I previously made a post about how Francis Ford Coppola is a massive fucking piece of shit so naturally I was against this movie from the moment it was announced.
With that in mind, I was genuinely worried that the movie would be good, that it would be a commercial and/or critical success… and I’m happy to report that none of my fears came remotely true.
I could not describe the plot of the film because I was completely unable to get invested in whatever the fuck was going on, you couldn’t pay me to give a shit about these characters. There’s no real story here anyway, it’s basically just a series of scenes and none of them are good. The writing is atrocious, the editing is bad, the music is corny and the actors clearly did not give a shit, because why would they? (this movie’s only redeeming quality is that it made a bunch of hotshot celebrities look like total idiots)
(spoilers below)
But basically it’s a movie about a bunch of ultra-rich assholes who hate each other. Naturally they’re all a bunch of boring perverts. The protagonist, Cesar, is an architect who invents a magic building material with which he plans to build a utopia - because, of course, only the rich can save humanity, with hand-wavy bullshit.
Oh by the way Cesar has an affair with a singer who is supposedly a 16 year-old virgin. He’s arrested but it’s all okay because it turns out she was lying about her age and is actually 23. This adds nothing to the plot and I don’t know why it’s in the movie but given Francis’ history with child abuse I found it very disturbing.
The whole movie is full of misogyny. The only woman with any characterization is Aubrey Plaza, who plays a gold-digging harlot who marries a rich old man just to manipulate him. Her elderly pervert husband (played by Trump-supporter Jon Voight) murders her with a crossbow and we’re expected to cheer. At one point Kathryn Hunter says “womanizer is such an awful word - as if the woman had nothing to do with it!”. Francis hides behind this disgusting sentiment by having a woman deliver the line.
Oh yeah, noted abuser of women and dog-murderer Shia Lebouf also stars in the film. Coppola explicitly hired canceled actors to rebel against Woke. Shia plays the villain of the film, and would you be surprised to hear that his character is also an effeminate crossdresser? Yup, we’re busting out the queer villain trope, baby!
This movie is, if nothing else, a thorough repudiation of auteur theory. This movie proves that Francis is not the genius that pathetic sycophantic film bros think he is. They will forever treat him like a god for “making” Apocalypse Now and The Godfather but in reality it takes a lot of people to make a film, and it’s clear to me that the success of those films has less to do with Francis and more to do with his collaborators. It’s very telling that The Godfather is often called a Coppola film and not a film by Mario Puzo, who wrote the script and the novel it’s based on.
If you really want to know what kind of artist Francis Ford Coppola is, you can’t judge his work by a small number of successful films he happened to direct 50 years ago (all of which had co-writers and were adaptations of novels). You have to judge him by the work he has done since, which has been mostly dogshit. And looking at the two movies where he had the most creative control, Twixt and Megalopolis, it should be clear to everyone that the man is a fraud and a hack, wholly undeserving of his status as a legendary filmmaker.
Continuing on with the anti-auteur thought, anyone else have thoughts on Chung Seo-Kyung’s movies with Park Chan-Wook? It kinda jumped out to me how his filmography before collaborating with her was doing far, far worse in terms of the depth of the characters, especially women. His main hit from this period (and arguably the main reason he’s known outside of Korea) is Oldboy, which while still being a stellar movie, has only 1 woman with any agency who is repeatedly assaulted and is shown almost no sympathy, despite the fact she’s the biggest victim of the movie. Even worse, Oh Dae-su attempts to assault her in the first act, and nothing happens! It’s just brushed off! Joint Security Area did a lot better before Oldboy, yet I think the movie failed to really present the complex internal world of the investigator, only slightly touching on her backstory and bringing forth the internal conflict in the third act in a much shallower way than you’d see in his later filmography; instead it mostly dwells on the personal and geopolitical conflict of the Korean troops. That’s not really a fair criticism, just a missed opportunity. I think when Chung Seo-Kyung starts writing his movies, though, they start to come out a lot better in that department, and they all tend to have these incredibly rich, three-dimensional characters with complex characterization. It works particularly well with Park’s style of presenting convoluted plots that can unravel those characters’ layers with flashbacks, back-and-forths, and reveals. Seriously, the presentation is the whole reason a movie like Decision to Leave works, there’s no better way to present these ridiculously layered characters that Chung Seo-Kyung comes up with.
I argue that as much as these directors have their weaknesses and the fans often overly center on the directors as the auteurs and sole driving force behind the success of great films, it’s worth recognizing that when you aren’t an egotistical jerkoff like Coppola, a director can grow across their career and build up a team of other skilled creators. There’s a lot of other examples, Scorsese with Thelma Schoonmaker, Fincher and Brad Pitt (ok, both varying degrees of horrible), Kurosawa and Hashimoto, etc. So if anything, the issue with Coppola is that it appears he’s alienated the people he worked with that were complementing his skills with their best contributions.