The Power Broker: MEGALOPOLIS

How small our imaginations and expectations have grown as a culture if we have no room to accommodate something as grand and singular—for better and for worse—as Megalopolis. Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in over a decade, a passion project he partially financed himself, is a long, rambling, sometimes hallucinatory narrative set among the powerful in a city that’s somehow simultaneously modern New York and ancient Rome—New Rome. It’s a warped funhouse mirror of our present’s problems, and a cockeyed rearview mirror of problems we’ve had since ancient times. It’s a big swing, full of ungainly ideas and vivid juxtapositions. You’ll never quite guess what you’ll be seeing or hearing next. This has been greeted with sighs by some who seem preemptively exasperated by the financial folly the project represents. It’s so uncommercial they say; it’s so unusual and confused and messy. Others seem to greet it with schadenfreude, somehow gleeful at the supposed downfall of a once-great filmmaker. They seem to find it laughable that a master director in his mid-80s would dare try to make something bold and wild and weird—something so unmistakably his own, every idiosyncratic idea honestly intended. Indeed, this is a movie that’ll challenge conceptions of conventionality. It’s too direct and flat and ungainly to be called a mainstream narrative. It’s full of posturing and speechifying, theatrical symbolism and pulp philosophy, thudding narration and aloofly schematic emotionality. But it’s also too arch and vulgar and full of wriggly low humor and with passages of bewildering narrative density to be purely schematic art film. It refuses to fit neatly into any box other than, perhaps, this: a modern Francis Ford Coppola experience.

That din you hear when the mind fills up as the film unspools is the noise of every Coppola movie happening at once. Here’s a man who directed a little bit of everything: from a Warner Brothers musical to a 3D nudist movie, from a scrappy Corman horror picture to lavish all-star literary adaptations, from epic, luxuriously filmic period pieces to tiny, high-contrast experimental digital indies. Here’s a career that stretches the whole breadth and scope of American movies from the end of the studio system to whatever we call now. With Megalopolis, he’s giving it all back to us at once in one heterogeneous mixture. It’s the family saga of The Godfather and the special effects extravaganza of Dracula and the artifice of One from the Heart and the resourcefulness of a Dementia 13 and the self-portraiture of Tucker and the deeply personal superimpositions of Twixt and the scope of Apocalypse Now and the slapdash comedy of You’re a Big Boy Now and so on. But it’s also a mad jumble of other inspirations or comparison points—a carousing Felliniesque city of appetites; a Fritz Lang Metropolis of big, blocky metaphors; a Cecil B. DeMille epic of Golden Idols and fallen angels; a Star Wars prequel of green-screen politics and emotional constipation; a hodgepodge of anachronisms like Julie Taymor’s Titus; a Richard Kelly dystopia of disordered modernity. It’s filmed in an unreal honeyed glaze, with characters who pontificate and pronounce more than dialogue, and a storyline that’s a work of grubby modern scheming scandal and prejudice shot through with a vaguely classical sense of stakes and design.

We meet a troubled artist: an arrogant city planner (Adam Driver) who dreams of building a better future with glowing sci-fi public transit and a fabulous downtown bustling with life. That he might need to demolish areas of New Rome makes some forces upset. (He’s Robert Moses meets Hippodamus of Miletus.) Driver plays up the sanctimony and impetuous ego and the troubled, druggy, playboy image he both indulges and resists. And he’s just one of many in a powerful web of family and entanglements. His lover (Nathalie Emmanuel) is the daughter of the loathed Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito). His Machiavellian party-boy cousin (Shia LaBeouf) is the troubled son of the city’s sleazy top banker (Jon Voight). Even his driver (Laurence Fishburne) has an important role: he’s a witness and a philosopher—a historian behind the wheel who narrates, sometimes in phrases chiseled in stone. There’s also a sneaky TV personality named Wow Platinum who plays up her shamelessness (Aubrey Plaza) and a pop star who plays up her purity (Grace VanderWaal). They’re all Power Brokers, trying to grow their influence and leave legacies, consolidate power, or use theirs to build a future. The figures strut like Roman politicos—with laurels and robes for Senators and Vestal Virgins alike—and appear on talk shows or in City Hall. They shout pseudo-Shakespearian speeches—and sometimes the real thing—through bullhorns and microphones and show up for chariot races in Madison Square Garden. It’s boldly iconographic, and interpersonally messy, high culture and low conflict colliding and kaleidoscoping, often enveloping and maddening.

It’s so much: political intrigue swamps idealistic agendas; a nuclear satellite is crashing to earth; a Deep Fake makes a phony scandal; there’s a new element that allows for fantastic creations; there are assassinations and uprisings and parades and concerts and telethons and press conferences—including an actual question from the audience, if you’re so lucky—and hostile takeovers and sex jokes and incestuous allusions and off-screen murder mysteries and cross-dressing and magical realism and tearful confessions and oddball line-readings and elaborate sets and gloriously fake backdrops and split-screens and montages and a score somewhere between a flourish of brass and an electronic pulse. It has computer-generated visions and concept art paintings and historical footage—like Hitler and 9/11—and flubbed lines and living statues and spinning newspaper headlines and a rewritten Pledge of Allegiance. Does it have clear politics? No, but it has the suggestion of them. Does it have philosophical perspective or insight? Sort of. All of that is a strange stew of half-formed impulses informed by its historical mishmash and a host of name-dropped oddities, like a scene in which a father and daughter bond by quoting Marcus Aurelius, or when a man arrogantly refers to his “Emersonian mind.” It certainly has style. It’s freed of the idea of telling a coherent story or legibly tracking character’s motivations or building conventional setups and payoffs. We’re left with a balance of the banal and the transcendent, as its enormous cast is full of figures who drift in and out of focus with the thematic web ultimately a justification for its metatextual melancholic hope in amorphous striving. Here’s where someone might exasperatedly ask: but is it good? Well, that’s complicated. It’s certainly nothing less than exactly what it wants to be. The result is disorienting, befuddling filmmaking. It’s not easy to recommend, but it’s hard to forget. I watched it knowing that I’ll be thinking about it forever.

Cash Out: MONEY MONSTER

Money Monster goes to dramatic lengths to find what it’ll take to make a cable news show do some actual reporting. It starts when a smooth-talking business news host (George Clooney) – think an even more buffoonish Jim Cramer – starts his daily stock tip program. He usually offers up some buzzword advice and hyperbolic recommendations to buy and sell. But not today. An angry young man (Jack O’Connell) sneaks on set with a gun and demands the man behind the anchor’s desk strap on a homemade explosive vest. He wants time on the air to demand answers. He’s furious about Wall Street greed, the rigged system of a casino economy legalizing fraud – he’s definitely a Bernie bro – and despondent over a glitch in a certain stock’s price that wiped out his life’s savings.

The once-cocky host sweats with a gun to his head. The director (Julia Roberts) is trapped in the control room capably keeping crew running like usual. Lights, cameras, mics, and the rest must continue moving without a hitch, the better to keep the dangerous intruder calm while police (led by Giancarlo Esposito) gather outside, debating how to get in without setting off the bomb. With little setup, the screenplay quickly launches into this tense scenario. Writers Jim Kouf (Rush Hour), Alen DiFiore (The Bridge), and Jamie Linden (Dear John) build a convincing cable news environment, a hectic and frivolous place that falls silent when real danger enters the frame. As the man with the gun shouts and threatens violence, the crew scrambles to find him his answers.

An engaging effort of slick competence, Money Monster is the sort of meat-and-potatoes topical movie star thriller that used to be a staple of Hollywood filmmaking. Now, outside Oscar season, it’s mostly found on tiny VOD budgets or on TV, so it’s nice to see this old fashioned form of glossy, well intentioned, reasonably involving drama play out on the big summer screen. Here we have the likes of Clooney and Roberts playing perfectly to type in a plot that’s tautly structured and built on sturdy genre foundations while engaging with some interesting ideas floating around the news these days. It’s about Wall Street corruption and the news media industrial complex, and somehow makes it into the stuff of entertainment without going too obvious or too hypocritical. This is a diverting movie that works out genuine and legitimate class frustrations in the guise of a ticking bomb plot.

Roberts deploys producers and reporters to discover the secrets behind the man’s grievances, while on camera two very different men – poor and out of options, controlling what little he can through intimidation; rich and out of touch trying to talk his way out of the worst situation of his life – come to a cautious understanding. They’re stuck in one place, while in the world beyond the studio people are watching the events unfold with rapt attention. Some are amused, others angered. Still others are getting a little nervous, like a slimy C.E.O. (Dominic West) whose dastardly company IBIS (a fitting name for a bad corporation, like BS, IBS, and ISIS rolled into one acronym) was, through mysterious and sketchy business practices, responsible for the market fluctuation that left the hostage-taker with nothing.

There are clearly delineated good guys and bad guys here, but there are some welcome moments where expectations are upended in small ways. A scene where negotiators bring in the hostage-taker’s tearful girlfriend goes in a surprising direction, and the movie’s not unwilling to see the situation from a variety of angles. Someone seemingly in the wrong can come over to the other side, and vice versa. Directed with a steady hand by Jodie Foster, the events unfold with clarity, cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera finding snappy simple frames as the studio simmers with tension and many outside – techs, journalists, cops, PR people, hackers, bankers, and so on – scramble to figure out how to bring the danger to an end. The plot is involving on a surface level, while the simmering ideas underneath are just broad enough to be crowd pleasing and just specific enough to avoid feeling too condescending.

In the end it succeeds on the strength of its lead trio of performers, who bring a capable sense of weight and believability to their characters actions and decisions. Clooney could play a perfect wealthy dope in his sleep, here bringing unctuous charm covering repressed decency as a market mouthpiece who slowly grows a conscience at gunpoint. Roberts is security and stability under pressure as an expert manager trying to maintain some semblance of order and safety, speaking carefully and soothingly through her boss’s earpiece, helping him see the bigger picture. And O’Connell is a fine vessel of frustrated millennial economic angst, jumpy and tense, wound up with hopeless rage, smart but treading water in a dead end minimum wage job just to make ends meet. This story, with sensationalistic elements and vigorous political points, is too conventional and interested in small humane shadings to be a trashier satire or a sharper indictment. Instead it relaxes into thriller mechanics, looking at its characters with compassion and condemnation while finding its way to a logical conclusion.

Man Cub's Burden: THE JUNGLE BOOK

Disney’s latest attempt to transmogrify one of their animated classics into a live-action spectacle is The Jungle Book. This production takes their 1967 Rudyard Kipling adaptation, a simple, rambling, musical story, down to its bare necessities, building it back up into a pleasant jungle adventure. In the process it loses most of the cartoony energy and all but hints of two songs. But some of what it loses in vibrant animated silliness it gains in the weight and heft of the best imitation wilderness money can buy. It’s CGI made with an eye for live-action, computer animated with a real boy running through. The amiable feature tracks along leafy green oasis and rocky cliff, swampy waterhole and cavernous ruin, getting undemanding picture book tableau out of every development. It’s high-stakes and kid-friendly, a child’s eye view of the jungle as a place where, if you believe in yourself, you’ll survive just fine with the help of your animal friends.

In this jungle-as-playground we meet Mowgli, the kid who was found abandoned as a baby and raised by a pack of wolves. He’s played by newcomer Neel Sethi, an agreeable boy who seems to enjoy scampering about the scenery and speaking to the animals who growl and howl around him. (He also doesn’t mind wearing only red shorts, the traditional garb of the Jungle Boy, from Bomba on down. Nice of the animal parents to understand the need for pants.) He’s enjoying life as a wolf, playing with pups and looking up to his canine parents (Lupita Nyong’o and Giancarlo Esposito). Alas, the menacing tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) knows the danger man poses and demands Mowgli be killed for the good of all jungle kind. This leads wise panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) to decide the best option is taking the man cub to be safely reunited with his own kind. There’s not much to it, the characters filled in by typecasting and cultural memories, but the movie has a sturdy construction on which to build its digital sights.

What follows is a trip through beautifully fake scenery, with towering waterfalls and sun-dappled trees, swinging vines and staggering vistas. It’s as much like a jungle as a greenscreen stage in downtown L.A. can be these days. Top-notch effects work creates an often-convincing vision, fitting a movie that’s content to poke along through episodic little vignettes enjoying the company of a variety of animals. The creatures Mowgli encounters will be familiar to anyone who knows Disney’s original. Screenwriter Justin Marks makes sure to include the expected cast of characters, some voiceless (elephants, birds), others voiced capably by recognizable performers, like sneaky snake Kaa (Scarlett Johansson, slithery seduction), sweet lazy bear Baloo (Bill Murray, warm and loveable), and the envious orangutan King Louie (Christopher Walken, making eerie musical use of his usual unusual punctuation). Every majestic creature – a menagerie that would barely look out of place in a motion-capture Planet of the Apes – is animated with uncanny accuracy and remarkably authentic textures, real enough to pull off the illusion, but fake enough to not scare too many kids.

Director Jon Favreau is a good fit for this sort of film. Think of his work on Christmassy Elf, sci-fi board-game trip Zathura, and kicking off the Marvel Cinematic Universe with two Iron Mans. He knows his way around bright, clean, clear popcorn imagery, bringing a fine workmanlike competence to the spectacle that works because he believes in the movie magic of his effects and has the cast and crew to pull it off. There is some real majesty to its best moments, and at its worst a sense of predetermined comfort. We know where we’re going, but the way there is reasonably entertaining. There are primal fable-like qualities to the images of an innocent boy standing next to these dangerous beasts and finding his way to be their equal. It’s not a story of man conquering the flora and fauna, but becoming a part of them, an age-old scamper-through-the-wilderness-to-find-yourself tale.

Favreau realizes the Kipling tale’s cinematic heritage as a red-blooded boy’s adventure story, eager to admire the beauty of its setting and creatures so cheerfully faked for our amusement. It may take direct inspiration from Disney’s own classic in story, character, and music cues, but it’s as indebted to the Kordas’ Technicolor 1942 version, or Stephen Sommers’ 1994 pulpier-ish iteration. It’s always about giving a man cub a fantastical place in the natural spectacle of nature, to play with danger and emerge safe and sound. Favreau concludes his Mowgli’s story with appealing lessons about standing up for what you believe in, using your talents to protect others, and being proud of becoming your best self. Though it is interesting to note where the boy ends up. This isn’t a story about emerging from the wilderness to become a man, but engineering a way to remain boyish forever. Seems a fitting message for a company that hopes we’ll keep paying to see new versions of old childhood staples.

Running on Empty: MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS

The kids stuck in a maze in last year’s young adult franchise starter The Maze Runner are out of the labyrinth and in a post-apocalyptic confusion in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. There’s not a single maze to be found, but there’s still plenty of running as a group of boys and one girl find themselves in a mysterious compound where a commander (Aidan Gillen) tells them to be patient and he’ll take them to a better place. Turns out he’s lying, because of course he is. So off the kids run into a desert wasteland stretched between ruined cities. The world has ended, and they have no idea what to do, so why not keep running from the guys with guns who want to recapture them and feed their blood into blue vats pumping out potential vaccines for a zombie virus. (That doesn’t seem too bad, considering.) It really is that simple, but I don’t know why the whole thing has to be knotted up like no one has a clue, or why it takes our heroes so long to figure out their next move.

The least interesting of this cycle of teen adventure series – behind The Hunger Games, and Twilight, and even the thin derivative Divergent – the Maze Runners are without personality. It’s a dystopian sci-fi zombie conspiracy mystery with a screenplay (again by T.S. Nowlin) that works exactly like a jumble of tropes and half-formed carbon copies of better ideas used more effectively elsewhere. The characters are undifferentiated. There’s the lead (Dylan O’Brien), his buddies (Ki Hong Lee, Dexter Darden, Thomas Brodie-Sangster), and a girl (Kaya Scodelario), running through the desert called The Scorch, trying to survive. But between this movie and the last, we’ve spent nearly four hours with this group and I still couldn’t begin to tell you what their goals, hopes, dreams, and proclivities are.

They’re just the runway-ready grubby survivors, lost in scorching heat and stuck in a nightmare of zombie imagery. We know they’re the heroes because they’re young and this is YA. The bad guys are of course the grown-ups with the evil organization (the World in Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department – or Wicked, for real). It’s never entirely clear why the bad are so bad and the good are worth caring about, but never mind. Grown-ups just don’t understand. The escaped teens have nowhere to turn, and no interior lives to draw upon. Now, I could understand their spotty backstories, since their memories were wiped. But where’s the personality? They are thoroughly bland and lifeless despite the young actors’ best efforts to imbue their line readings with meaning, strain, and stress. When they run, they throw their whole bodies into it, swinging their arms side to side and twisting their torsos. It’s like they’re trying to run right off the screen and out of the theater. I knew the feeling.

As I sat through the movie’s opening stretches, I found myself wondering if the whole thing could be improved by the presence of some welcome older character actors who could at least elevate the dull, empty proceedings with their gravitas and charm. Soon enough, it started regularly introducing tiny nothing parts for the likes of Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Tudyk, Lili Taylor, and Barry Pepper. But even they can’t save scenes that require them to do nothing more than gravely intone exposition or wait for effects work to explode around them. Lifeless dreck, there’s not one moment lively or interesting in and of itself. The closest it gets are a sequence set in an abandoned zombie-infested shopping mall and, later, a woman (Rose Salazar) stuck on a rapidly cracking pane of glass over a deadly vertiginous height. In other words, even at its best it’s weakly lifted from better movies (Dawn of the Dead and The Lost World, respectively) without any creative twist or winking homage.

It’s just borrowed ingenuity heaped on a derivative structure. On a technical level it’s competently made, with convincing effects, sturdy photography, and some brisk action cutting. A moment involving a safe house rigged to self-destruct has a clever beat or two, and a moment of climactic betrayal-induced dread works well enough. But crushing boredom takes up most of its 131 long minutes as I quickly lost interest. I suspect director Wes Ball, helming the sequel to his directorial debut, could do good decent work given a better screenplay. Maybe a corporate superhero universe will call. But here a talented cast and crew have far too little to work with. It’s slick, professional, and completely uninteresting.