Francis Ford Coppola IS The Filmmaker Of The Year
And the one we needed this year. Money is NOT the object or barometer.
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Who’s bold? Francis Ford Coppola IS The Boldest and deserves our love and celebration!
I know what my top film experience of 2024 was. By far. I got to attend the first screening of MEGALOPOLIS. And now everyone has the opportunity to see it. I can’t even begin tell you what a pure delight it is to get to see a cinema artist do what they want. We just don’t get the opportunity. Making movies is so expensive, the business asks us to predict a similar return as to the cost, and that requires compromise. MEGALOPOLIS has no compromises that I can tell of. It deserves our love and acclaim. As does FFC. People are so tamed, compliant, lame, and restrained. But not Francis.
Sure we can have fun picking apart what works and doesn’t, what’s missing or could’ve been, but so what? What’s incredible is that he made this movie and made sure we got to see it. There has never been anything like it — that’s all that matters.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/opinion/megalopolis-coppola-classic.html
I often feel that with films that are not designed for everyone, where there is a great curiosity among a small subset, that last thing we should do is traditional distribution. The haters are going to hate those that don’t conform, but us lovers will celebrate it. So the trad pundits proclaim it a flop, but what if it was only playing in one theater in the entire country? What if it moved from state to state for a one week engagement every week? I think that would be sweet.
I initially was a bit angry that he spent so much money on his dream, in the same way that I am about Jeff Bezos’ space venture. But I came around. He got a windfall on the sale of his vineyards. He has provided for his family. He is an artist who inspires, and l love that he did what he desired.
“With its intellectual earnestness, first-person grandiosity, and aesthetic extravagance, the film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else Coppola has made.”
and:
“Coppola fills the movie with fervent, rapturous rhetoric that seems to emanate, almost in his own voice, from behind the camera, and this rhetoric fuses with the visual rhetoric of what the camera does—an aesthetic flamboyance in the movie’s visual compositions, performances, design, costume, and the scale and tumult of its spectacular action. “Megalopolis,” a movie made with hubristic ambition, is not only a tale of hubristic ambition but is indeed a celebration of it. The film is a tragedy in which everything comes out right: Coppola builds his protagonist’s absurd overreach into a foreordained happy ending, and the movie itself is a happy outcome from the very start.”
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This is the real story of America’s last twenty years.
And it is absolutely devastating. It is also another example of incredible storytelling using data and graphics and what makes online news reporting great. You MUST check it out.
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