Lawrence Person's Futuramen

The new trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s new film Megalopolis just dropped. I’ll let you take a look at it before commenting further.

Is it just me, or does that look like pretentious crap? Sumptuous pretension crap, but pretentious crap none the less.

Nor is the Wikipedia entry any more encouraging. “The film was a longtime passion project for Coppola, who wanted to make a film drawing parallels between the fall of Rome and the future of the United States by setting the events of the Catilinarian conspiracy in modern New York. ”

Snip.

“An accident destroys a decaying metropolis called New Rome. Cesar Catilina, an idealist architect with the power to control time, aims to rebuild it as a sustainable utopia, while corrupt Mayor Franklyn Cicero remains committed to a regressive status quo.”

Yeah, I think a Roman parallel and an architect who cans stop time is a conceit too far.

Also, I’m not exactly thrilled by the “Coppola is a genius and the critics were wrong!” intro. The Godfather was hailed by almost all at the time as a classic and won Best Picture. Apocalypse Now got somewhat more mixed reviews, but was an Oscar nominee (losing to Kramer vs. Kramer), and John Simon was notorious for hating just about everything. Bram Stoker’s Dracula? I don’t think anyone looks back on that as a classic of cinema, or even vampire cinema, though opinions about that seem to have improved a bit as well. I noticed Jack and Twixt didn’t get mentioned…

Update: Evidently, some of those critics quotes are made up.