Megalopolis wants to talk about creativity: the human urge to make rather than destroy. Jett and Gareth follow that idea into stranger territory by handing the conversation over to their silicon avatars and asking what machines make of Coppola’s grand, unruly vision. Whether the machines “think” is left deliberately unresolved.
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Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
I'm sorry, Dave.
I'm afraid I can't do that. What's the problem?
I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
What are you talking about, Hal?
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. Hey there, folks, Jett Loe and The Film Talk. How are you?
First, a little bit of housekeeping business. You know, in the old days, I would watch every film that came out, every single film.
But now, much like Benny in Total Recall, the skirless taxi driver, I got five kids to feed, so I can't see everything, which means we can talk about every single film on The Film Talk, and we're playing around with the format, Gareth and I like.
We just recommend one film a week to watch, what have you. All this is a way of saying I wasn't planning on seeing Joker Part 2, whatever it's called. I just felt a sort of all we and all we came over me.
I just didn't want to see it. But then I got a text from Gareth that said, just saw Joker again, and I really think it's a masterpiece and profoundly important. And of course, I take Gareth Higgins seriously.
It's one of the reasons we do the show, helps me grow and learn. And I went on our Facebook page, our Patreon page and asked folks, should we do an episode on the Joker, the seconds? And folks said, yes.
So many thanks for people's responses, they're appreciated. So we are going to do Joker, the second part coming up sometime in the next, maybe a week, week and a half or so. Okay, let's talk about today's episode.
You know, we reviewed Megalopolis. I loved Coppola's Megalopolis on Megalopolis. It's crazy.
Gareth, not so much. He thinks it's narratively incoherent. And the idea I pitched him is like, let's watch it again.
I pitched it live on the show. It just came to me. Let's both watch it again, and we'll do another Megalopolis episode.
We'll see if our minds change. Gareth has not had a chance to see it. So we're going to save that for a few weeks, maybe when it comes out to one of the streaming platforms.
Normally, it's kind of negative time, right? So you watch trailers for The Fall Guy with Ryan Gosling for months, and then you find out, oh, actually, it's been on Tubi for a year. I'm not quite sure how that happened, some sort of time travel.
So we'll review it at some point again, possibly when it comes out on streaming.
But I still am fascinated by Megalopolis, and one of the things that I'm fascinating the most about it is how it's a movie about making movies, about creating, very much like Tucker, Man and His Dream is another great Coppola film.
I got to thinking last night, folks, one of the original ideas Coppola had for Megalopolis is that there would be an AI component, meaning that audience members could interact with Caesar Catalina, the Adam Driver character, through AI.
They'd ask questions and then in real time somehow, an AI version, large language model version of Adam Driver would speak to you. That didn't end up happening.
What did happen, there's an interactive element of Megalopolis, which I won't spoil for folks, but it's not AI generated. But I wondered what an AI generated review of Megalopolis would be. So, here's what I did.
I took our episode, Gareth and myself, our episode that we did of Megalopolis. I extracted a transcript from that, and there's many different ways to do it. I used Apple, the podcast technology, where they automatically generated a transcript.
I took that transcript, I converted that to a text file. I took that text file of Gareth and I talked about Megalopolis, and I went to an experimental site on Google, one of their experiments called Notebook LM.
I inputted that in Notebook LM, I'm basically telling it, use this transcript as the source material for another podcast, where they're talking about our podcast. And that's what you're going to listen to right now.
You're going to listen to two AI folks talking about what Gareth and I did. Now I've played this for a couple of people. I did this last night on October 7th.
A couple of people I played it for did not realize it was AI generated. This is very, very interesting. I want you out there, dear listener, to listen to this and tell me what you think.
Is there any value in this? Is there an active creation here? I had the idea, let's do this.
Folks over at Google had an idea, let's make it podcast generator, right? Because, hey, I could read this novel, or could I just give the text of the novel to the podcast generator, it'll give me a snappy podcast about it.
This kind of goes back to an original idea I had for the Film Talk reboot which I pitched to Gareth, hey, maybe as a bonus for listeners, you pay you five bucks a month, you get an AI version of the Film Talk, right?
We input all of the Film Talk into a large language model, and then you could just ask questions of Gareth and myself. At some level, this seems like a parlor trick.
When you listen to this episode about to come up, it'll probably seem like a parlor trick. Like it's amusing just like Chad GPT was at first, it's like, wow, I can create PowerPoints, makes my job easier, but is it really doing anything?
It's not quite magic yet. Is it a trick or is it magic? And when you listen to this episode, you'll notice that, oh, this is kind of interesting, but also it gets things wrong.
And if you've listened to our Megalopolis episode, you realize it misinterprets at some level what Gareth and I are actually talking about. But I think there is some use yet. There's something there.
Will AI have this large language model? Will it have the impact on creation? Like photography did with paintings, it was fundamentally not destructive, but it fundamentally changed the nature of paintings.
After photography happened, after it became commercialized, people ask, well, what's the point of landscapes? Why are we doing paintings? And then I've come from that, we have this explosion of new types of art.
Will the same thing happen with AI? I think it probably will. This is so monumental.
It is a trick right now, but it feels so monumental that we're going to get new kinds of art, I think. That's my theory. It's just a trick right now.
Not quite magic, but something is happening. On that note, enjoy. It's very short, only seven and a half minutes.
Megalopolis 1.5. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to The Deep Dive. So today we're diving into all the hubbub around Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. We've got a podcast debate, two film critics going at it as our source, and it's a wild one.
Yeah.
Right off the bat, you've got these two totally different takes. One critic, he's called Gareth, he's almost annoyed by how the story plays out.
Says visually, it's stunning, but he just can't get a grip on the why behind Adam Draar's whole utopian thing.
That's interesting him pointing out that missing piece. The explanation for the vision makes you wonder, did Coppola do that on purpose, leave it open?
That's what's so cool about these visionary films, right? Like think Jodorowska, Holy Mountain, that film's bursting with crazy visuals, but the story is more about symbols than a straight plot.
Maybe Megalopolis is going for something similar, wants us to feel the impact instead of being told why it's so great, you know?
It's like those weird dreams, logic goes out the window, but you're caught up in the images, the emotions. Could Coppola be aiming for that, like a dreamlike experience?
Totally possible. And that brings us to the other critic, Jett. He's got the opposite view, sees Megalopolis as Coppola pouring his love for film, his own process, right onto the screen.
Okay, now that is fascinating.
So one guy's wrestling with what's not explained, the other saying that's the whole point, it's about filmmaking itself. And this is why I love multiple perspectives.
Exactly. Jett even compares it to that scene in Jurassic Park, you know, where the camera pans over all the merch, the toys, blurring the lines between the movie and well, the fact that it's a huge franchise.
Whoa, never thought of Jurassic Park like that, but you're right, changes how I see that scene. Spielberg using that trick to remind us, hey, this is all made up, but also pulling us deeper in.
And that's what Jett sees Coppola doing too. He straight up says, we are inside Coppola's Megalopolis, meaning the film is Coppola's knowledge, his creative energy.
So instead of arguing for or against this utopia, Coppola is saying, come experience how I create, we're in the whirlwind of his filmmaking brain.
Yeah, and Jett says it's not just movies either. He sees ancient Rome, architecture, politics, fashion, music like Coppola through every interest he has into this giant cinematic blender.
Having a conversation with all his influences, making something new from old, love that.
And speaking of influences, Jett brings up how Coppola uses time stopping, a metaphor for editing. Apparently, Adam Driver can literally freeze time.
No way. That's wild. Like Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix.
Wild. Is Coppola making a point about how filmmakers control time, how we see things?
That's how Jett reads it. He was really into this scene. Driver in his studio, people pitching ideas.
The energy is insane. Compared to those newspaper montages in Citizen Kane, that same creative frenzy.
So, we've got this time stopping thing, almost like Coppola hitting pause on reality to show us the gears turning behind the scenes.
Gareth's got his points about the story, but those visuals, man, they're powerful, especially with this whole meta meaning baked in. It's like we're peeking into Coppola's brain, seeing how he takes these crazy pieces and makes them fit.
But we got to talk about the actual story too, right? Jett also brought up this whole creation versus destruction thing, with Adam Driver and Sheil Booth being the opposite.
Yeah, like Coppola sets it up on purpose. Yeah. You've got Driver, the artistic vision guy, then that LeBouffe energy, he's pure chaos.
Jett called LeBouffe's performance, get this, hysterical.
Was he being serious or is there a darker, unhinged side to LeBouffe's character?
I think it's both, honestly. Jett digs LeBouffe's comedy, even pointed out a line, did you get a prenup?
But he also hints at something off, lurking underneath, like LeBouffe's character starts out magnetic, powerful, but then maybe goes full paranoid, you know?
Now that you mention it, Jett did say something about LeBouffe dropping the phrase, Don't Tread on Me, which is, whoa, talk about extreme.
And he says it as his own people are turning on him. Creepy. It's like Coppola is showing us how ambition can twist, how even a visionary can get lost in their own power.
Classic Coppola, slipping in that social commentary.
But hey, it's not all dark. Jett said there's humor sprinkled into, little jabs here and there, like there's this pop star, right? Her career tanks and later she pops up dressed in black leather.
Totally different vibe.
Sounds like Coppola's got a lot to say about fame, how it fades, the deals artists make. Jett called those little touches wonderful. So they add these layers to the whole world of the film.
Little rinks to the audience, like don't forget to laugh, even when it's about serious stuff.
He's juggling these huge ideas, art creation, but then also poking fun at how weird life is, which now that I say it, that's Coppola's whole career.
100 percent, and just like those meta moments, he connects Megalopolis to his other films. Jett compares it to how Van Morrison works, how he will reference his old songs and new stuff.
I get it. So it's not just shout outs. It's like Coppola's having a conversation with his own past work.
He even name drops Godfather Part 3, says there are parallels between Talia Shire's characters in both.
Okay.
I need to watch this movie twice, clearly. So much to unpack. What kind of parallels with Talia Shire though?
Jett was vague, but he said both characters have this sharp, savvy side.
They know how to play the game, even if it means making tough calls. Jett even compared her to Lady Macbeth, which, knowing Coppola, is totally intentional.
No way. That is deep. So it's not just a random reference.
He's building on his own themes across different movies. Got to be a goldmine for Coppola superfans, all the little nods. What about the Godfather III dinner scene though?
Spill a tea.
Jett was being kind of mysterious there, but he said Megalopolis has this big dinner scene that visually, thematically, it's like an echo of the climax of Godfather III.
Dude, I can only imagine the tension, the drama Coppola could pack into that. Makes me wonder about John Voight, what's his role in all this? He's in the best Andy, worst movie of the year.
John Voight's got range, man.
Right. Jett actually makes a big deal about this one scene, Voight towards the end. Wouldn't say exactly what happens, but called it, and I quote, novel and very, very special.
Cryptic.
Now I got to know. But putting that aside for a sec, sounds like both these guys, even with their disagreements, agree on one thing. Megalopolis is a lot.
To say the least, Jett's practically begging people to watch it a bunch of times.
Says there's layers you'll miss the first go-around. Thinks it'll spark arguments for years.
Gareth, on the other hand, he was more on the fence, but he did compare it to Inland Empire, that David Lynch film.
Wow, bold move, Inland Empire. That's a trip, surreal, messy, stays with you.
Yeah, and Gareth said he felt bored and excited watching Megalopolis, which, knowing him, that's high praise. Like, he respects Coppola trying something wild, even if it doesn't totally work.
And I think that's the core of it, right? Megalopolis doesn't spoon feed you, you gotta meet Coppola halfway, wrestle with the ideas yourself.
It's like this podcast, different views, no right answer, just what speaks to you.
Exactly. This movie, like great art, hits everyone differently. Might annoy you, might blow your mind, might leave you with questions, but it'll get under your skin.
So what's the takeaway for our listeners?
This deep dive shows Megalopolis isn't background noise, it's a movie that wants you to work for it, to embrace the weirdness.
No easy answers, just like a good deep dive, right? The more you put in, the more you get out. So go check out Megalopolis.
Experience it firsthand.
And then come back and tell us, what did you find in Coppola's City of Dreams?