic or meaningful way. They're all just. 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. It's weird. Like, I. I totally get that you can have Shakespeare plays that are all about kings and shit. I. You know, that's fine. Like, you don't. The commoner has to be represented in every.

[Dan McCoy]

The tragedies. And there was kings and shit that was.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Roman Mars]

But it's just Kingsmere.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's the emblet. No, that doesn't work.

[Roman Mars]

What?

[Stuart Wellington]

I said Kingsmere.

[Elliot Kalin]

Kingsmere works pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. Toilets and cressida. Is that what.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

Okay, speaking of roads. So Caesar promises these magical floating, glowing robes that are all like the rainbow. 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 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. Julian Caesar's baby.

[Dan McCoy]

And let's say this is a very strange looking shot too. There's a 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Roman Mars]

But the baby is the one stopping time, right? Maybe.

[Dan McCoy]

Must be because she's the one moving and everywhere.

[Elliot Kalin]

But I thought she. But I thought. Doesn't Julius hate to tell Caesar to stop time? Maybe I'm misremembering it. I don't know.

[Dan McCoy]

But then they're frozen. Like, I mean, I think she does, but it doesn't.

[Elliot Kalin]

Oh, it's the baby that does it. Well, the baby doesn't know what she's doing. It's very upsetting to me. Very upsetting.

[Stuart Wellington]

In the movie, the feeling I get is that they're leaving the future for the next generation.

[Elliot Kalin]

For the sequel, Megalopolis 2. Babyopolis.

[Stuart Wellington]

My notes then say, pledge allegiance. Did something happen after this? Was there like a speech or something?

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

Oh, yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Roman Mars]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

It meant so much. You printed it out and laminated you.

[Roman Mars]

Up on the wall. I pledge allegiance to our human family and to all the species that we protect. One Earth indivisible, with long life, education and justice for all is what the kids said.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

Look.

[Dan McCoy]

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 pledge.

[Elliot Kalin]

I think we can all stand behind the values of the human race and everybody getting justice and education. It doesn't fit with this movie, which.

[Dan McCoy]

This movie is about, isn't really.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's a real Robert Moses viewpoint movie where it's like the people don't know what they want. The people are sheep. They have to be shown by a genius what is best for them. And someone needs to make the decision. It is a movie that I think is. The person making it thinks they're 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.

[Roman Mars]

And you.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 Toilets Andronicus because Toilet and Cressida is a poem, right? Like, it's not a play.

[Dan McCoy]

No, Toilet and Cressida is a play.

[Elliot Kalin]

Is a play. What am I thinking? What's his epic poem then?

[Dan McCoy]

I don't know. I'm less familiar with this viewers.

[Elliot Kalin]

Shakespeare, if you're listening, write in and tell us.

[Stuart Wellington]

If only we had.

[Elliot Kalin]

You want to have a toy English.

[Stuart Wellington]

Majors on this podcast?

[Dan McCoy]

Um, yeah. I mean, we're getting into the final judgments sort of area, but, like, that's. That's. 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

But guys, toilets and crested. I was thinking of the poem by Chaucer, and then Shakespeare wrote the play of it. That's right. Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

So toilets and Cressida work.

[Dan McCoy]

Thank you.

[Stuart Wellington]

Okay, let me just amend the scoreboard.

[Dan McCoy]

Get it out on further review.

[Elliot Kalin]

The call against toilets and Cressida has been over. Terrible.

[Dan McCoy]

You've crystallized something for me, Elliot. 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 because political.

[Elliot Kalin]

I think you strike that maybe from the record when he's talking. Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

Politically, basically, 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

So instead of a fable, it should say a bunch of megalopolis. A bunch of stuff that happened, 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 Pro Coppola should have made that Dogman movie. What do you think?

[Stuart Wellington]

Dogman? Yeah, I think he should have made that movie. Is that. Where 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean, that's kind of like what? Like a cynosopholic or canocephalic. 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 is about. A. He's a police officer with a dog's head who.

[Stuart Wellington]

Oh, that's too bad.

[Elliot Kalin]

We should get into a series of books for children.

[Dan McCoy]

We should get into our final judgments. But before we do, I just want to give.

[Elliot Kalin]

I thought we'd start it already.

[Dan McCoy]

I want to give Stuart some plaudits for how he handled that.

[Stuart Wellington]

That's cool. Anyone else want to give me plaudits earlier?

[Roman Mars]

All the plaudits?

[Dan McCoy]

No, I just, you know, I was keeping an eye on time and early on I'm like, oh, man, we're never. This is going to be a four hour episode. But Stuart, you got us through. You have to pass.

[Stuart Wellington]

The trick is forgetting things like satellites falling on me.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, but of course, this is where we give our final judgments. Whether we thought that Megalopolis 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 going to say good bad in the sense that, 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 gotta do megalopolis. I wanna hear what you say about megalopolis. But part of me was like, well, I don't wanna take someone down for like.

[Elliot Kalin]

I wanna give the masses what they want. I'm a genius. I know better than they do.

[Dan McCoy]

Well, I feel bad about taking a passion project down. Even if it's misbegotten, gotten. Like, I do appreciate the swing. I don't think that this movie is successful and there's large chunks of it that are boring. But I say good bad in the sense that, like, I would not discourage anyone with any 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 there's going to be some stuff in it that's going to have you grasping your head and shaking your fist to the heavens. So that's what I say. Stuart, what do you think?

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, I mean, I Feel I have less of an issue with targeting passion projects because I feel like passion projects often suffer from a certain amount of great man syndrome and delusion of genius. 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. 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. Because it feels a lot like those movies. Like, 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 this movie exists and I feel like if you're interested in it, you should check it out. It's a mess.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 on. I'm glad to have seen, even if I'm never gonna watch it again, probably. And I feel. I think you're right, that.

[Stuart Wellington]

Not with your kids.

[Elliot Kalin]

Well, eventually. Eventually. Dad, can we watch Megalopolis? You're not ready yet. You wouldn't understand. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get them to watch Metropolis, another kind of politically mushy movie set in the city of the future. And they have no interest, even though that's a great movie. But I think the future film critics will look back on it, knowing what it is and being able to pick out the few kind of pearls that are in the morass of sludge, rather than us looking at it now, expecting something different than it is, which is 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 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 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? Why is he doing that? And that's something I like. You're saying, Stuart, in 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?

[Roman Mars]

I think that, you know, what is it like 15 years of watching bad movies has rotted Yalls brain because this is a bad movie.

[Elliot Kalin]

This is. Roman, I've seen things you couldn't imagine. Crap movies glittering off the shoulder of remake.

[Roman Mars]

Here's the thing. I think this is a bad, bad movie. And I think that if you compare it to other. This is like a false premise of like, it is interesting. Whereas all superhero movies are boring. At least this thing exists and it has some kind of vision or whatever. But that. 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.

[Elliot Kalin]

Roman, that's the way you think. You're never gonna. You're never gonna be able to.

[Dan McCoy]

I was never gonna do that. That's my thing.

[Roman Mars]

Literally. Do anything else?

[Stuart Wellington]

Learn a language.

[Dan McCoy]

I meant to.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, I mean, it's just. If it had this vision and was messy and was chaotic and whatever. But it's just like. As you dig into the ideas of the movie, I think those ideas are bad and dangerous ideas. Like, I think that they actually are pernicious that make the world a worse place. That's why I kind of. I was almost wooed by this idea of like the Passion Project that you don't wanna 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 caring about the people and that even the movie cares about people and serving people, but then ignores them, ignores their needs. That there's this phony kind of MeToo crisis in the middle of this thing that's completely dashed by facts that exonerate this man. All that sort of stuff. If was. If the underlying core of this was sort of More benign or innocuous, I would have more charity towards its big swings. But I think that it actually has terrible ideas at its core.

[Stuart Wellington]

I feel like that almost makes it more interesting.

[Roman Mars]

I get that.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

And so, like, if you're like, again.

[Elliot Kalin]

In case you're worried that this movie is gonna sway people. Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

I mean, I don't think it is.

[Roman Mars]

Either, but I just feel like. I feel like it should be held accountable for. For its dumbness, you know, Like, I.

[Stuart Wellington]

Would argue it does because he, like, spent so much of his money for a huge flop that is being publicly pillory. Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

You're saying he owned himself.

[Roman Mars]

But, you know, but you know, and I know this too. Cause we're all like, I'm a little older than you guys are. But like, you've watched.

[Stuart Wellington]

You look great. Thank you.

[Roman Mars]

But like, you've watched like really misguided millennials in Gen Z resurrect the Star wars prequel trilogy and talk about its secret genius. And you're like, no, you don't understand. We were there. It's fucking awful. Like, you have to trust us on this. The book is closed on that matter. And you're right, this is going to be resurrected and people are gonna find things in it and it's just gonna be just. That's gonna 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, you know, populism and politics and, you know, like, and greatness and being sort of, you know, great men being sort of like somehow thwarted in their great, you know, like, what's so crazy about the movie is like, with all this crazy stuff that happens, like, you know, everything is just given to Caesar. 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, these are bad ideas to play play with poorly right now. And that's what I think. That's the part that really incenses me about it as a movie.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

That's fair.

[Stuart Wellington]

I'm one of the dumbasses. I want to follow this guy. Tell me about your utopia, Roman.

[Roman Mars]

But I want it to be so much Better. I can deal with all the nonsense of it. In fact, one of the. I think it's 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, you know, he sounds like he just leans into it, but he's not hammy. It's like, that's the part where I'm like, I liked him more coming out of this movie not than I ever have, but, like, it just added to my esteem of him.

[Elliot Kalin]

Well, something that we see a lot in the movies on the podcast is that when you are an actor who's in a movie that doesn't make sense or is not good, you never win points by being openly disdainful of the movie or by acting like, you know, it is. Like, I think one of the things that helps with Adam Driver's performance is when he's saying nonsense or he's doing things that doesn't make sense, he is still acting as if the things that he's doing make sense and are rational and coherent. And I think you're right. He comes out of it. I mean, I feel like there's. Most of the main performers in this come out pretty well.

[Roman Mars]

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.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, well, that's also, like, from what I understand from hearing people talk about it, like, he. 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. If you don't want to lean into that, that's fine, because it sounds like this was not a good working experience for a lot of people.

[Elliot Kalin]

If you don't want to be told to do something different every single moment, then suddenly kiss you or harass.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, yeah. So I'm not necessarily making an argument to ignore that, but I am saying that he seemed to embrace, like, okay, like, as an artistic thing, I'm going to roll with this and be, like, collaborative and really commit to it. And that's probably part of why he does come out feeling like he.

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean, we also. I don't Think we need to get into it. But I'm sure there was also an element of Francis Ford Coppola probably treating him better than he treated other people, you know, because he's the star that he identifies with in the movie. And he saw and he loved 60, so he saw that and he was like, you were shooting dinosaurs.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

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 Grubbull's 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. You knew what was going to happen.

[Dan McCoy]

I don't think so.

[Elliot Kalin]

I don't think so. I don't know how you did it. It doesn't seem like my movie.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, I mean, my movies are good. This one, I don't know.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Roman Mars]

After the break, more from the flop house. If you ever worry about the safety of your home and family, there's no better time. Time to act right now. Simplisafe is extending its massive Black Friday deal for our listeners. Get 50% off a new Simplisafe security system. Simplisafe's active guard outdoor protection changes the game by preventing crime before it even happens. If someone's lurking around, agents see them in real time, talk to them directly, set off your spotlights, and even call the police before they've had a chance to break in. This time of year in particular, with packages coming to the house for the holiday place, I am glad that there are eyes on my house, making sure nothing untoward happens. Simplisafe is extending its massive Black Friday deal for my listeners this week only. You can get 50% off any new system with a select professional monitoring plan. This is your last chance to claim their best offer of the year. Head to SimpliSafe.com Invisible. That's SimpliSafe.com Invisible. There's no safe like Simplisafe.

[Elliot Kalin]

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[Stuart Wellington]

Arco.

[Roman Mars]

Believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model they have some really delightful prices too. Everyone who's listened to the show for years knows how in the bag I am for article furniture. I love it. I have a ton of it in my home. But our sound engineer Martin Gonzalez just redid his whole living room with article. He sent me a picture and it was almost comical how much article furniture he stuffed into his Brooklyn apartment. So I'm going to let him tell you what he thinks. I'm sitting here enjoying my brand new article living room set. I replaced my junky free and craigslisted.

[Elliot Kalin]

Furniture with a very nice set from the Seni collection.

[Roman Mars]

I got a sofa, love seat and chair all in matching volcanic gray were delivered right to my door. All I did was pop open the boxes and screw some legs on. I am so much more excited to have people over now that I'm not embarrassed of my furniture. I did in fact use this offer code that Rowan is about to tell you. Article is offering our listeners 50 off your first purchase of 100 or more. To claim, visit article.com 99 and the discount will automatically be applied at checkout. That's article.com 99 for 50 $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. You like to optimize things. You've chosen the perfect credit card to maximize your travel points. Shouldn't you handle your charitable giving the same way? GiveWell spends 50,000 hours every year doing deep dives into different charitable programs to try to find the ways to do the most good for your dollar. Over 100,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high impact giving. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free. You can make tax deductible donations to their recommended funds or charities and GiveWell doesn't take a cut. Go to givewell.org to find out more or make a donation. Select podcast and enter 99% visible at checkout to make sure they know that you heard about them from us. Again, that's givewell.org to donate or find out more.

[Dan McCoy]

Let's answer a couple of questions from listeners. This one is from NYLO Last name withheld.

[Elliot Kalin]

This is from FF Coppola. Uh oh.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, Everybody's gagging for it.

[Dan McCoy]

Everyone wants that look up.

[Elliot Kalin]

They want to see it as big as finally, the real moon's gonna get. The just desserts that the film moon got.

[Stuart Wellington]

Finally, the stand up and cheer moment of the year.

[Dan McCoy]

Well, what else? Moonfall.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Elliot Kalin]

I mean. So I'm gonna think about this a little more practically. We don't have sound. Right? Cause it's just being projected.

[Dan McCoy]

True.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

Akira works for it.

[Roman Mars]

You have to tune your radio to a certain frequency.

[Elliot Kalin]

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. Once it's project projected on the moon.

[Dan McCoy]

One week by Buster Keaton. I don't know.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, you're basically talking about the biggest movie in the park that you can imagine for the summertime. And so it's gonna be like Toy Story. I don't think it's gonna work.

[Elliot Kalin]

Worse things you can go with than Toy Story.

[Roman Mars]

No, but it's gonna be some Pixar movie that you can bring all the kids to and then. And that's it.

[Elliot Kalin]

Well, this thing, I wanted to be family friendly. Cause if my kids are out looking at the moon, I don't want them seeing something that they shouldn't see. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

Different kind of money. What shouldn't they see? It's on the list.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

Well, when are your kids going to be ready for a funeral?

[Elliot Kalin]

Daddy, Daddy. Why is Tetsuo expanding into a techno organic mass?

[Stuart Wellington]

I mean, why is he crushing Kaori when he's trying to love her?

[Dan McCoy]

One of these crimes of the future I saw.

[Elliot Kalin]

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

[Dan McCoy]

What were you saying, Roman?

[Elliot Kalin]

Sorry.

[Roman Mars]

I said I saw Paris is Burning in Lincoln center outside. And that was a lovely experience. So that could be one that you.

[Elliot Kalin]

Could do that'd be a great actual movie.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, I like it. This second and final Letter is from Annemarie, who writes. Hey, y'all. And this is clearly in response to our recent break into Flop TV episode we had.

[Elliot Kalin]

I wanted dancing season tickets available now for Flop TV Season 2.

[Dan McCoy]

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 4 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

That's how bugs stick to things alternative.

[Elliot Kalin]

That's a good theory. Well, it's not really how they stick that.

[Stuart Wellington]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

Joseph Gordon Levitt bounced off of it.

[Dan McCoy]

Yep.

[Elliot Kalin]

So was there a question there, Dan? No, it's just sharing an idea.

[Dan McCoy]

This is a charming tale of a child's imagination. Sort of like, you know, I don't know, E.T. i guess that's not an imagination, but it sparks imagination anyway.

[Roman Mars]

I mean, I love 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 all.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 makeup that only shows up on certain colors of light. And they had a gel there moving from the light. And that effect, it's from a movie from the 30s and the effect looks amaz.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah, I started writing. Special effect is that scene where the guy falls over in the movie the Gate and he turns into a bunch of little guys.

[Roman Mars]

That's pretty good.

[Elliot Kalin]

That's pretty amazing. And also there's the moment in Throne of Blood when Shiramophone gets an arrow to the neck and I'm always like, did they really kill him?

[Dan McCoy]

On that note of credulity, let's move on.

[Stuart Wellington]

Actually, Elliot, I just checked to Shir Mifune's.

[Elliot Kalin]

Oh, no, they did it. Officer arrest Akira Kurosawa. We've solved the cold case.

[Dan McCoy]

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

[Stuart Wellington]

Dan, I'm looking 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?

[Dan McCoy]

I appreciate the spirit of Dick's the Musical. I didn't enjoy it as much as I think you did.

[Elliot Kalin]

So why are you recommending it, Dan?

[Dan McCoy]

I'm not.

[Roman Mars]

This is.

[Dan McCoy]

Again, I haven't even introduced the segment, which is.

[Stuart Wellington]

I'm just looking over Dan's shoulders. Letterboxd.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Elliot Kalin]

Just stare at their face for the full runtime of Megalopolis, which is like 2 hours and 18.

[Dan McCoy]

They'll be like, what are you doing? Can you stop that?

[Elliot Kalin]

Is Megalopolis showing on my face?

[Dan McCoy]

I recently, I just rewatched Lost highway, which I hadn't seen since around the time it was new, David Lynch's Lost Highway. And 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 gonna go down that road, like, there's a lot about sort of.

[Elliot Kalin]

Is that road Mulholland Drive?

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. Disassociation after sort of a horrible event. Trying to make sense of your life through these, like, sort of fantasies. Lost High was his first trip down that Lost highway to Mulholland Drive.

[Elliot Kalin]

Now you're gonna want to go down Lost Highway. You're gonna take a turn onto Mulholland Drive.

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's gonna get you to the Inland Empire.

[Dan McCoy]

Yep. If you wanna see Bill Pullman, just wail. On a saxophone as well.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yes.

[Dan McCoy]

That's your best chance. I don't know.

[Elliot Kalin]

Some would say your only chance.

[Dan McCoy]

There's not much to say about. 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.

[Stuart Wellington]

What if you're, like, a huge Robert Blake fan?

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah. But not his movies, more his personal life.

[Roman Mars]

Not his eyebrows.

[Elliot Kalin]

I love Robert Blake. I just hate when he has hair below his forehead.

[Dan McCoy]

Is there a movie for me, anyway.

[Elliot Kalin]

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 reference were like, what?

[Dan McCoy]

Scathing.

[Elliot Kalin]

They were scathing because it had a. Like a nonlinear, 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 honestly, the fact that film reviewers saw at the time and weren't like, oh, it's a David lynch movie. I have to watch it through David lynch glasses. Yeah.

[Stuart Wellington]

I don't know if I ever told this story, but I remember seeing it, 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 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 a lot.

[Dan McCoy]

Let's go in the same order. We did our judgments. Stuart, what do you have?

[Stuart Wellington]

Okay, I'm going to recommend a movie I saw a couple weeks back. I saw Anora, the new Sean Baker movie. It's, 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 was like, whoa. I go there and. Yeah, I mean, it has. I'm Nora. Yeah. I'm like a Nora. Yeah. I mean, I feel like it really captures the rush and craziness of love and hope and also hoping against the crushing power of capitalism and shittiness. And then, of course, things start to come back to earth and things get a little bit rough. It's got an incredible central performance by Mikey Madison as the title character. Yeah, I thought it was great. I love it. Yeah, check it out.

[Roman Mars]

Cool.

[Elliot Kalin]

I'm also going to recommend an offbeat comedy romance, but not the same one. This is. I want 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. And the department store makes a point of hiring ex convicts to give them a second chance at life. And George Raft is one of those ex convicts, and they fall in love. 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 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 Weyl. So it's a like, 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 Sylvia Sidney has been on my mind since there's that new Beetlejuice movie. She's not in the new one, but since she was in the old one, you know.

[Dan McCoy]

So that's you and me play Juno.

[Stuart Wellington]

Yeah.

[Roman Mars]

I was having a hard time thinking of what to recommend, but I think the one I'd settle on is Hearts of Darkness, A filmmaker's Apocalypse, which is the documentary Eleanor Coppola made of Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now. One of the things that ends the movie Megaloff 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, he did what he wanted to. It's all okay, you know, like. And that was a nice sort of like homage to her. But she was an extremely good documentary filmmaker. It made me appreciate Apocalypse now so much more. It gave you so much insight into making a movie. It just like has so much drama. It's so fascinating. I really love Hearts of Darkness. I saw it as a kid, or 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. Apocalypse now, in a lot of ways. But I love this. It's one of the reasons why I love documentaries. I think it's just expertly and beautifully made. So hearts of hearts.

[Dan McCoy]

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. We were 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, like, even without having seen the movie, 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 probably see Apocalypse now first and then catch.

[Roman Mars]

Well, I mean, you know, it's weird. I mean, I think people take things in a lot differently now and, like, you never know. But I think this movie is great. I think it's actually better than Apocalypse Now. But, you know, that's my own flavor of, you know, that, to me, is, like, not defensible. That's just taste, you know, that's just a personal choice.

[Elliot Kalin]

Dan, there are people who saw Spaceballs before Star Wars. People watch things in all sorts of crazy orders, you know?

[Dan McCoy]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. These days.

[Stuart Wellington]

I thought you were about to mention a documentary about the making of Spaceballs. That'll be fascinating people to see.

[Elliot Kalin]

May the Schwarz be with you. A filmmaker's journey before.

[Dan McCoy]

That's not what Balls of Fury was.

[Stuart Wellington]

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

[Dan McCoy]

To find out was that real?

[Stuart Wellington]

Did they kill Rick Moranis?

[Elliot Kalin]

Did they kill Rick Moranis in that moment?

[Dan McCoy]

All right, well, we should wrap this up with a big thank you.

[Elliot Kalin]

I wanna see now. I wanna see a comedy sketch in a show where they're like, okay, they're talking to the 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. 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. We're wrapped on that. So this is your Last thing you have to do. We'll be covered.

[Dan McCoy]

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.

[Roman Mars]

Delighted. Longtime fan and supporter. I'm so happy to be here. It makes me very, very happy.

[Dan McCoy]

What were you going to say?

[Elliot Kalin]

If you want more shenanigans like this, just tune into the 99% invisible breakdown. The power Broker.

[Dan McCoy]

Exactly the same.

[Elliot Kalin]

It's exactly like. Like this show. It's just like it. Yeah.

[Dan McCoy]

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, 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 some you like. But that's it for this episode. For the Flop House, I've been Dan McCoy.

[Stuart Wellington]

I'm Stuart Wellington.

[Elliot Kalin]

I'm Elliot Kaelin.

[Roman Mars]

I'm Roman Mars. I'm gonna take that again. I'm Roman Mars. Like that.

[Dan McCoy]

That's it.

[Elliot Kalin]

Little professional.

[Stuart Wellington]

Bye, bye.

[Dan McCoy]

Professionalism undone.

[Elliot Kalin]

Roman's like, let me make sure I say that the right way. And then Stewart's like, what?

[Dan McCoy]

On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis.

[Elliot Kalin]

Do you want me to have one? Do you have.

[Dan McCoy]

You want me to do one? We're embarrassing ourselves. Okay.

[Stuart Wellington]

No, no, no, no. Roman knows her father.

[Dan McCoy]

This is the whole experience.

[Roman Mars]

You can listen and subscribe to the Flop House wherever you get your podcasts. And after all that, if you still somehow want to watch Megalopolis, it's now available on vod.

[Elliot Kalin]

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[Roman Mars]

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