Aubrey Plaza: right breast and see-through

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Some great collages by Penman:

Film Clip

Chloe Fineman’s butt

Emily Berry as a topless corpse

Grace Vanderwaal – fake

Nathalie Emmanuel does a scene in a translucent nightie

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Francis Ford Coppola has been planning and promising this film for nearly 50 years. Why, exactly? Entertainment Weekly has a theory. In a scathing review summarized by the rare “F” grade, their reviewer basically theorized that Coppola now has the highest-rated film of all time in The Godfather, and wants to earn the lowest-rated as an appropriate bookend. Imagine being able to say, “I made the best film of all time, and the worst!”

This film won’t end up dead last at IMDb. The visuals are dazzling.

Megalopolis can be loosely described as a futuristic interpretation of the Catilinarian conspiracy, as filtered through Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. A more literal interpretation of that ancient Roman conspiracy would have been a (perhaps too obvious) metaphor for modern American politics. Cataline was a Roman who lost an election but refused to accept the results. He planned to send a mob of his angry supporters to overthrow the “deep state” in Rome, which was led by Cicero. Catiline basically planned a violent coup to place himself and his allies in charge.

Megalopolis uses the names of the characters involved in that historical episode, but makes Catiline no villain, nor Cicero a hero, choosing instead to position Catiline as a visionary agent of needed change, and Cicero as a defender of the corrupt status quo.

Coppola wraps that tale in theatricality, as if Tom Hooper or Baz Luhrman had decided to make a campy musical version of Julius Caesar. In homage to Metropolis, of course, it must be spiced with just a soupcon of German Expressionism.

If I understand where Coppola is going with his extended metaphor, it’s not about American politics at all, but American filmmaking. Catiline speaks for Coppola, the visionary genius who can see that things need to change, that film needs to be the art form of this century, as well as the public forum to express and discuss intelligent ideas. Cicero and Crassus represent the Hollywood moguls and bankers who just want to keep milking the old, tired formulas for some fast bucks.

Or not. What do I know?

At any rate, I have to give Coppola a tip o’ the hat for the audacity to make what is essentially an experimental art film, the sort of thing an NYU film student might create if he won a billion-dollar lottery, and not at all what one might expect from an 80-year-old establishment figure who occupies a central chair in the pantheon of film gods.

As demonstrated in the images and clips above, the film is filled with surreal images and situations, saturated colors, frenzied action, bizarre comedy, garish musical numbers, and exaggerated performances. Adam Driver, for example, goes full Cleese and silly-walks throughout the film. Now that I think about the way he glides, twirls and waves his cape, it’s not full Cleese. It’s half Cleese and half Lugosi.

Contrary to what I have hinted, Megalopolis is not actually a musical, but it plays out like one, so I still expected people to stop the action and burst into song at any moment. Instead, they stopped the action to deliver Shakespearean monologues – and I don’t mean that figuratively. At one point Driver actually, rather inexplicably, delivers Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy. Yes, Megalopolis can be highbrow – until the next instant when it turns lowbrow, as if Vince McMahon had suddenly commandeered a toney production from Masterpiece Theater.

Songs. Dances. Dali. Hamlet. Expressionism. Cicero. Romance. Spectacle. Slapstick. High tech. And yes, art. It’s a mix that makes the film nearly incoherent.

And I’m not sure that I need the word “nearly.”

Coppola supposedly financed the epic-length film with as much as $120 million from his own pocket. He is an old man with more money than he will ever need for his own pleasure or comfort, so he decided to use that wealth to check off the major item left on his bucket list, the project he has been discussing and dreaming about for four or five decades. Self-financing the film meant that there was nobody to hold the reins once he finally decided to gallop forward with the project, and there was nothing to prevent him from making his masterpiece exactly as he envisioned it.

Oh, dear.

Well, at least we got a look at Aubrey Plaza’s T&A.