Mickey17 (3/5 Stars)

A “Straw Man Argument” is a logical fallacy where an opposite position is distorted into an extreme version and then argued against. Instead of addressing the actual argument, a straw man argument presents a simplified or false version of the opponent’s stance.

Science fiction polemics, by their very nature, are straw man arguments. Because they take place in the future, the proponent gets to lay the groundwork for several hundred (maybe thousands) of years of distortion by making the audience assume that across the vastness of time and space the opposite argument when enacted into policy will naturally result in an inevitable and disastrous slope towards dystopia.

Here, in writer/director Bong Joon-Ho’s newest movie, Mickey 17, we are introduced to a world where the world is beset by environmental destruction and rampant organized crime. The remainder of the human race desperately seeks to leave a doomed Earth for a distant planet. A buffoonish politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his Machiavellian wife (Toni Collette) lay on thick plans of cultish demagoguery for the new settlement, which an utterly naive populace consumes without a hint of critical thought. One especially pitiful creature, Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) signs up to be an expendable, which apparently is a category of human being that agrees to be cloned for the purpose of suicidal tasks that range from being exposed to radiation, to being a test subject for biological weapons, to being a guinea pig for the development of vaccines. We are introduced to Mickey 17, who provides an elongated voiceover explanation as to the gruesome fate of versions 1-16.

For various reasons that need even more elongated voiceover explanation, this particular spaceship can only have one expendable on it, so Mickey is tasked with every single suicidal task the mission requires. He’s a great help. Indeed by his multiple sacrifices he saves many lives and is hard to imagine the mission succeeding at all without him. You would think these people would be grateful. But they aren’t, because apparently the future is full of shitheads. (Except for the one black woman. Black women, as we all ought to know, are magic negroes imbued with a sense of heightened morality brought upon by the extreme intersectionality of their historic victimhood).  They treat him as if everyone was still in grade school and he came to class with the wrong kind of shoes. I don’t think Mickey Barnes is even being paid.

Would society in the future actually not care about the experience of cloned people? Would we treat them as second class citizens? I ask you, given the world as it is today, why that would be a probable outcome? There have been many science fiction books and movies about cloned people. Can you think of one example where the author isn’t sympathetic to their plight? Do you hear anyone today arguing that clones might be a decent source of cheap slave labor? Wouldn't it be odd if our culture in the 20th-21st Century started out uniformly sympathetic towards clones and then turned with uniformed antipathy against them sometime in the future? And yet, in every single one of these science fiction books and movies, the creator assumes that this will be the case. If there is basically no one with antipathy against clones today, who exactly is Bong Joon-Ho arguing with here?

The answer I don’t think is any one segment of society that actually has antipathy towards clones. I believe Bong Joon-Ho’s argument is against capitalism and he is setting his scene way far into the future to suggest an inevitable outcome of the march of capitalism towards some dystopia where the lives of human beings become valueless in the face of corporations or contracts. It is telling that he wouldn’t be able to make that argument today, since all that has occurred since the introduction of capitalism as a ruling orthodoxy in society (starting say in England circa the Industrial Revolution) is the steady democratization of political power, an exponential rise in the standard of living, and the universal acceptance of human rights, at least in societies that use capitalism. There are still plenty of places that do not have capitalism, and the people there remain slaves to power monopolies. I’m not sure why Bong Joon-Ho, if he is so concerned about the plight of humans, can’t direct a satiric gaze at North Korea, the totalitarian state across the border, where people are treated like animals as we speak, not far off in the distant future.

One of the more influential pieces of culture in the past few years to originate from South Korea was Squid Game, a contemporary story about a group of capitalistic elites (mainly composed of gay texans and at least one Chinese man) pit debt-laden and put-upon South Koreans against each other in fights-to-the-death. Have any of these people ever heard of North Korea? Squid Game could take place there, except of course, for the prize money element.

Mickey 17 draws parallels (and maybe inspiration) from a better movie about science fiction clones. That would be 2009's Moon by Duncan Jones starring Sam Rockwell. That is a much better critique of capitalism. The main difference is that the original Sam Rockwell astronaut sold his genetic material to a corporation and gave them the permission to use and dispose of his clones on a remote lunar base. In that movie, the original guy is sitting at home getting paid for the work his clones are performing. His clones, although expendable and not privy to the truth, are treated with a nominal amount of respect. No one goes out of their way to insult them and the robot on the base is programmed to be helpful. It is a much more interesting take on the subject since it is much closer to an actual moral quandary that someday could occur.

Moon came out in 2009. At the time, it was impressive to see Sam Rockwell interact with himself on screen. In 2025, although I enjoyed the performance of Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, I am no longer impressed all that much by seeing two of the same actor interact with himself. It’s not all that much of a novelty any longer. It is always nice to see Steven Yeun show up in a movie. It would have been better if he was around longer and was more important to the plot. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette ham it up as real idiots and that go about doing real stupid things. One wonders how they could ever be put in charge of anything, and then one remembers that this takes place in the dystopic future where everything is possible.

Has it really been six years since Bong Joon-Ho made his previous film, the great Parasite. Do you notice the integral difference between that movie and this one? Parasite takes place in the present day. So, to make it believable, there couldn't be the underhanded straw man cheating that is possible in science fiction movies. Joon-Ho was forced to present characters that would be believable in our time. That constraint made for a much better movie. He should do more of that and, please, more often.

The Brutalist (4/5 Stars)

There are many impressive features of The Brutalist and I want to make sure I mention them up front lest the reader come to the conclusion that I didn’t like watching this movie. I did and I recommend it. I do wonder how much more I could have liked it if I didn’t have an avid personal hatred of the architectural school of design called Brutalism. So let me be positive first and get all the well earned compliments about this movie out in front before I let loose on Brutalism. The movie does have some very good examples of Brutalism, and like all real world examples of the same, they are awful.

The movie is directed by Brady Corbet and written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. It is one of those movies that seem to come out of nowhere. It is not like there is some sort of established demand for movies about architects and Brady Corbet is not an established or productive director. His career is actually mostly acting and only in recent years has he started directing small projects like TV episodes and music videos. You probably haven’t heard of them and even if you had, you wouldn’t expect his next project to be a three and a half hour epic. But here we are, a movie with a pace and length that reminds one of large scale big studio Hollywood movies from the 1950s-1960s. It even has an intermission. Settle down and watch it at home over a weekend. I think it is better broken up into two watching periods, this will give the viewer the opportunity to mull over the first half before watching the second. Both sides of the intermission have their own languid buildup, diverting tangents, climax, and denouement. One can complain about the length, but just compare it to an 8-10 hour television series. This story takes half that time.

The Brutalist is a low budget film, but it doesn’t feel that way. One of its most notable features is a large and expansive original score (the composer Daniel Blumberg just won an Oscar). Same goes with the cinematography that pries distinctive images from everyday events (the cinematographer Lol Crowley just won an Oscar). Same goes with the editing which masterfully overlays different elements of the story and makes the movie feel shorter than it is. The opening is a masterclass in all three of these elements (and acting and directing). It overlays the audio of a spoken letter by a woman in Soviet-held Eastern Europe at the end of World War II with a camera that follows our main character Lazlo Toth (played by Adrien Brody) as he is awakened and makes a minutes-long journey through the interior of a crowded ship. As the man struggles through the belly of the boat, we more and more become apprised of his situation via the context of the written letter. As a Hungarian Jew, he has spent years fleeing the death and destruction of World War II becoming separated from his family and wife in the process. As he exits the interior of the ship, he glances upwards and sees something that transforms his mood from exhaustion to ecstasy. The music swells and the camera wildly veers upwards until we see the Statue of Liberty peeking out from the top of the frame upside down. It is a scene on par with the more classic and straightforward opening of Godfather II. Again, it is notable that It was made for no money, but feels huge. The audience is immediately assured that it is in the hands of people who know what they are doing. That is an especially comforting thought at the beginning of a marathon of a movie.

For whatever reasons, some actors seem destined to play certain types of roles and have become intertwined with their meaning. Adrien Brody has now starred as and won two Oscars playing Eastern European Jews either suffering through the Holocaust (2022’s The Pianist) or making a life in its aftermath 2025’s The Brutalist). These roles are more than twenty years apart but feel like they could be seen one after the other in a double feature. His portrayal of Lazlo Toth is one of mystery and contradiction. He is a gifted architect but has a haunted past and an uncertain present. He is best understood in contrast to his main antagonist, the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. who picks him up from a coal-mining job and, depending how you interpret this movie, takes pains to employ him, or adopt him, or own him.

Van Buren Sr. is played by Guy Pearce in a strikingly impressive performance. There is a seriousness to this businessman, a capacity for charm and generosity, but something undeniably mean about him. And I’m not just talking about his penchant for making vaguely racist remarks. He’s healthier than you and has more money and commands more respect and it just hurts to be around him. This is one of Guy Pearce’s best performances. It is uncanny how he has grown into the role. Lots of actors get rounder as they age (Russell Crowe?). Pearce’s Van Buren Sr. is as sharp as stone. In comparison, Lazlo Toth is sickly and weak. But Toth has something that Van Buren lacks, a capacity to create and the vision to match it. Van Buren knows this, his jealousy mixes with his disgust for Toth’s inability to escape addiction and post-traumatic stress, until one night in Italy, the relationship culminates in a rape while Toth is preoccupied in a heroin stupor. It is a shocking scene that doesn’t completely work due to the physical logistics of space and time. Instead, it feels more metaphorical and maybe even ideological like the rape scene in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I don’t know exactly what to make of it, so I won’t speak too much about it. I will say that the first half of the movie also has a scene of unwarranted cruelty that sets in motion the second half of the movie. That too seems ideological. One interpretation is that America is not a place for Jews. That the real homeland is Israel (two other characters make that move), where art and identity do not have to be compromised.

Those are the good parts. Let’s talk a little about Brutalism and what makes it so terrible. The first example of it in this movie is the transformation of a library in the Van Buren Sr. estate. The room doesn’t start well. It’s a bit of a mess with long ugly red curtains lining up across a rotunda of large paned windows looking out onto the gardens. One of the main problems pointed out is that the books are large first editions, so you don’t want sunlight on them directly as it will make them grow old prematurely. The design of Toth deals with this problem by encapsulating the books in large wood cabinets. Here is a picture of the finished product. The lounge chair is also Brutalist.

This looks nice, but I want you to consider how it would actually work as a library in practical terms. That is, if you wanted to use the room as a library, not just pose for pictures in it for Architectural Digest. First, one of the main delights of any library is the ability to peruse the bookshelves for interesting things to read. You can’t do this if the books can't be seen. The design takes the most important part of the room, the books, and removes them. Second, the main purpose of a library is to read books therein. As was mentioned, the books in this library are large first-editions. They are big heavy books. How the hell are you going to read a big heavy book in that lounge chair? That lounge chair is good for magazines and nothing else. Moreover, the ground is barren and hard so you can’t lie on the floor and read a book there either. In order to read anything, you would have to leave the room. This room may look impressive, but in terms of functionality, it is terrible.

Van Buren Sr. is so impressed with the critical raves that his library receives from the high-brow architectural community (Brutalist architecture routinely received design awards in the 1950s-1960s), that he commissions Toth to build him an ambitious community center on a hill on his vast estate. Presumably the community center is to serve the neighboring town of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, although neither Toth nor Van Buren Sr. ever appear to consult the town as to what they want and/or need. Van Buren Sr., not one for details, casually remarks that a community space of some sort is required, and a library because those are nice, and a gymnasium because he did wrestling in high school. At some point someone adds a pool. In order to get the town to chip in financially, they have to add a Christian chapel. Toth expresses surprise that a Christian chapel would be included in a community project, seemingly unaware that churches are society’s most basic communal organization.

Because this is a low budget movie, they couldn’t actually build the Van Buren Institute. The best glimpse we see of it are a small-scale model and certain parts of the inside and outside of the building. It is genuinely Brutalist though. It is giant and made of concrete. It looks like it might be impressive, but here are a few details that the movie (and its characters) do not seem to consider.

One: Location. If this building is to serve the community of Doylestown, why are they building it out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere? How are the people of the community supposed to get to the building to use it?

Two: A big deal is made of the design of the chapel altarpiece. Only the finest marble from Carrera, Italy will be used. The building is designed so that sunlight will filter from an opening in the ceiling so that at certain times of the day, the altar will be illuminated. Okay, that’s cool. But how are people going to see it? From what I can tell, there is no seating in this church.

Three: The gymnasium has a pool which has no natural light and indeed seems to have no artificial light. It appears to be located in the basement where all it could possibly be good for is drowning. The building itself apparently has a multitude of underground passageways. These passages, particularly after hours, would be a convenient place to rob and rape and be robbed and raped. This is not only an ugly design, but also a dangerous one.

All of this is characteristic of Brutalist architecture. The look of the thing, impressive from a distance or in a diorama trumps all considerations of actual utility. Not a single frame in this movie shows the community actually using the community space. We are treated to an epilogue in which the building is praised, Toth is heralded as an uncompromising artist, and we are asked to be impressed by pictures of empty rooms of concrete. The building will last forever, that is true, and it will be a testament to Van Buren Sr. and Toth. But unless it is appropriated by an enthusiastic group of skateboarders, it is likely to remain empty and universally hated by the general populace. If you didn’t consider all the awards it received, it would be a massive failure.

Why is Brutalism so admired in the architectural community? I have a theory that derives from the idea of the comedian’s comedian. In one of the making-of vignette’s of Seinfeld, Larry David is revered as one such comedian, not necessarily because he was the most talented, but that he had very little patience with the audience, going so far as to treat them with outright contempt on some nights when, he felt, they didn’t find his jokes funny enough. Such a comedian inspires courage in his colleagues by pursuing enlightened self-gratification over compromised commercialism. Here Lazlo Toth fits right in. As revealed in the epilogue, the expensive quirks of his masterpiece, the extra high ceilings and the underground passageways, have nothing to do with the community purpose of the project. They are personal memorials to his time in a concentration camp, a secret detail that benefits his ego and will mean nothing to the people of Doylestown. He is a bright beam of inspiration for every megalomaniac that considers people to be no more than those tiny stick figures in their fancy dioramas. When a provocative comedian/writer/artist receives criticism from their work, they can always retort by telling the audience to change the channel. Architecture is different. The people in the area have to experience the building whether they want to or not. It takes a lot of ego to not care about the feelings of other people on such a massive scale. It is no mistake that Ayn Rand chose an architect in The Fountainhead to express her uncompromising philosophy of uncompromising selfishness.

Brutalism isn’t an expression of freedom for all. It is an expression of the architect’s freedom and the general public’s slavery to it. It is not a place to create or to become someone. There is no space for innovation or self-improvement. The forms are rigid and inflexible. It tells the user how things are and insists that they are never going to change. The structures being huge are designed to make humans feel small. The interiors of such places are perfect for prison cells and torture chambers. Its main practical use is to wash the brain and crush the soul. It is the only form of architecture that is routinely improved by graffiti. In 1984, George Orwell described the totalitarian state as a “boot stamping on the face of humanity for all eternity”. And if you wanted an architectural expression of that idea, it is Brutalism.

Having said that, this is a pretty good movie.

Emilia Perez (2/5 Stars)

I’ll give “Emilia Perez” this, it is consistent and it is original. That is, it has a vision and follows it without distraction or compromise. It is a great example of Roger Ebert’s insight about the worst movies being made by some of the best talents. His point was that those who lack skill generally make mediocre movies that inspire neither admiration nor hatred. Those movies are simply boring. It takes great talent to make a great movie. But it also usually takes great talent to make a truly awful movie. Only the best of us have the ability to take a bad idea and unapologetically and unwaveringly run it into the ground. “Emilia Perez” is one such movie.

A movie can be good in two ways. It can be technically proficient, the set can be correctly lit, the sound can be correctly mixed, the makeup can be correctly applied etc. It can also be personally enjoyable: that is, the subject matter can appeal to the personal preferences of the audience. (I never saw last Christmas’s viral hit “Hot Frosty” but I bet the people who watched it were probably pleased with the product without it needing to be all that technically good.) A movie can also be bad in two ways. It can be incompetently made. But a movie can also be technically proficient, but offensive on a personal level. These categories overlap obviously. Most mediocre ones are technically deficient but personally appealing. The last category, technically proficient and bad, is the most rare. Since movies are such a collaborative medium, and are made for people, it is rare that a team of talented people, working well together, make a truly offensive movie.

To illustrate what makes a movie “bad” in the second sense, take the character of Rita Mora Castro, a lawyer played by Zoe Saldana. We are introduced to her as she is preparing the defense of a client that the movie strongly implies murdered his wife by throwing her out of a window. Zoe Saldana does a song and dance (this movie is a musical) in which she uses her legal acumen to thrwart the meanings of words like “love”, “justice”, and “freedom” in favor of someone she knows is guilty. At the same time, she complains and pities herself that her legal talents are not appreciated by her superiors. At no point in this song does Ms. Castro express sympathy for the murder victim.

Movies and television shows are replete with characters of dubious moral nature. But just because a movie is about a bad person, does not mean that the writers/directors/producers of this movie are justifying that character’s behavior. Some of the best cinema about bad people, think Walter White of “Breaking Bad” or Tony Soprano of “The Sopranos”, are made by creators with well honed moral compasses who know exactly why and how bad their characters choices are. That well honed morality lends greatly to the dramatic arc of the story line. The problem with “Emilia Perez” is that it supports its sleazebag attorney. She could be a good person, but she isn’t because she wants money and power. The movie is fine with that and even goes so far as to give her a song and dance at a later time in which she accuses everyone else of being worse. The argument essentially is that her character’s lack of candor and dubious morality is justified because people don’t deserve her integrity. That is offensive. As a lawyer myself, that is specifically offensive to me. Her position and education demand that she hold herself to a higher moral standard, which, at a minimum, means she doesn’t make bullshit excuses like not being able to start her own law firm (where presumably she would be able to practice law without moral compromise) because, and I quote her, she’s black.

Ms. Castro’s efforts in support of the rich and powerful are not ignored though. She is approached by the boss of a drug cartel who wants her to help him fake his own death so that he may engage in a voluminous amount of cosmetic surgery to the end of transforming himself into a woman. The plan, carried out to song and dance, is successful. He fakes his death, abandons his wife and children in the process (he did not bother to seek their counsel about it), and resurfaces from the bandages with, among other things, new skin, new breasts, a new vagina, and a reduction in his adam’s apple. Importantly, he pays for all of this by embezzling money from his drug cartel. Like a lot of money. So although he starts a new life, shorn from the responsibility of running a large organization, he still has all the money and lives his new life as a new woman in luxury in a big house with maids and newly hired goons. Imagine the CEO of the company you're working at doing something like this. Imagine your spouse doing something like this. Imagine your father doing something like this. Imagine a movie not giving a shit about your feelings and instead insisting that you should feel a great joy in this person’s journey of self-actualization.

And it gets worse. This man refers to this decision as if a woman, someone named Emilia Perez, is telling him to do it. And this is another striking example of this movie being tone deaf and in dramatically poor taste. After the transformation, Emilia Perez, feeling sorry for all the mothers of Mexico whose children have been disappeared in the drug wars, starts a non-governmental organization that denounces the cartels that are conducting this orgy of violence, and the corrupt government that allows it. This NGO aids in the retrieval of bodies from mass graves so that these poor mothers can adequately mourn. (This Emilia Perez is quite adept at doing  this because she intuitively knows where the bodies are buried.) The character, and the movie, are under the impression that engaging in a sex-change operation absolves all sins and makes the character a truly different person. Emilia Perez feels no need to turn herself into the police or give back the money she has gained via the blood of innocents. She didn’t commit those crimes. The man did.

There is an old joke about the rich man and his toupee. This egocentric guy, growing old and growing bald, decides to invigorate his looks with some youth by wearing a hair piece. It looks ridiculous and everyone can tell it is fake. But no one says it to his face because he is rich. So he just goes around looking ridiculous ensconced in a delusion that only the wealthy can afford. This is the same with all transgender people who choose to engage in cosmetic surgery. We simply do not have the technology to affect what they desire and, most of the time, they end up in the uncanny valley, approaching something to what they intend to be but obviously, and unsettlingly, not what they intend to be. So, even with all this surgery, which I believe the actor Karla Sofia Gascon actually received (for personal reasons, not for the movie), there is an unspoken dirty little secret that hangs over the movie. Karla Sofia Gascon looks ridiculous and fake. This is clearly a man we are looking at. It says a lot about this movie that it chooses to engage in this pandering sensibility so much so that even in front of all the television cameras that Emilia Perez preens for, not a single person in Mexico recognizes the drug lord. Even her wife (played by Selena Gomez) and children don’t recognize him. Emilia Perez pretends to be a long lost and very rich aunt of the deceased drug boss and no one suspects a thing. It says alot about the Academy that they have decided to sustain this pandering delusion by nominating Karla Sofia Gascon in the category of Best Actress. SHE’S A MAN!

“Emilia Perez” has an ending reminiscent of the one in “The Room”, in which writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau, after dragging us through an awful awful movie, at least unwittingly granted the audience the concession of watching the hated main character commit suicide. “Emilia Perez” provides this same type of relief when we are treated to a large fireball that kills enough people to spare us a sequel. The movie believes the characters are martyrs and that this should be very sad (there is funeral parade in which the poor peasants of Mexico appear to be canonizing the memory of Emilia Perez), but we know they more or less got what they deserved and the scene works as a cleansing purge that washes away much of the repugnant build-up of toxicity and entitlement that came before it. Can this movie become a cult classic at midnight screenings with running commentaries by derisive drag queens? I don’t know, I think it might be too technically proficient of a movie, but maybe. As for the music, well there wasn’t any particular song or melody that stood out as good or distinctly memorable. The dancing was fine I guess. Whether or not the lyrics were eloquent (or even rhymed) is beyond me because I do not speak Spanish.

And now we have to address the elephant in the room here, which is that “Emilia Perez” has been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, the most of any other movie this year. It could very well be named Best Picture. Although there is a perverse part of me that likes the idea of a movie as original and daring as “Emilia Perez” winning the top prize, I can’t help but imagining that such an honor bestowed would come off with the general populace like the movie itself, tone deaf and in dramatically poor taste. It would be a few notches worse than giving Will Smith a standing ovation after he slapped Chris Rock in the face. I suppose it is hard for certain insular groups to consider the feelings of other people. The Academy is no exception (weird though, since the point of art is to do just that). For political reasons, “Emilia Perez” should be nowhere near the Best Picture race. Maybe their high-priced attorneys can explain this to them in such a way that it doesn’t unduly hurt their feelings. If the Academy wants to be daring, it can bestow the prize on “Anora”, a movie that presents with clear eyes how the delusional entitlement of very rich people affects the rest of us. Or the Academy can be safe and honor whatever this year’s version of “Green Book” (“Wicked”, anyone?’). Almost everything we do is political and certainly at this level with so many millions of people watching. We just experienced a political election in which a manifestly defective nominee just won the popular vote. One can sit back like Ms. Castro and complain about other people, or one can take stock in this simple reality: that the American people looked at Donald Trump and then the alternative and then, after ruminating about the choice for many many months, decided that the alternative was worse. The way to get back is to get better.

Gladiator II (2/5 Stars)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.”
Errol Morris

Edward Gibbon’s landmark The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1789) is distinct from most history texts in its general direction. Most histories start at the infancy of a civilization and follow it through to its maturity. The Decline and Fall starts at the maturity of the Roman civilization and follows it aaaaallllll the way down. The best and most famous of its historical characters are all at the beginning and as the story continues they get worse and more obscure. There are many reasons why the Roman Empire declined and Gibbon’s book has several thousand pages of them, but I will very briefly outline the very basic problem that occurred after the death of Marcus Aurelius (circa 186 A.D.) and continued for the next 100 years until the advent of the reign of Diocletian (circa 284 A.D.). The authority of the emperor rested on the army, and, more specifically, the Praetorian Guard which was that part of the army that was stationed in Rome. Starting with the reign of Commodus and moving forward, many emperors were killed via the honorable usurpation of a crazy tyrant or the dishonorable assassination of a competent prince, but no matter how the transfer of power occurred, the first thing that the new emperor would do would be to pay off the Praetorian guard with a donative, basically a bribe for the army’s loyalty. This first act of business was so ingrained and predictable that it created a moral hazard. After all, the more the army assassinated emperors, the more they benefited financially. For those 100 years, there were an estimated 30-35 emperors/usurpers, only one of which, Septimus Severus, died of natural causes. The rest were murdered.

[Gibbon tells of an extraordinary interregnum after the murder of the Emperor Aurelian (circa 275 A.D.) wherein the army asked the Senate to recommend a successor and the Senate, in turn, asked the army to recommend a successor, and this back and forth went on for eight whole months while the throne remained entirely vacant. Nobody wanted the death sentence.]

Surely, in this context, there is a prurient, exploitative, and lurid story to be told in blockbuster cinematic form. There isn’t really a moral to be found in the circuitous killing of so many princes over such a long period of time, which itself presaged only a further and total decline in the empire, but at least the story would have no lack of sensational violence. It may come as a surprise then that Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, a story that takes place circa 211-218 during the reigns of Geta, Caracalla, and Macrinus does not use any of it. The most this movie takes from history is the names of those three emperors, but the real crimes of these men are not explored and their interactions with each other, though dramatic and fatal in real life, are not shown and indeed cannot be said to even inspire the plot of the film. It is just generally bewildering to me that the writers could have such a mountain of material to work from and disregard all of it in favor of a storyline that, essentially, could only appeal to an audience entirely ignorant of the historical context in which the movie supposedly takes place.

Modern dramatists come across a very basic problem with interpreting material that either originates or takes place in the past. Shakespeare is a good example. There is always this temptation to update the language and locate the action in venues that are more easily identifiable. The problem is that the best thing about Shakespeare is the language, not the plot, and if you are updating the language, you lose what brought you to the material in the first place. The fact is that the past is old and hard to understand. To truly appreciate it, the audience needs to go to the past, not the other way around. The best Shakespeare performances are those that strip out all distractions from the words themselves and focus almost entirely on helping the audience understand what is being said.

Gladiator II could have been a much better movie with this approach. As it is, the plot concerns Lucius, the son of Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe’s character in the original) becoming a gladiator about twenty years after the events of the first film. He is a jaded malcontent that speaks derisively of the Roman Empire and yearns for his grandfather Marcus Aurelius's “Dream of Rome” in which power is returned to the Senate and the empire is once more based on freedom. There is a subplot in which a returning army is going to overthrow the corrupt duo of emperors Geta and Caracalla and enthrone the daughter of Marcus Aurelius (Connie Nielson, still alive from the original, where apparently she totally got it on with Russell Crowe and bore his son. I think we all missed that part) as the rightful heir to Marcus Aurelius with the presumed plan of returning the empire back to the old days of the Republic.

That bullshit plot is historically absurd. The Roman Senate was not a model of republican virtue and indeed had very little semblance with our modern institutions. The Romans did not believe in freedom and certainly no emperors, generals, senators, or sons and daughters of any of them would have paid lip service to a plan to expand "freedom" by granting more power to the Senate. Nor does this confused conspiracy have even internal logic. One cannot support freedom and republican virtues through the assumed authority of hereditary power. And there is no reason to believe that the daughter of Marcus Aurelius has more right to rule than the duo of emperors who are also the sons of emperors. Besides, I very much recall that in the original movie (and also in real life), Marcus Aurelius’ main mistake was giving over the empire to his worthless son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) instead of adopting a competent successor like Maximus. But here we are to assume that Lucius has some legitimate claim to the throne based on who his father and grandfather is. The movie ends with an incredible confrontation and denouement that suggests the “Dream of Rome” has a plausible chance of becoming a reality, perhaps as soon as the next movie. Of course, in reality, the Roman Empire declined and fell. Indeed the very next emperor after Macrinus, Elagabulus, was a teenage orgy enthusiast. He does not make an appearance here and is sorely missed.

There are good elements to the movie. I for one have no problem with the absurd spectacle of an armored Rhinoceros or a naval battle replete with sharks within the Coliseum. Those were fun. Also fun was Denzel Washington’s machiavellian portrayal of Macrinus. While all the other characters are enunciating their lines in “swords-and-sandals” fashion, he just chews through his dialogue as if this was the sequel to Training Day. He didn’t get the memo on how to act in the ancient past. Also, with one exception, this is a good example of color blind casting. Given that race didn’t matter in the Roman Empire (citizenship certainly mattered, but that wasn’t based on race), it doesn’t affect the inherent drama of any particular scene by having a black man play a character that historically wasn’t black. And since Denzel Washingon is one of our best actors, why not hire him to play what, in this historical context, should be a race neutral role. The only exception to this is the plot point, found in this movie but not in history, that Macrinus was once a slave, which for no apparent reason, makes Denzel Washington’s blackness seem relevant when it isn’t.

I’m not sure what the point is in morphing the distant past to pander to modern sensibilities. Most movies take place in the present and already do that. One of the best things about a movie that takes place in the past is that it can provide the modern audience a new experience, a story about humans that have an entirely different worldview. A very good example of this is the recent TV series Shogun, which is a fictional account of feudal Japan that takes pains in helping the audience understand what characters living in early 1600s Japan thought, felt, and were motivated by. I don’t think any of us would condone ritualistic suicide the way that feudal Japan did, but with a well produced story, the audience can understand why the characters do it and how it affects the plot. 

You don’t have to agree with characters in order to find them interesting. To only value the past to the extent that it justifies our actions in the present is a narcissistic, narrow, and numbingly tedious way to interpret historical events. After all, if there is no difference between then and now, then there is also no novelty in setting a story in Ancient Rome. And if all one considers important about the the past is that which comments on the present, then history does repeat itself, but only because one is too vain to consider those elements that are different. This is why movies made by Communists are so stupid and boring. Ridley Scott is usually better than this. 

All of Us Strangers (5/5 Stars)

Adam (played by Andrew Scott), a writer, sits alone in his apartment not writing. His building was recently built and so is almost uninhabited. One night the fire alarm goes off, Adam evacuates, and finds that he is the only person to do so. As he looks up at his building, he sees an apartment with a light on, the only apartment in the building with a light on, and a man looking down at him. They notice each other. Back in his apartment he hears a knock on his door. It is the man he had a moment with earlier (Paul Mescal). He introduces himself as Harry and offers his friendship in this lonely building, maybe more than that. Adam considers it but declines.

He thinks twice of it in the coming days and when he notices Harry again in the building lobby he strikes up another conversation. They start an intimate relationship. Around the same time, Adam visits his old neighborhood and indeed, the house he grew up in. He finds, without explanation, the ghosts of his deceased parents, frozen in age right before they died in a car crash when he was about nine years old.

What follows is a series of extraordinary conversations between Adam and his Mom (Claire Foy) and Dad (Jamie Bell). They are curious as to how his life turned out and how he is doing. Adam comes out as gay to his mother who is mainly worried, in a 1980s way, that such an identity would lead to stigma and illness. Adam explains that things are different nowadays. Then he has a conversation with his father who with bemusement explains that he already knew he was gay. That conversation turns when Adam questions his Dad as to why he didn’t comfort him when he was being teased at school because of it. After considering the matter in full, perhaps for the first time, his Dad apologizes in a moment of sublime warmth.

Adam’s interactions with his parents are not confrontational and his parents aren’t defensive. Instead, Adam is curious about why his parents did or did not do things and the explanations given, generally, are that his parents are human beings that sometimes make mistakes. Maybe if they lived long enough, they could have gotten it right eventually, but they died when Adam was still young. His parents are happy that Adam has found in his new relationship with Harry. The plot turns in a way that I won’t reveal when Adam attempts to introduce them to each other.

“All of Us Strangers” was adapted by writer/director Andrew Haigh (Lean on Pete) from a Japanese novel entitled Strangers by Taichi Yamada. Without reading the novel, you can feel the Nippon seeping through the screen. It makes a lot of sense that the original story is about a man in Tokyo feeling lonely. Meeting ghosts as a matter of course without the obligatory “this can’t be real” scene is very Japanese. But reading the synopsis of the novel’s plot one gets an idea of how great an adaptation this could be. (I won’t know for certain until I read the book, which is now on my list. Ask me in a couple of years about it.) Apparently the homosexual identity of Adam and the very personal conversations about sexuality with his 1980s parents were all superimposed by Andrew Haigh on a Japanese novel about ghosts.

Sometimes when the emotions of a story are so raw, it helps to have a creative barrier to better aid the audience to digest the story. Japanese movies in particular can be so intense that sometimes I feel the subtitles help the experience. After all, when you don’t understand the language, you kind of assume that the acting is perfect and don’t find it distracting. (It is hard to imagine Grave of the Fireflies, a movie about fire bombings and starvation, being endurable without the helpful emotional salves of a foreign language and anime.) It is then commendable that All of Us Strangers, a live action movie in English, hits all of its notes with appropriate delicacy. In particular, the performance of Andrew Scott is meticulous in its execution. This movie excels in the Japanese art of small things.

There is one very special moment in this movie that is a lock of my annual award of Best Use of a Song. One of the ghost encounters has Adam travel back in time to the night of his parents’ death as they set up a Christmas tree in the warmth of the family home. Playing on the radio is “Always On My Mind” by The Pet Shop Boys. This song, like the movie, is an exceptional cover that transforms a heavy handed lyrical ballad sung by the likes of Elvis Presley into a normal brit pop tune with 1980s synthesizers and beats that only upon further introspection reveals tender and moving lyrics. Movies, music, poetry, I mean art in general has a utility in our lives that this scene is a shining example of. For most of us, it is hard to articulate exactly how we feel, either by lack of talent or by lack of nerve and probably both. But sometimes you can just point to a song, a dialogue, a phrase, a picture and say this, this is how I feel. All of Us Strangers is one of the best movies of the year.

Anora (5/5 Stars)

If you haven’t heard of Writer/Director Sean Baker yet, then this is the perfect movie for an introduction. He has been making very good films for twenty years (Prince of Broadway, Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) but Anora is his best and may finally be his breakout. I say “may” not as some sort of hedge against the greatness of this movie, but only as to its subject matter, which does not correspond with the tastes of the general public. Anora is about an erotic dancer, Ani (played by Mikey Madison) that finds herself the object of desire of the son of a Russian oligarch. The first half of the movie is a whirlwind of irresponsible romance. The twenty-something heir, Ivan (played by Mark Eydelshteyn), finds her in a strip joint in Brighton Beach where they communicate in Russian. A week later, he pays her for sex that takes place in his parent’s mansion on the beach (the oligarchs are absent, likely in Russia). Shortly thereafter, he hires her for a week-long bender in Las Vegas, at the end of which he proposes to her and they get married in a Las Vegas marriage ceremony. In the second half of the movie his family’s hired hands energetically attempt to annul the marriage as soon as they are able.

Anora is the best movie about class since 2019’s Parasite, but unlike that movie, it doesn’t have anything to directly say about it. Instead, this is a Sean Baker movie. It exists not because Mr. Baker has something to say about rich people (like say, the TV show Succession) but because he finds Ani interesting and worthy of a story. Mr. Baker has made a career telling stories about people on the edge, and frequently in sexual trades, on their level and on their terms. His movies are ruthless in their realism but devoid of judgment. He shows a profound respect for his subjects, none more so than Ani who spends the running length of this movie being profoundly disrespected by everyone she interacts with. Mr. Baker respects Ani and people like her by depicting with clear eyes the bounds of their agency, or lack thereof, and the consequences of it. The movie ends with a gut-punch of emotion, a scene of catharsis so “earned” that it may as well set the standard for the same. Anora reminds one of 1990’s “Pretty Woman” only as far as subject matter and by contrast demonstrates what is fanciful and ultimately unsatisfying about it.

Anora is an energetic movie that takes place within a few weeks of confined time. It zips along through brief periods of elation and down-to-earth cynicism. It is funny, but not in a way that would denote it as a comedy. It is funny in the way that a Martin Scorsese movie is frequently funny (take Goodfellas or The Departed). That is, it knows its subject matter so well, and moves so efficiently, that the amount of material that the audience “gets” in every scene is inherently entertaining and frequently produces laughs of understanding. The movie, already at a rapid pace, gets kicked up a notch once the family gets wind of the marriage and a trio of men are sent to the mansion to put a stop to it.

The leader of these men, Toros, is played by Karren Karagulian, an actor you probably don’t know or recognize. I was watching the audio commentary of Sean Baker’s first movie Take Out, made for about $3,000 in 2004. In one scene he comments that the man on screen complaining about his delivery for about three lines was the most natural performer he had ever worked with and that he wanted him to be in every movie he made. Wait, what? That guy? It was Karren Karagulian, a very normal looking very Armenian middle-aged man. He is the antithesis of what a Hollywood actor looks like.

Sean Baker never reuses actors, except for Karren Karagulian. At the same time, Sean Baker never tells stories about people who look like Karren Karagulian. So Karren has always been an understated supporting actor in Mr. Baker’s movies or relegated to one or two scenes. Anora is really the first movie that allows him to perform some throw-down acting. Karren takes the opportunity and does not disappoint. The main reason the movie works so well in the second half is that the euphoria of the first half, in terms of energy, is replaced if not trumped by the manic panic of Toros in the second half, so that the frenetic pace never lets up. When the irresponsible heir escapes from his mansion without the newlywed Ani, Toros and his men take Ani on a 24 hour search for Ivan. When it appears that they have no leads as to where Ivan went, you would expect Toros to ease up and let everyone go home, but he never does. He takes out his phone in a diner and shows random people a picture of Ivan on the off chance that someone may have seen him.

Rounding out the trio of hired help is Igor played by Yuriy Borisov. He is wondering why he has been brought along since his job is to be the “muscle” (i.e. he beats people up when ordered to. In one scene, he shows proficiency with a baseball bat versus private property). It is explained to him that he is not to touch Ivan, and as for Ani maybe just to make sure she doesn’t run away. Igor is perhaps overqualified for this task. Like many people stuck in an awful bureaucracy, he does just enough to do his job with some base level of dignity. This movie, like Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, shows the poor fighting each other on behalf of rich people who stay above the fray. We get a glimpse of the patriarch oligarch in his private jet. His general lack of concern says quite a lot about why his son is such an entitled screw-up. This is perhaps the first rich character to be found in a Sean Baker movie. Mr. Baker seems to be content with showing just enough of him as necessary and moving on. The real romance here is one between Anora and Igor, but only to the extent of course that a sex worker and/or hired muscle can be allowed romance. Their respective employments are so emotionally exhausting, it is a wonder that they have any left over for their own personal use.

Perfect Days (4/5 Stars)

Hirayama is a janitor working for the city of Tokyo, Japan. He lives in a studio apartment and has a simple daily routine. He cleans the toilets of various public restrooms. He eats his lunch in the nearby park. He rides his bike. He patronizes a ramen stand in the nearby subway station and a small restaurant on a side street. He takes an interest in gardening, photography (in particular a kind of shimmer of light that results in the sun shining through the leaves of trees), 1960s-1970s musical artists like Patti Smith and Lou Reed (the latter’s song “Perfect Day” is sampled herein), and novels. Sometimes during this story, the semblance of a plot pokes through Hirayama’s routine in the guise of a niece who has run away from home or a co-worker that needs money for a date, but these are not too dramatic and their resolution is not too important.

This movie is enjoyable in the same way that a yule log burning in a fireplace at Christmas is enjoyable. I expect you can put it on in the background as one makes dinner, glance over a few times, and not miss anything. There will not be much to add here about the movie itself, which is stripped down and focused in a way like Hirayama’s life. The Director Wim Wenders has decided to portray this story bereft of concerns like excitement or ambition. There is no arc for the character since he is without want. He likes things the way they are and they stay that way. It is all very zen.

And wouldn’t it be nice if we all could slow down and live a life like Hirayama’s. Well, too bad. The rest of this review will be a discussion of why his lifestyle is actually illegal in most of the world. Yes, the remainder of this review will be a discussion on zoning and public policy. You could show “Perfect Days” on the first day of a class on city planning and spend the rest of the semester discussing it. It portrays those things that are actually important to the daily lives of normal people, not the megalomaniacs that too often seek to dictate by fiat the way the rest of us live.

Let’s take Hirayama’s job first. He is a janitor that cleans public restrooms. Normally, this would be a disgusting and dangerous task. In New York City, we don’t have public restrooms because our inhabitants can’t handle them. But this takes place in Tokyo, where apparently not only are the public restrooms devoid of drug addicts, graffiti, and litter, but are themselves works of public art. These are some nice restrooms Hirayama is cleaning the toilets in. We will discuss further why Tokyo does not appear to have the undesirable elements of urban life living in its public spaces, but for now will just notice that they are not there.

Let’s consider where Hirayama lives. He lives alone in a studio apartment. He can afford a studio apartment on a janitor’s salary. In NYC this is what would be called movie magic. But again, this takes place in Tokyo. The development of the Tokyo metropolis is an extraordinary case study in what occurs if a government simply allows people to use their land in the manner they see fit. In other words, Tokyo developed from the ground up without much city planning or zoning. How this occurred highlights its extreme improbability and why very few other places in the world are like it.

There are many reasons given for zoning laws, but the ones that actually make the most sense is incumbency bias. Zoning exists because vested interests want to protect their property values. Put another way, people who already have what they want bend the rules to keep what they have. So, let’s say if you wanted your children to go to the best schools and interact with other people who have just as much money, you could live in a community where all the residences have a minimum value of middle class or more. This strategy has the practical effect of keeping all of the poor people out of the neighborhood. Taking it one step further, since the neighborhood schools prioritize students that live nearby and are funded by neighborhood property taxes, you can effectively provide your children an edge in better schools and better social networks by living in a neighborhood that only middle class or rich people can afford. This, in a nutshell, is suburbia and most of America lives there.

Japan before World War II was a deeply unequal place. But, one of the effects of a devastating war is that it dramatically reduced inequality amongst the Japanese people. When the Americans burned Japan to the ground, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives. Many poor people lost all they owned. Many rich people also lost all they owned, but since they started off with more, they lost more. So far, so normal. Wars and other dramatic events like famines and plagues decrease inequality. But what happened next really has no historical parallel. The United States deposed the imperial government of Japan in an unconditional surrender. This dramatically reduced political inequality to go with the dramatic reduction of economic inequality caused by the war itself. Then instead of looting, enslaving, and colonizing the country, it installed democracy and capitalism and left. So Japan in general, and Tokyo in particular is an extraordinary natural experiment: what occurs when vested interests are removed and replaced with an open society. Forty years later, Japan had the second largest economy in the world.

How does this affect our hero Hirayama? Well, since Tokyo was allowed to develop as much as the free market dictated, there isn’t this dramatic shortage of housing that exists everywhere else in the world. Tokyo is an ocean of development, as densely packed as the island of Manhattan as far as the eye can see. As a result, a janitor can afford a studio. Another important detail. Hirayama’s studio apartment doesn’t have a full bathroom. Hirayama patronizes a nearby public spa to bathe. In NYC and most of the United States, that is illegal. Every living space requires a bathroom, electricity and a kitchen. That is nice I’m sure, but it makes the apartment more expensive. And when the living space is too expensive for poor people to live in, they live in tents on the street without bathrooms, electricity, or kitchens. You thought you could get rid of poor people by removing cheap housing, but all you did was remove the cheap housing. The poor people persist in their existence.

(I recall reading about Ernest Hemingway living as an underemployed writer in Paris, France in the 1920s. How could he afford it? Well, for one thing, his apartment didn’t have running water. Would you trade running water to live as an underemployed writer in Paris in the 1920s? Or how about being able to live like Hirayama in Tokyo? To be poor and live alone in NYC is either impossible or requires a government handout, which is as bad as living with the government in your home. Something to contemplate about NYC is that all people here have the right to shelter. So there exists a shelter system that every single person living on the street could take advantage of. The homeless you see on the street choose to be there.)

Let’s consider where Hirayama spends his time. The ramen spot that he patronizes. The bookstore that he buys novels from. The record store that sells him his mix-tapes. The tiny bar that he drinks at. All of these places are run by middle-aged or older operators. What does that infer? It infers that the owners are working at their own shops. Tokyo allows these tiny stores to exist by allowing commercial spaces in places that are forbidden elsewhere. In Irvine, all shopping and residences are separated. And the only shopping you can do is confined to malls that, by design, have one owner. So, in effect, by developing the neighborhood in this way, it ensures that the physical marketplace is monopolized by one entity. This has the effect of dramatically raising the rents for stores in the mall. After all, you’ve unnaturally made commercial space scarce by rendering it illegal in all areas that are not within the mall. So only big companies can afford to rent space in the mall, which means that you can’t have these small independently owned stores that Hirayama patronizes in Tokyo. It’s nice to know the owners of an establishment. If it is a ramen spot, the owner remembers you and says hello. If it is a bookstore, the owner talks to you about books. If it is a bar, the bartender knows what you like to drink. And if you plan your town so that it is difficult for normal people to own the places that they work, you don’t have this type of interaction.

When he is not working, Hirayama rides his bicycle around Tokyo. The places that he patronizes are close enough in space where this is not inconvenient. When Hirayama comes to his destination, he does not lock up his bike. What? What alternate dimension is this where one does not take the basic precaution of locking up one’s bicycle? This is the one detail that I’m not sure is actually correct about “Perfect Days” depiction of Tokyo, but it does reflect a general truth about Japan. It is an abnormally safe place to live. In a country of 125 million, there were 912 recorded homicides in 2023. That is absurdly low. It is this sort of detail which allows Hirayama to live his type of life without the stress and anxiety that surrounds the poor in the rest of the world. At one point, he decides to relax by drinking beer under a bridge. It is a nice place to drink and there are no hostile people around. Would you drink beer under a bridge in your town?

One can point to stringent gun sales for low crime, which helps but isn’t the real reason why crime is so low. The real reason is that Japan is democratic, capitalist (i.e. has the rule of law), relatively old, and entirely composed of Japanese (like 99% of the people are natives). There isn’t anything special about the Japanese people. Take any other group of people and give them the same institutions and demography and that country too would be peaceful. What the low crime rate reflects is strong community ties. What enables strong community ties is a stable population and time. Japan has almost no immigration or foreign born population. Everyone is Japanese and their families have lived there forever. Over time, this fosters a very strong sense of community identity which is reflected in the fact that the public spaces (including the bathrooms) respect the people and the people respect the public spaces (including the bathrooms).

It is not that immigrants are inherently wild people. It is the fact that they are new, which in turn renders their portion of the population transient. Over time, community ties will form, but community ties are simply not there when the people show up. If you have a prolonged and large influx of people and/or large exodus of people, say like what happened in American cities in the 1970s and 1980s, communities that did have strong ties can break down and dissipate entirely, one side effect being an extraordinary rise in crime. There are benefits to diversity and immigration that are especially noticeable when one considers the example of Japan. Its aging population and workforce, its stagnating economy, its conformist and potentially oppressive culture would all be helped with more immigration. If it allowed more immigration, it would come with a crime wave. The question is at what point does the trade off stop being worth it. Immigration is not a question of yes or no, it is a question of how much.

There is much to learn about the good life by contemplating “Perfect Days”. In the context of city planning, one realizes that although Hirayama lives alone, his life is made possible by the people and community of Tokyo, who in their wisdom have decided to enact laws that are uncommon and to not enact other laws that are common. Now, I’m not saying we all have to live the zen life. All I’m saying is that it shouldn’t be illegal.

Megalopolis (1/5 Stars)

“By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash - as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot - it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.”

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

The hook for seeing Megalopolis was too good for this reviewer to ignore, regardless of all the bad reviews and box office failure. I recall first hearing about this movie a few years ago. Francis Ford Coppola, maker of several of the best films ever (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now) had an idea for an epic movie. Something he had wanted to make for decades. He believed in it so much that he swore that he spend his family fortune on it if no studio would fund it. No studio funded it, and so I am told, Mr. Coppola funded it himself. At 85 and a self-made man, he is entitled to one last big roll of the dice. And….it looks like he just lost something like 100 million dollars of his own money.

The interesting thing is that this isn’t the first time that Coppola has blown his fortune on a movie. After the great success of The Godfather Part I and Part II and Apocalypse Now, Coppola self-funded the costly flop One From the Heart which put him in the middle class (until Godfather Part III in 1990). That movie is underrated. It had pretty innovative visuals and a Tom Waits soundtrack, but unfortunately paired it with a not-sexy plot of the tired love of a long married couple. In other words, the story was never going to make money regardless of how cool everything else was. But everything else is cool and the movie is worth the viewing for any Coppola fan seeking a deep cut after consuming the hits. Megalopolis on the other hand, well, I don’t know what this movie is supposed to be. It looks expensive and has several fine actors, but whatever original inspiration and/or message Coppola thought he was conveying has been hopefully lost amidst a plethora of mixed metaphors and stale images.

I quote the above passage of George Orwell as an aide in trying to articulate what is going wrong here. Take the main metaphor of Megalopolis. The city in which the characters inhabit looks like New York City but is called New Rome. The main characters are Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and an upstart city planner named Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver). Other characters include a wealthy magnate named Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight) and a influential reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). The plot concerns the debaucherous decay of this empire of New Rome. At one point, the public is bribed with Bread and Circuses (this is a literal subtitle).

Any student of history can point to a glaring problem here. The characters Cesar, Cicero, and Crassus are from the fall of the Roman Republic (130 BC to 0 AD). The Roman Empire with its “bread and circuses” would fall hundreds of years later (200 AD to 476 AD). These are different things. For instance, the historical figure Julius Caesar was killed by a group of senators who considered him a tyrant and an enemy of the Republic. Wouldn’t then, the character whose namesake he shares be more appropriately an enemy of an institution that is a republic, not an empire? And Caesar was a popular leader not an elitist. Wouldn’t then his nemesis be one of the elites, not a vulgar rabble-rouser named Clodio Pulcher (Shia LeBouf) whose followers conspicuously bear red base-ball caps. Does Coppola not expect us to notice that he is misusing his metaphors? Does Coppola, this man who spent 100 million dollars of his own money on this idea, not understand the historical difference between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire?

There is another reference here that seems heavily relied upon if not explicitly stated. The movie has heavy tones of Ayn Rand and objectivism. I don’t think it is a mistake that the main character is an architect (like the main character in The Fountainhead) and he is developing this new fantastic and futuristic building material (like the main character in Atlas Shrugged) that will solve all sorts of humanity’s problem if not for the silly little people who don’t understand genius when they see it. This architect is a very special person. Apparently he can stop time. Like, a building is falling down. He stops time, and while the building is stuck in free-fall and the world and everyone in it is frozen, he sort of nonchalantly looks around before resuming time again. It’s a cool trick, never explained and never used in such a way that would develop plot or character. There is no connection whatsoever between this objectivist architect, Megalon, or the time-stopping power with the historical Rome, either its republic or its empire. The little sense that the metaphors make on their own is doubly lost in their combination.

The material is called Megalon and the silly little people are afraid of it, though no reasons are given as to why. The architect is using this material to build a new city amongst the skyscrapers of Manhattan. This new city, in the humble opinion of this reviewer, is a god awful monstrosity that no one in their right mind would ever want to live in. Its best quality seems to be how it looks from a very very long distance. Imagine for a moment actually living in this place with a million other people. There are no discernable units, no bedrooms, no kitchens, and no bathrooms. Call me old-fashioned and reactionary but I think it highly important to be able to take a shit in private.

The movie provides a much better use for Megalon than as a building material. In one scene, a character gets shot, point blank, in the face. In the hospital, Megalon is used as a substitute for that part of his brain that exploded out of the back of his skull. This character makes a full recovery. The only thing more amazing than that turn of events is the fact that no-one else really appreciates its significance. Megalon apparently gives the gift of immortality and nobody cares.

This story ends with a big speech by our hero architect in which he exhorts the people of New Rome to, I don’t know, I couldn’t figure out what on earth he was talking about. I looked online for the transcript of that speech so that I could reprint it here and analyze it as a prime example of the type of meaningless bullshit that pervades this movie. But I couldn’t find it at this time. I expect it will someday be easier to look up later and I’ll update this blog post when it is possible to do so.