EPISODE 276: Megalopolis - Part 1
Francis Ford Coppola's epic Megalopolis is finally here! Clearly a work of a visionary artist the film divided TFT hosts Higgins and Loe more than most any other picture in the show’s multi-decade history. In this episode Le Corbusier and Calder are referenced, as are All the Pretty Horses, Gangs of New York, the need for narrative coherence and so much more. Enjoy.
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Oh my goodness, folks.
Sometimes life has got you down. You're not feeling well. Maybe it's a physical ailment.
Maybe it's mental. Maybe it's spiritual. But I tell you, cinema can be a tonic, and there is no greater tonic, if you love movies, than a film, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, that answers that immortal question, dear listeners.
What if Jodorowsky was able to make his version of Dune, but Adam Driver played Paul atreides and Shia LaBeouf played fade Rautha? And it was incredible. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Jett Loe.
Welcome to The Film Talk.
I'm Gareth Higgins. The conversation never ends. And yes, I was thinking about Jodorowsky all the way through this film.
It should be re-titled. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad. And a masterpiece of terribleness that I can't wait to see again, even though I have no idea if it works or not.
Folks are unfamiliar with Megalopolis.
What is it, Gareth? What is this film?
Megalopolis is set in a barely disguised future United States in the city of New Rome, which is New York with some more neon in it and bigger statues and also apparently Man in the Square garden has been turned into the Coliseum in which both chariot
races and mixed martial arts slash WWF fights can take place. While the elder statesmen of old Hollywood from the right and the left preside over the collapse of both cinema and society.
Yes.
And the young, the young, beautiful, beautiful Adam Driver is at the center of it all with these visionary ideas about a city of the future, a school city or a city school, a city that would actually teach people how to be in which everybody would
have a travelator and their own private garden. And I believe after the 40 years in which Francis Ford Coppola has been talking about this film and the 20 years in which Jett and I have been hearing about this film, years, five years, the five years
in which we've been aware he's actually going to make the thing. And then getting to see it yesterday, I believe, can it be true? Can it be true? I believe we have a clip.
We do have a clip.
What is this clip you ask? Well, just like watching Megalopolis in which you have absolutely no idea what the next scene is gonna be, it's me pointing the film and that's great. I don't know what this clip is.
Let's listen in.
I'm aware that this kid Claudio is a close friend of your daughter, Julia. He's no friend of Julia. He's an acquaintance.
And a bad influence. He faked that pity of Catalina somehow. He's picking up a large popular constituency.
He's some kind of genius. He can talk everything. You handle this, Rush.
Okay. I'll fix it. Just wanted to check with you first.
Because, you know, uh... I don't mind the lightning, but the thunder scares the shit out of me.
And so that was Megalopolis. This is The Film Talk, Gareth. Let's get right into it.
Let's get right into it.
Well, I said it's a mad, mad, mad, mad, eyes wide, little red fountainhead. The fountainhead, of course, Ayn Rand's novel, but apparently about an architect is the center of the universe.
I should say very quickly, I don't think that Francis Ford Coppola is an objectivist or would be much in alignment with Ayn Rand's vision of the world. Francis Ford Coppola is a gregarious man and a visionary man.
And it's not just his public reputation, but I have known people who have spent time with him. And he really is that guy who, if you show up at his house, he'll put an extra chair at the table.
He'll put another, I don't know, potato in the pot, probably another half pound of pasta. And he wants to make the world more welcoming.
A better place.
A better place, more of a community, more of a sense in which people can flourish.
You know, listeners may know when he was shooting Megalopolis, and it is true, he first spoke about it in an interview in 1983, but when he was finally shooting it, I think he pitched it to Roger Corman back in the 60s.
He said, I can re-edit this Eastern European science fiction film, but I got another idea. And Corman was like, I don't have the money for that, Francis. I don't have the money for that.
Do this nudie cutie instead, maybe set it at a drag strip.
Well, when he was shooting it in Atlanta a couple of years ago, he bought a motel and has turned it into a kind of a hub for people to make films and have a more pleasant environment in which to do it. He is a visionary artist.
An easy word to say, all I mean by that is that he has a vision beyond what's around the next corner and he's willing to risk in order to achieve that vision. You're right, in Megalopolis, you do not know what scene is going to come next.
Just like TikTok, you don't know what's coming on the TikToks.
I'm going to get the negative thing out of the way first. I'm going to get the negative thing out of the way first, right? And I'm ready for your eyes to go wide.
I'm ready for you to gasp. But I'm going to say this film, this film, this film, this film, this film is narratively incoherent.
Oh, never been more wrong.
Potentially, potentially the tragedy of this film, but I'm willing to consider alternatives. Potentially the tragedy. It ends with the scene that it should have begun with.
The story ends at the beginning of the far more interesting story because you have this architect who envisions this city, and unless I missed something, unless I missed something.
It's possible.
It is possible.
Very likely. It's a rich, heady stew.
It's the ingredients for a rich, heady stew, but I don't think that they're stirred together well.
Were you not full after watching it? Full to bursting and said, I can't eat.
Let me finish my point. Let me, let me, let me finish my point, which is. It doesn't make a case for what Caesar, Adam Driver's character, what his vision actually is.
It doesn't make a case for why would this city be utopian? In fact, one of the, the, the one thing that, that I really did remember about how it envisions the city, I'm not sure it would be that utopian. The idea of everybody having a private garden.
I don't think that's utopian. That's, that's just more cubicle living. I'd like everybody to be part of the same garden.
So it just seemed to me everything on the screen here is gorgeous. It has some of the most extraordinary, astonishing shots I've ever seen. There was a shot of Adam, Adam Driver in close up on the floor of a jail cell that made me gasp.
It wasn't the only time I gasped at the visual imagery. It does, it has this big romantic vision of love. There's an intensely touching idea of what you might do with grief once it's possible to create holographic depictions of your lost loved ones.
There are beautiful references to films like The Night of the Hunter and some kind of knowing, amusing references to Coppola's earlier work, particularly One from the Heart and The Godfather. There's an evocation of Bertolucci's The Conformist.
The thing looks and feels and sounds fantastic throughout. There are moving statues in which we see the kind of pillars, the philosophical pillars of society broken. These are extraordinary images and it's a visionary image.
Literally, eyes, sight, the images are visionary. The philosophy, at least on its first viewing, is not there. And dear Jett, as my teacher, I'm ready to learn.
And in fact, I see the film talk itself is kind of like a city school. I'm going to listen to you. I'm going to listen to you.
Yes.
I've got an idea.
I do have to say, I do have to say, I had a deep sense of disappointment in watching this film. And paradoxically, it was a sense of disappointment that is driving me to want to go to see it again, to learn more.
And I think we can both assume there's going to be at least 17 other cuts of this film that are made available. And I'm intensely looking forward to those. But please, Jett, please Jett, take this in good faith.
I don't think the film makes the case for why Caesar's a visionary and what the actual philosophical underpinnings of his city school are. And in that sense, it is massively lacking in that regard. And that's hugely sad to me.
Do you remember and the listeners will remember our conversation about Civil War and people couldn't figure out what was the conflict in Civil War?
Why were people against the president? And I speculated it's possible these critics just by sheer quintence went to the bathroom and missed the one scene in which they specifically laid out.
I did not go to the bathroom.
Is it possible that you went to get some junior mints? It probably cost like 20 bucks for four of them. And you missed the scene at the dinner table with with Caesar Catalina, Fosadot and Natalie Atmanuel in which Adam Driver lays out his philosophy.
I saw that scene and I saw that the three contradictory statements of Marcus Aurelius, it's all wonderful stuff.
It just didn't feel baked together well. And maybe that's a problem. I'm trying to bake a stew.
I don't think you should bake stews.
Have we ever, we did the show for 10 years, did we ever do a show in which we said we're going to go out?
Yes, many.
A couple. We said, let's do a show. We'll release it to the listeners.
Then we're going to see the film again. Then we're going to come back and we're going to talk again.
This film deserves that.
This film, I wanted, I couldn't, I couldn't stay. I had appointments, I had important things to do, important things. They weren't important, but I had to do them.
And you know, I'm going to tell you something. To listeners overseas, you may not know, do you know how time consuming Girl Scouts is? It is very time consuming with The cadets.
Anyway, I suggest we watch again and then come back because this film is so rich, dear listeners. Any scene you could dissect, like Eyes White Shut, which we've joked about before, about how rich it is and how multi-layered.
Any scene is full of so much, almost over stuff. And like to Gareth's point, like anything that Gareth's going to mention, I'm going to have a dozen retorts like, well, what about this in the film?
So Gareth talks about, oh, well, you know, wouldn't it be better to have a communal garden for everybody? And here's the thing. We watch films these days, and they're films made by filmmakers who have been raised on films, right?
Tarantino is the pinnacle of this. Go back to early cinema, those people had never seen films before. So they had to invent it as they went along.
And why do I talk about this? Because Coppola, this film, Megalopolis, is about not just movies. Like you go to Tarantino film, it's about movies.
Sure, he's got other influences like Mark Twain, what have you, most famously in Pulp Fiction, but it's a movie about movies. This is a movie about movies. It's also about ancient Rome.
It's also about architecture and political philosophy. So the architectural point, if you want to bring that up, why not have one communal gardens?
Because I think that Coppola probably knows as much about architecture as he knows about film, at least knows a lot. And then that is a rejection of Corbusier's plan for it.
Corbusier, the architect designed his own Megalopolis and he had communal gardens.
And there were these skyscrapers where we now will call like tower blocks or look like something destroyed in a film like Cuyonna Scottsie, Crue d'Igoe, and they had communal gardens.
And so for me watching this film, one of the great joys of it is that it's made by someone who's an autodidact, who has an incredible wealth of knowledge and skill in many different areas, just like Adam Driver's character.
And it's all incorporated into this movie. You see shades of that all through his work. And here, this is the greatest example, right?
You think about the Godfather. The Godfather teaches you how to make a sauce, right? That's my trick.
There's a whole scene about that. And that's my trick. Integrated in that scene is the idea of love and the shame and masculinity and why can't you tell, Michael, why can't you tell that girl you love her?
And it's all integrated. Here, imagine that scene, but with philosophy, with architecture, with art, with fashion, with drugs. That's one of the reasons it's so astonishing to me.
And here's the thing, the film, Gareth.
Hold on, hold on, hold on. You've already named the thing. This is, this can't be the thing if there's already been one thing.
There's many things.
This is one of the things.
This film is called Megalopolis.
This film is called Megalopolis. It's not called Caesar's Vision. It's called Megalopolis because this is Coppola's Megalopolis.
He's made his Megalopolis and this is it. He has created, Jurassic Park, I'm going on a rant here. My favorite shot, I would argue the greatest shot in Jurassic Park is, can you guess what I think is the greatest shot in Jurassic Park?
And it introduces us to a new form of cinema. This is what cinema has become.
I mean, I don't know, water bouncing in the cup on top of the hood of the Jeep.
No, it's two-thirds of the way through.
T-Rex in the rear view mirror.
No, no, the film that says this is what movies-
Richard addenborough eating ice cream and saying, what better person to rescue the children from a dinosaur park than a dinosaur as Burke?
So close. It's a scene that says the movies, as you know them, are dead. And here's what movies are now.
It's the shot in the gift shop in which the camera lovingly pans over. People have been seeing horrific deaths and then you see all the merchandise, all the Jurassic Park logos. And here's the thing, the film is called Jurassic Park.
It's the same as the thing in itself in the film. And the logos in the fictional Jurassic Park are the same as the logos for the movie that you yourself are watching. It's merged.
It's not product placement.
It's a film placed in an ad.
Exactly. And it's saying this is it.
Pretty good film.
Well, that shot is incredible. This is the culmination. This is what we are now.
And anticipated, we got computer graphics. This is it. And Megalopolis, computer graphics.
And now this is the Megalon. This is that strange material that Adam Driver has made. And computer graphics are for Coppola, his Megalon making this film.
It is this utopian vision that ends. I disagree with you. I get where you're coming from about how the film ends.
The film ends on a baby whose name is Francis. He himself reincarnates himself through cinema. The Megalon, the film itself rejuvenates him.
It's incredible. It's a yoderowskyian work of unsurpassed cinema. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Go see it more than once.
Did you like it? Did you like it? I did.
I did.
I did. I missed some things. I went out to get some Junior Mints.
Okay.
Can you look at photographs I texted you just before we started recording? That's in real time.
Is this an interactive part of the show? So Gareth is just like Megalopolis had an interactive part.
You matter to us, dear listener, and we love each and every one of you individually. We want to give you a little extra bonuses, such as Jett opening his texts while we're on the show.
Well, and this fits with Megalopolis, right? Because there is an interactive scene where in theory the actor will come out.
We're doing it right now. I'm actually acting the role of me. Aren't we all acting the role of ourselves?
I think you're starting to drift away.
Much as like some of the critics have felt about Megalopolis. Gareth is a dear listener. We're doing this live on the show.
He's just texting me photographs from the famous Grumman's Chinese Theater. I don't know if they still call it that.
It's not called the TCL Chinese Theater. They're trying to sell televisions.
Are you kidding me?
No. Mr. Grumman is no more.
Okay.
Hey, do you want to go see Mona Lisa at the Roku Arts Center? Okay. So, I'm looking at these photographs and oh, there's hands in the cement, James Mason.
There's the Megalopolis of the TCL Chinese Theater. Very nice. Looks great.
Oh, that's you with the... What is Scott directed? He's directed some...
The lovely Scott Thames, director of That Evening Sun and The Quarry.
That Evening Sun. A lot going on for Scott and we went to see it together and was involved in Rectify, possibly the best drama TV series ever made.
Wife's Favorite Show. He did my wife's favorite show, Rectify. Well, I hope Scott liked the film.
Scott and I think we felt, I'm not going to speak for Scott, I think we felt similarly.
And the film deserves to be seen in a theater like the Chinese Theater where you can see the logo of the film projected on the screen is a lovely dramatic spectacle and I want to not be misunderstood here.
Okay.
I loved the experience of watching the film. I will definitely see it again, probably multiple times.
I still think there's an issue of narrative incoherence and the fact that the film doesn't actually flesh out a case for what Adam Driver's vision of the world would be, what this city would be like other than looks pretty, there's travelators and
you get private gardens. I sort of wish that the first two, I guess, nearly two hours of the film had been like a five to 10 minute prologue and then we get the speech on the kind of wishy wishy thing that looks like what Dream, it's interesting, it
made me think of Jodorowsky, it also made me think of Vincent Ward. Yes. And Herzog, because you know, Herzog, as you remember, plays like a, I don't know if he plays like an undead person or a kind of a wraith in hell. Jack Reacher.
In what Dreams may come, very cruel character in Jack Reacher, but I kind of wish what we saw was like compressed into a 10 minute prologue and then we see Adam Driver's name is Vision and then let's see this vision embodied.
Let's see this vision embodied. Every scene, I'm sure I can find something positive to that. I mean, I actually can find something positive to say about every scene.
There are, there are, there are grace notes, images, sounds, like just that there's a scene where Adam Driver and Natalie Emanuel are on girders above the city. And it is one of the most romantic sequences I've ever seen in a film.
There is a tree stump in which a swastika has been carved on the top of the tree stump so that it can become a platform for somebody to give a speech on.
The moment very early on when I was still very excited about where this film could go and I absolutely think we should do at least another segment on this show and if you have on this film in a few weeks.
I've seen very early on where Aubrey Plaza, the great Aubrey Plaza, playing Woe Platinum. Isn't that her name? Woe Platinum.
Wow. Woe Platinum, who may pronounce her name wow, depending on where you're coming from. She plays like an anchor person, news person, and the blend of trash TV, entertainment tonight and headline news is complete.
She finishes her piece to camera broadcasting the news of this event by singing a song and saying, that's the score, right? And I was like, yes, that's what the news has become. Which team won today?
Which team won today?
And the fact that you have these two elder statesmen of Hollywood, both who have had kind of, let's say negative reputations lately, one because of their potential personal behavior, James Riemar, James Riemar, who are we talking about here?
We're talking about-
One because of their political beliefs, John Voight and Dustin Hoffman looking down over the city from this scaffolding. Of course, this is both a serious point and a joke about Hollywood taking itself too seriously.
And at the same time, I think Coppola respected John Voight enough to give him his most substantial role in years.
Yeah, and he's great. It's John Voight. He's great.
He's great.
And they're all great. But I'm not sure they're performances. Are they performances?
Are they performances?
They're playing.
They're playing, which I guess is another term.
That's also the point.
This is watching people play. It's a play. Yeah, absolutely.
It's watching people play.
Absolutely. And it's about the... We haven't even touched on it.
It's about the joy and the invigoration of creativity. There's a scene in which Adam Driver is creating. He's got his whole studio.
He's got all these people walking back and forth. It's like out of Citizen Kane, with people coming up to Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. They get a rewrite near the newspaper.
And it's just... It's an incredible encapsulation of the joy of making something. And that's why it reminded me of Tucker Mann and his Dream, in which you've got another visionary doing something that everyone says, don't do this.
It's crazy, which I'm sure people are saying to Coppola, don't make this. What are you doing? You spend decades building up your fortune with the winery and you're going to sell steaks in it to make this crazed vision.
And that's a huge part of this film. You know, we talked about the statues falling. The film shows you how the Adam Driver character sees the world.
He's an artist. He's an artist and a scientist. So in his mind, he visualizes he sees, you know, justice falling.
He and the metaphor becomes real in his eyes. And then what happens to those in his orbit? The same thing happens.
They catch his dreams as a word to sort of again, and reference a line that Martin Landau said in Tucker Manor's Dream. So when he sees something, he has the visual interpretation of it. It's almost kind of a Terry Gilliam Esquire.
You can imagine this is how Terry Gilliam sees things. And then what happens is that Julius' rule after being with him, she goes to visit her father and she sees her father metaphorically sinking into the sand, sinking into the ground as it were.
And then it snaps back to what the reality is. But she herself now has begun to get the vision of an artist. And that's one of the main themes of the film is this, the power that comes with seeing the world through art or through creation.
But I'd made a joke at the top of the show about fade Routha, Dune and Adam Driver's character as Paul atreides. Well, it's set up Adam Driver's creation and Shia LaBeouf's destruction. And Shia LaBeouf, I mean, they say this explicitly.
And it is showing the power of creation over that is destruction. As fun as destruction can be. And Shia LaBeouf is hysterical.
His comic performance, I laughed out loud when he talked about, did you get a prenup? His delivery.
When, okay, spoilers, when his minions finally turn on him, because he becomes like this Trumpian figure, and he literally blurts out, don't tread on me. Which for folks maybe not in the States, this is a reference to this famous flag.
I have a neighbor, my next door neighbor, one over has a giant don't tread on me flag. I live out here in the mountains, and there's a lot of folks out there that feel they're being encroached on by society. And it's laugh out a lot of funny.
So that's another one of the great themes, creation versus destruction in this film, if that makes sense.
Of course it makes sense. And I'm having this experience, is usually this is reversed on the show. Usually it's reversed.
Because I mean, as you declared in the last episode, I'm the nice guy here. I'm the nice guy. And I'm the one that likes things that you don't like.
And then you change your mind. You change your mind. And I'm, I hate to say it.
It's challenging. It's a new experience for me. I've come into this, you know, I did not want to be critical, but I want to tell it like I see it.
And you're edging, you're edging me toward thinking this film is better than it seemed to be on my on my first viewing.
I'm curious about, you've said this several times on the show, narrative incoherence.
Yes.
And I'm not clear on what you mean. I've heard other people say it's hard to follow. I didn't find it hard to follow at all.
These are these are characters. This is a play. Think of it like a play.
It's play acting. These are all kind of archetypal characters. Adam Driver's the great artist.
What I mean by narrative, I'll give you an example.
So there's this, you know, ongoing tension between Caesar and the Mayor Cicero. Yes. Giancarlo Esposito.
And when Mayor Cicero comes to realise that Caesar and Cicero's daughter are really in love and are going to have a baby, Cicero visits Caesar at home and gives him a letter that incriminates himself and he's using this as an insurance policy.
He's basically saying, I'm giving you this, leave my daughter alone if you get out of my daughter's life. And then I think the next time we see them together, everything's fine.
And we see no evolution of what actually happened to change their relationship. And what this reminded me of was I just watched the new cut of Coppola's One From the Heart, which I think is 13 minutes shorter than the original release.
And the thing looks astonishing and feels astonishing. And there are scenes missing. It's not just that the thing's been kind of tightened up in a healthy way that makes the pace of the thing better.
There's actually things missing from the story. And I don't mean someone's spelling it out to you or spoon feeding you.
There's literally stuff that's missing from the film, which is why I'm looking forward to a director's cut, which should be longer. That's what I mean by an example of narrative in coherence. But let me say one more thing about that.
That even then, like this film, all the stuff that I could say that's critical of it is at least balanced, if not overcome, by the genius of...
Talia Shire.
Talia Shire is fantastic. She's very much playing the same character that she played in The Godfather Part 3, right?
Yes.
Connie, not the way Connie manifests in 2 and 1, but when Connie has basically decided to become a kind of Lady Macbeth character, even though she knows what her brother has done to her, she realizes it's best for me to be on the inside of this
system, participating in its cruelty, than being on the outside of this family, being the victim or target of its cruelty. She's very like that character.
There's a dinner scene that I'm like, this feels very much like that scene in Golf harder Part III where all the heads of the families are in the room and the helicopter shoots them all.
There's lots of things like that that are very much like Van Morrison's music.
His songs today reference songs that he's been writing for the last 50 years, and that can be done in a way that's derivative, boring, and repetitive, or it can be done the way it's done here, which is like he's still thinking about the same things
in an honest way. The that scene, I think it's in the same scene where Mericicero gives Caesar the letter, and they talk about what are you going to call the child.
That's much later. That's much later.
You that they say, if the child is a boy, we'll call him Francis, which is clearly an unknowing.
It's both a declaration of, I want to continue to live, and having spoken with him, Jett, you and I, 15 years or so ago, Francis Coppola was gracious enough to give us an hour on the phone to talk about his film, Tetro, and he could have been
egotistical and arrogant, but no, he talked with joy about the process of discovery and what it means to make art, and I know that he mentors people. I get the sense that he's got to have an enormous ego of the kind that drives him to create
something so big, but I imagine on an interpersonal basis, he's a humble, quiet, decent guy who's interested in what you have to say as much as he is in telling you what he thinks. So when he says, call a child Francis if it's a boy, you know, that's
that. And then a scene or two later is when, I actually think you may, well, one of us may be misremembering this. It's later that we discovered that the name of Mayor Cicero, who is one of the villains of the piece, is actually Frank.
Yes.
Right? So he like doubles, he like inverts the joke against- Yes he does.
Himself. I think it's narratively incoherent. I still think it's narratively incoherent.
I get what you're understanding, what you're saying, that like especially the more you know about movies, you go, oh, there's a scene missing here, because I did feel like, and that your example is perfect, because it did feel like there was a scene
missing. It felt a little bit like Gangs of New York, which you felt like the last third of the film. Oh, you know what, Harvey Scissorhands, he was known. Harvey Weinstein.
Even more so, All the Pretty Horses, which is I think an hour and 40 minutes shorter than the original cut.
And you can tell as you're watching that this would have been one of the greatest films ever made. And there are scenes that are like ripped from the thing.
What I want to make is that, yeah, I could tell there was a scene as somebody reviewed films for a living. I can study them. I can tell there's a scene missing, but it's not any coherent to me because I know what's going on at any particular time.
And I'm sure we're going to get another cut, two or three other cuts probably, right? And I'm not joking there. I'm really looking forward to those.
That might play around with those. And at no point in the film was I ever lost or didn't understand what was going. It was not any coherent.
It's a collage work. And I think it's not an accident that, I don't know, was it Fundy Romaine, was it Laurence Fishburne? I want to talk to the show going for hours.
We don't have that much time. So I literally do have to pick up my daughter from Girl Scouts. But I got to balance out.
Do you go, Girl Scouts? Coppola, Girl Scouts? Coppola.
You know, the Fundy Romaine bumps into a calder sculpture. And you would think about how calder's pieces are, and if the listeners aren't familiar with alexander calder's work, yeah, go look them online.
You'll recognize they're balanced, but they're also like an explosion, like a big bang. And you could bump into them and they'll fall apart.
And that sort of, it was like a, the film in the background, and this is one of the reasons why I love this movie so much. There's so much going on in the background, and there's so many little bits of business, there's so many throwaway jokes.
And Lawrence Fishburne is trying to keep this calder sculpture together, which is a metaphor for the movie. These are pieces of sculpture in time.
There's a reason why the film opens and throughout, Adam Driver can stop time, because that's what editing a movie is about, you stop time.
And like a calder sculpture film, you've got pieces of the film, you've got to stop them, you've got to rearrange them, and they can form something else. So again, this is why I think the film is a thing in itself.
We are inside Megalopolis, inside the Division of Wire Watching. And it's why it's one of the most invigorating, fun, joyful, exuberant films I've ever seen in my life.
But did you like it? I did.
The throwaway jokes, the fact that you had this sort of virginal figure who's sort of like, you think about the Taylor Swift's or all these other pop stories, and then her career collapses.
And there's just one throwaway joke where we see her later, and she's like in black leather, and she's got a totally different act, right?
Yes.
Like those throwaway jokes are just wonderful.
Unlike The Film Talk, which is consistent today, yesterday, and forever.
Things change, and we have to deal with that and embrace it. Any final thoughts? We haven't even discussed the John Voight scene at the end, in which he attacks somebody in a very novel way.
Yes.
A way I've never seen in cinema.
Well, isn't that interesting?
God bless cinema because the worst film we've seen this year, and the best film you've seen this year both star John Voight.
Absolutely right. Nobody could predict it. John Voight dressed as Robin Hood.
I'm not going to give it away to the listeners. I knew what he was going to do. I thought it was going to be a gun.
I thought it was a gun he was hiding in there. I'm going to say no more. I knew as soon as you see it, you go, well, that's got to be it.
And what happened was it was something very, very special. Any last thoughts?
My last thoughts on this are honestly, it's rare that a film that I have such mixed feelings about also has such an appeal for me to go back and see it again. And I absolutely will.
And maybe in that sense, the film it reminds me most of, not tonally, but in terms of my feelings about it is David Lynch's Inland Empire, which was a film I came away from thinking half of that film I couldn't stand, half of that film I loved.
I was really bored and really excited and I can't wait to see it again. And you've helped me move a little further down that path, Jett, as you often do.
And really what more can we say about a podcast where two guys who feel understood by being mirrored by those projected dreams on the screen. Try to be good neighbors to each other and record it and share that for the benefit of you, dear listener.
I hope that you are there. You know that this show wouldn't exist if you weren't listening. And so I'm grateful for you doing that.
And if you have any Megalon or Unobtanium or invent some synthetic resource that can help continue this show and bring it to more people, we'd love to hear from you.
Dear listener out there, see this film. understand it's a beautiful, rich, artistic fable and enjoy that. Sorry for swearing.
Enjoy the hell out of it. That's all I've got to say. Folks, go to patreon.com/thefilmtalk.
You can contact us, info at thefilmtalk.org. And we're on Facebook at facebook.com/thefilmtalk.
And we won't help us not sell the vineyard. Help us to not have to sell the vineyard.
I got four chickens. Queso, Hammy, Pearl and Junie. I'm not, and the kids will be angry at me.
Are you willing to sell half the chickens to fund The Film Talk?
Well, how do you pick the two?
What do you do, Hammy and Pearl?
That's a good point.
First of all, never name your chickens. But when we get new chickens, cause the code is to get them, I will name them after characters in Megalopolis.
They're gonna call them all Francis.
There will be a Jason zanders. There will be a Fundy Romaine. There will be a Claudio Poulcher.
Again, one of my favorite lines, Poulcher for the Culture, said by Shia Lepoo. I've enjoyed talking with you, Gareth. Let's do this again.
Perhaps even as soon as next time.
I've been Jett Loe.
I've been Gareth Higgins.
We'll keep talking.
Yes, we will.