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.

The Little Hours (4/5 Stars)

Ostensibly “The Little Hours” is based on “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio. This 14^th century work concerned a group of ten women who relocated to the country to wait out the bubonic plague. To entertain themselves, they each tell a story. There is only one rule: don't make it depressing like the plague. This movie is more likely to have been inspired by one of the short stories as opposed to actually adapted from it. I don’t know much about the actual short story except that it involved a convent of horny nuns and their adventures with the new gardener. That more or less happens in “The Little Hours,” but there is plenty here that is most likely anachronistic. Then again, there is also plenty here that isn’t anachronistic. And more than anything, the choices that Writer/Director Jeff Baena makes as to what to stay historically faithful to and what to not care too much about changing are what makes “The Little Hours” a superior movie and yes, very funny.

What stays the same is the general context of 14^th century Italy, specifically the Tuscan countryside where the convent is located. I know something about the context because of recently reading Will Durant’s “The Story of Civilization, Volume 5: The Renaissance”. (I may have been the only one  in the theater keenly aware of the historical context of one character’s paranoid obsession with Guelfs.) The characters, being of 14^th century Italy, and unaware of a brighter future with far more freedom, respond to their situations in historically correct ways. One particular nun, when told by her visiting father that the family’s money is tight and she probably won’t get a promised dowry (and thus dashing her hopes of someday leaving the convent to marry), is disappointed but does not get angry or disobedient. Although such a response would be unheard of today (just like it would be unheard of for any daughter to be forced into a convent for monetary reasons in the first place), it is this type of detail that provides the basis of catharsis later on in the story. This story, after all, is about life finding its way through the strictures of not just physical but psychological repression. That repression, though outdated, must remain heavy and the characters must believe in it for the movie to truly succeed. When successfully providing the basis for the reality of the movie, it provides high stakes for certain reveals that in this day and age nobody would care about. Those high stakes seen through a modern consciousness are quite funny. At the height of one particular comedic moment, I heard a sizable gasp in the audience (and onscreen) when one character accuses another character of being a Jew. (Gasp!)

What is changed is plenty. For one thing, although this is Italy, there are no accents and there is noone speaks like Shakespeare. The script is tailored not to the prose of “The Decameron” but to the comedic attributes of its very good cast of talented comedians. In supporting roles are the men. John C. Reilly plays a good-hearted pastor with a weakness for wine. Fred Armisen plays a traveling bishop who functions like a spiritual auditor (more in an accountant way than an inquisitor way). Nick Offerman plays the previously mentioned monarch obsessed with Guelfs. In the main roles are three of the most talented young female comedians around. First is Alison Brie (“Community”) the aforementioned girl who wants to leave the convent and marry but whose family decides is not worth the dowry. Next is Aubrey Plaza (“Parks and Recreation”) whose dead-pan bluntness and sullen rebelliousness makes her the perfect candidate for witchcraft. Finally is a new-comer (at least to me), one Kate Micucci, who is a comedic revelation. If the convent plays a little like high school with Alison as the rich girl and Aubrey as the goth girl, Kate is the unformed slightly nerdy girl that just wants to fit in with the rest of them. Although the characters are of the 14th century, the movie takes a purely modern and secular view of certain taboos (homosexuality, celibacy, drug-use, etc.). For example, witchcraft is not so much about being evil as it is about dancing naked in the woods on drugs. The witches are not unlike modern hippies.

Surrounded by all these colorful characters is Dave Franco, the humble gardener whose presence in the convent excites all of the repressed nuns. Dave wisely plays the straight man to the craziness abounding around him and never really goes for the laughs himself. That’s fine, because the story is driven by the women in it, and it is their choices as it pertains to the gardener (some of which can be decidedly categorized as sexual harassment) that reveal each of their well-rounded characters.

A movie like “The Little Hours” could not have been made before the digital revolution in movies. It is way too niche and obviously would be very difficult to market in any mass market type of way. If however you stumble upon it, give it a shot. I thought it was hilarious.

Safety Not Guaranteed (4/5 Stars)

The source material for this movie is a real classified advertisement from 1997 that received thousands of responses. It went like this:

Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED. I have only done this once before.

In the early 2000s, it became an Internet sensation when a photo of a man with the most serious 80s mullet in the world was added to classified advertisement. Now it is 2012 and there is a movie. Given the source material you would probably expect a dumb action/comedy with plenty of low budget action and at least one great mullet. And you would be completely wrong. The movie, “Safety Not Guaranteed,” written by Derek Connolly, directed by Colin Trevorrow, and starring Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza, has action and comedy but also comes with several fully developed characters, a totally unpredictable plotline, and a really sweet romance. It is a far better movie than the source material commands or requires.

The story starts with the classified advertisement. A magazine writer finds it and pitches writing a story about it to his boss. He gets permission to take two intern, a nerdy Indian and the sarcastically depressed Darius, played by Aubrey Plaza, with him on the road trip to hunt down the weirdo.

A movie like this has two storytelling traps in it that would doom the ordinary independent movie. The first trap has to do with time travel and the fact that it ought to be impossible. At some point in the story the writer is going to have to give us a decent explanation as to what is going on there. The second is the presence of a sarcastically depressed character. These people overpopulate indie movies. They usually are underemployed artists/actors/writers/dancers who are depressed, most of the time because they aren’t famous and successful artists/actors/writers/dancers. The problem with this sort of character is that they tend to be pretentious and annoying (because seriously only a pretentious and annoying person would be depressed that they can’t be famous and successful for doing something profoundly useless like, for instance, art.) An intern for a small magazine seems to fit that mold pretty well.  

It is a credit to this movie that both of these traps are deftly averted. The main reason for this I believe is the movie’s treatment of the advertiser, a middle-aged supermarket employee named Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass. The character is one of the most weirdly endearing characters in movies. He truly believes in his mission and is sincerely looking for a partner to go back in time with him. In fact, it is revealed that he has been seeking out theoretical physicists over the Internet and engaging them in discussions about time travel. And yes, he is actually building some sort of big mechanical thing in his garden shed.

But more importantly he also happens to be shy and protective. When the magazine writer shows up at his door and asks to help, he flatly rejects him because he rightly senses that the writer doesn’t really want to go back in time. This guy may be delusional enough to believe in time travel but he can also tell when somebody is making fun of him. Darius is more sympathetic in her introduction and succeeds in gaining enough trust to start Kenneth’s brand of time travel training, but it is still a long time before he feels he can trust her enough to actually tell her the reason he is going back in time. It is a really nice reason that I am not about to spoil it here.

How the movie portrays Kenneth avoids the traps because at some point I started to not really care whether the time machine worked. And I did not care because Darius starts enjoying the sincerity and enthusiasm of the strange guy in the woods to the point where she loses much of her sarcastically depressed persona and stops caring whether the time machine works too. The story becomes more about a romance then about time travel. As far as plots go, that’s ridiculously original. What’s more ridiculous is that it really works. 

Now I can probably guess what you are thinking, and that might be that what I just described is a great cliché in romantic comedies: the oft-seen and inexplicable romance between an outlandish out-of-shape comedian and a ridiculously tolerant supermodel. Believe me this is not the case. This romance is not inexplicable. This is brought out by a superior performance with some very tricky material by Aubrey Plaza. It should be mentioned that it is never suggested that her attraction to Kenneth is a normal thing. This is even highlighted in one of the best scenes where Plaza interviews for the article a sort of ex-girlfriend of Kenneth, played by Kristen Bell, (who you may fondly remember as the ex-girlfriend in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”). She gives a totally understandable explanation of why she did not get too involved with the guy and does so without coming off as a total bitch. Instead, the attraction Darius has to Kenneth isn’t just a foretold conclusion because the screenplay necessitates that the guy has to get the girl in the end, but something that develops between two fully realized imperfect personalities that just happen to be perfect for each other. Darius has actual reasons for wanting Kenneth that make sense. It’s a pleasure to watch a comedy go through the trouble to do that every now and then.

I have yet to not be impressed by an Aubrey Plaza performance. Of course, I have only seen her in this and in her small part in “Funny People,” but I’m already at the point where I’m looking forward to seeing her in plenty of other movies. I have finally added “Parks and Recreation” to my Netflix queue.

Funny People (3/5 Stars) August 26, 2009

Death by Penis Jokes! 


The third movie from Writer/Director/Producer Judd Apatow is “Funny People,” starring Adam Sandler as a rich and famous comedian who has just received news from his doctor that he has a terminal illness, a newly thinned Seth Rogen as an up and coming stand up comic that Sandler hires as his assistant, and Leslie Mann as Sandler’s “one who got away.” Rounding out a strong supporting cast are Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman as Rogen’s fellow standup comic roommates, Eric Bana as the Mann’s Aussie husband, and Aubrey Plaza as Rogen’s love interest. There are also an impressive number of cameos by other comics playing themselves like Andy Dick, Paul Reiser, Norm MacDonald, Dave Attell, and Sarah Silverman. Inexplicably Marshall Mathers (Eminem) also shows in one scene where he impressively rants about the annoyances that come with being a celebrity and tells an eavesdropping Ray Romano to go “Go F*** Himself.” As in ‘Knocked Up,’ Apatow’s own daughters play the children. Both of them do a good job of acting like they are Leslie Mann’s (who is Apatow’s wife) actual children. 

The title notwithstanding, this movie is not a comedy. It is a drama that happens to be about comedians. Since comedians have a tendency to draw on their lives’ tragedies to produce humor, this movie has many jokes in it. But the jokes in this movie don’t work like the jokes in a regular comedy. In a regular comedy the jokes would work for the purpose of making the tragedy somehow okay by various techniques. Perhaps the best example of a joke making DEATH okay is King Arthur’s fight with the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” A more modern example is South Park’s Kenny being murdered in almost every single episode for several seasons. These jokes take the big topic of DEATH and belittle it by absurdly suggesting that a) it doesn’t hurt (Tis’ but a flesh wound!) and b) it isn’t necessarily terminal (OMG they killed Kenny…Again!). In this movie, jokes are made about death, but they aren’t successful in belittling it. The story wants us to take George Simmons (Sandler) terminal illness seriously. There is one scene where this is especially telling. Ira Wright (Rogen) has brought upon himself to make George an itunes list of reflective songs to help him cope with the illness. Simmons asks to hear some of them and jokes about how hokey and phony the first two are. Then Rogen puts one on that is undeniably moving. George finds his mind blanking on jokes, is reminded of why Ira made the list, and angrily berates him as he storms out of the room. Let the record show that Adam Sandler can be a nuanced actor when he feels like it.

I would compare the experience of watching this movie to the experience of watching Scorsese’s “Casino.” Let me explain myself. I could tell the movie had top-notch directing, editing, casting, acting, and writing. The creators knew the material inside and out. The stand up routines that were meant to be funny were actually funny. The pathos made sense. Technically speaking, everything seemed to be fine about this movie. The problem is that “Funny People” is an especially long movie about essentially miserable characters. George Simmons is an isolated and alienated comedian who lives alone in a huge house that seems to be useful only for attracting groupies for one night stands. He has to pay Ira to be his assistant and confidante. He constantly berates him about his last name and private parts. For the whole movie it seems that George is not learning any lessons from his illness. His first act after learning he is may be well is to get back the woman that ‘got away’ i.e. he cheated on her and she left. He does this by attempting to breakup a troubled marriage. That guy can be quite a vicious clown. It simply isn’t easy to feel sorry for a rich and famous dude who lives in a mansion and treats other people like shit. 

Seth Rogen also plays against his usual “Seth Rogen” oafish confident type. Having lost a lot of weight, his character Ira Wright seems a whole ten years younger than his usual fat self. He plays the guy young, starstruck, and way over his head. If there is an arc to this movie than it is in this character because he seems to be the only person who changes any. He goes from idolizing George Simmons, to doubting him, to finally willing to throw away any perks he could have gotten career wise just to tell the guy off. It is probably a shame that the movie focused on George Simmons so much because the heart of this story is in the coming-of-age tale of Ira Wright. Seth Rogen may have struggled at the box office this year, but in consecutive movies he has acted against type in two very different roles and has performed admirably in both of them. (the other being ‘Observe and Report’)

Also worth a special mention is Aubrey Plaza who has very little screen time as a struggling fellow standup comic but gives the most memorable performance in the movie. She is introduced cynically enough. The Jason Schwartzman character, a successful comic with his own TV show, brings her home and gives Ira ten days to ask her out or he will sleep with her. Three weeks later, after Ira has only gotten a tentative date set up with her to see a Wilco concert, Schwartzman sleeps with her. Ira doesn’t get mad at Schwartzman (because hey, he said he would give him ten days and ended up giving him twenty one.). He instead gets mad at Aubrey. Here is where the movie makes an interesting choice. Instead of simply using the scene to allow the audience to get vicarious revenge on groupies who sleep too willingly with stars, the movie gives the woman an impressive and ultimately sad retort, and Aubrey knocks the scene out of the park. What we come to understand is that two fundamentally good people who may have had a chance of being together, but feel that they have to compromise themselves because they are bottom feeders in a business that seems to arbitrarily pull some people up and keep others down. It is such a sad scene. Aubrey’s performance is, in my opinion, good enough for a Supporting Actress Nomination. Sometimes one scene is enough.