Tema: Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

¿Se aplicara a las futuras ediciones fisicas en otros paises como Alemania, Francia...?

Esa es la verdadera cuestion.

Iniciado por PrimeCallahan

¿Se aplicara a las futuras ediciones fisicas en otros paises como Alemania, Francia...?

Esa es la verdadera cuestion.

Casi seguro al 100% porque Amazon dice que los cambios han sido "al master" que le ha llegado y desde el que hacen la codificación.

Veremos.

Iniciado por Branagh/Doyle

Casi seguro al 100% porque Amazon dice que los cambios han sido "al master" que le ha llegado y desde el que hacen la codificación.

Veremos.

Esto lo digo porque dudo que de este film haya varios masters circulando, aunque podría equivocarme. Tiene pinta de que el resto del mundo tirará de la autoría/master que hagan los de Zoetrope para el BD y UHD USA. Cómo la peli es de Coppola... otra cosa será la codificación -bitrate- de la distribuidora encargada de la edición en físico en cada país.

Maravilloso texto de un usuario del foro de Criterion sobre el film (en respuesta a otro usuario, pero se entiende por el contexto).

SPOILERS:

I'd go so far as to say that both infamous lines of dialogue are straightforward jokes with contextually communicated setups and punchlines. In the former case, LaBeouf ("revenge tastes best in a dress") is goofing around with his partner-in-crime about a disguise, but underneath that is a subversion of the character's heretofore arch-masculine approach. He hates Adam Driver so much that he'll debase his Roman virtus (in his eyes, and also in a certain sense in the eyes of the film) for revenge.

In the latter case, Plaza ("you're so anal, I'm so oral") is attempting to entice Driver into sex with a series of cheeky come-hither one-liners. It's a little broad, because her character is a little broad (in ways that are useful for the critical aims of the film), but it's one of our first signs that Plaza's preferred tactic is overt sexual manipulation (see also: her subsequent interactions with Voight and LaBeouf himself). Her specific phrasing is also a subtle Freudian joke: the anal phase of development follows the oral, so she is rhetorically making herself an "immature" sexual partner, itself a powerful image that recurs through the film. Quite frankly, I think there are several other humorous asides you could have picked from this wonderful film (such as Driver's recitation of the entirety of Hamlet's most famous soliloquy) whose points are harder to grasp.

I think the two major elements of the film's approach that cause it to fail to land for so many people are its simultaneous contempt for conservatism, abstracted in the nightmare cartoon vision of modern elite culture with a Roman makeover, and its equally earnest and sentimental depiction of progressivism, which Coppola conjures as a force so perfect and powerful that it can bestow actual superpowers. When examined from this perspective, the narrative of the film is not so much nonexistent as it is simple and sublimated into the philosophical conflict at the film's core. Similarly, the movie is not a tonal disaster area so much as it is a combination of broad yet pointed satire and deeply sincere suggestion for a path away from what ails us. If you wanted to watch a film that is truly just rudderless setpieces, throw on Caligula.


Even if you hate this film, I don't think you could make a serious argument that it is either "uninterested in politics, history, or psychology," given how frequently all three subjects recur, or only interested in its own prurience or feeling of self-impressedness.

I also kind of rankle at your description of the movie's central conflict. Cicero and crew's "perspective" on the world is neither moderate nor stabilizing: they are elitists who preserve the unequal status quo for personal gain, in doing so hollowing out society, creating a 1% monoculture as inaccessible as it is repulsive as it is inescapable, and justly attracting the ire of ordinary citizens (note how Esposito is met with constant booing whenever he appears in public, a device that would be effective enough if it were not an eerily accurate replica of the public image of the current mayor of New York, and several other occupants of the same position during the lengthy gestation of this film). What you have cast as disconnected sketch comedy bits are, in fact, vicious satires of the real counterparts of most of these characters. Consider, as you do, virginal pop star Vesta Sweetwater's arc.

During her relatively brief time on screen, she:

1. is presented as an archetypal Vestal Virgin, a woman whose purity represented the spiritual quality of the Roman state (utile elite civic institution)

2. auctions off her virginity to a high bidder (elitist corruption of said institution)

3. is revealed to be spiritually impure (comes to signify the rot and incapacity of ruling elites)

4. rebrands herself as a newly sexually potent adult (attempts institutional transformation)

None of this is subtle, but the point is to connect two separate patterns of social and cultural behavior and use the grossness of one to comment upon the grossness of another. Coppola is using the oversexualization of female teen idol singers and the usual arc they take to talk about the worst parts of conservative culture: it is moribund, predictable, and fetishistically obsessed with the sexual behavior of vulnerable women. It's an accurate read of these types of artistic expression (when I saw Sweetwater's second music video, I could only think about a real teen idol trying to rebrand her sexuality using the verbatim phrases "untouched XO" and "losing all my innocence in the back seat"). But more pertinently, it is a highly effective Vox Lux-esque attempt to expose the interconnected qualities of social problems that share a root cause.


A skeptic of this reading might suggest that the film thus puts its faith too much in Adam Driver's architect and his grand central plan to save humankind, but I think the film is implicitly critical of his actions in isolation. Acting alone, he is a genius, but also a Robert Moses figure, a great planner whose politically entrenched brilliance has led him to disregard the humans whom a better system would serve (hence his copious demolitions of buildings early on in the film and his pigheaded attitude towards displaced residents). Nathalie Emmanuel's character saves him by returning him to humanity, by, to borrow a phrase, being the heart that mediates his head and his hands. Only together and through love can they strive towards the grand civilization-saving plan of Driver's dreams. To Coppola, this is corny, and also true.

I kind of can't believe that it's taken me this long to talk about the special and visual effects, the best and most striking element of this film, but that's because they are, again, powerful contextual extensions of the film's mood, milieu, and message. On one level they are abstracting devices, tools through which Coppola can blend disparate real-world influences like the hold of "Roman-ness" upon the American founding myth or the venality of mainstream news media or the mental disarray of post 9/11 New York, but their form too does tremendous things for the movie. Some parts of the film, mostly those with the villainous characters, feature what I would call deliberate tackiness, with overlit shots, asymmetrical camera movements, heinous CGI elements, and garish costume and hair/makeup choices. Most of Voight and Plaza's wedding, for instance, features all of these elements, culminating in Driver's drug-enhanced freakout in which the hideousness of New Roman life physically harms him.

But these are combined with effects that are utterly gorgeous and convincing: Vesta Sweetwater's virgin-song looks completely different and is shot in a completely different fashion to the Bacchanalia surrounding it. It is ethereally beautiful, in contrast to the ugliness around it, because it is a direct expression of a Roman founding myth. From the opposite side of the film's conflict, I found the scenes with Driver on various rooftops to be completely transporting and convincing. You feel (or, well, I felt) perfectly his fear of and difficulty in expressing his great vision, and are(/were/was) astonished by the occasional but stunning use of his magic power.

Megalon is an aesthetically ideal substance, as multivariate and beautiful as it is useful. Vesta Sweetwater demonstrates how it "goes with anything" before it's ever used to build a building. I know that a lot of this paragraph is "but I found it compelling," but I think there's more to Coppola's method towards effects-driven filmmaking than what most profit-minded effects-heavy films can contain (for the dreamier parts of this film, what other comparison even exists but Twin Peaks: The Return?). It's a real shame to me that this film is attracting pejorative comparisons to the Wachowskis or Prequels-era George Lucas, as in truth it finds a substance in its maximalism that those filmmakers never achieve.

Detrás de las cámaras:

Revisada anoche en 4K con HDR y toda la pesca.

Sigo estando igual de perplejo que a finales de Septiembre. Coppola compone sus planos con mucho esmero, la fotografía de Malaimare es increíble, el diseño de producción descaradamente teatral es muy imaginativo y la película resulta a partes iguales divertida, refrescante, fascinante y emotiva, con un ritmo impecable y una historia sencilla y perfectamente accesible por todo el mundo, sin renunciar por ello a contener múltiples aristas o matices (entre ellas una interesantísima lectura autobiográfica, de manera incluso más patente que en Tucker), y que en última instancia acaba atrapándote por su desarmante sinceridad.

En lo formal, la imaginería visual de Coppola deja múltiples instantes para el recuerdo, especialmente en la segunda mitad del film. Si a eso le sumamos una estupenda dirección de actores (muy medida desde las coordenadas dadas a cada intérprete) y una partitura maravillosa de Osvaldo Golijov, pues ya tenemos todos los elementos necesarios para una muy buena película.

¿Por qué no es redonda? Bueno, Coppola no prioriza el worldbuilding, y algunos elementos secundarios se quedan sin cerrar debidamente, lo que resulta, en cierta manera, algo frustrante. Aunque el foco está puesto en la trama y personajes principales y muchos de los elementos secundarios son metafóricos, uno no puede evitar querer sumergirse a fondo en ese mundo, y pasar más tiempo allí.

En ese sentido, el otro elemento que resta puntos a la película es una excesiva compresión de la trama en los últimos 30 minutos de metraje, subyugantes en lo cinematográfico, pero durante los que suceden muchas cosas muy rápidamente . ¿Se explican y cierran apropiadamente? A mi juicio si, y aunque la edición ayuda a mantener un buen ritmo y jamás pierde de vista la claridad expositiva, uno no puede evitar cierta sensación de apresuramiento, y de que se tuvieron que adoptar soluciones de compromiso (muchas de ellas muy imaginativas, sin duda, si algo tiene esta película es personalidad), porque se quedaban sin tiempo y probablemente sin presupuesto.


Un 8. La mejor película de Coppola desde la infravalorada y ninguneada Youth Without Youth.


Con todo, estoy de acuerdo con BruceTimm: estaría receptivo ante un corte de 4 horas de esto, e incluso más largo.

Del instagram de Criterion. Mmm...


A very special visit from the great Francis Ford Coppola! ✨ His latest epic, MEGALOPOLIS, is now playing in select theaters and available to watch on demand.✨ To mark the film's release, we're also hosting a collection of his work on the Criterion Channel—featuring ONE FROM THE HEART, APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX, and HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER'S APOCALYPSE. Stay tuned for more

Iniciado por Branagh/Doyle

Revisada anoche en 4K con HDR y toda la pesca.

Sigo estando igual de perplejo que a finales de Septiembre. Coppola compone sus planos con mucho esmero, la fotografía de Malaimare es increíble, el diseño de producción descaradamente teatral es muy imaginativo y la película resulta a partes iguales divertida, refrescante, fascinante y emotiva

Y esto ya se atisbaba de sobra desde el trailer como quien dice. Que estaba muy por encima de la media.

Habéis hecho un gran trabajo, compañeros, retratando las intencionalidades y el lenguaje referencial del film (hasta donde he podido leer, bien no empaparme de spoilers abundantes, bien por ser muy extenso). Ha sido un tema éste que contagia ganas y pasión pues el material orginal ya se intuía que iba a presentarlas. Y me alegro particularmente por los intérpretes que han participado en el film porque en circunstancias normales acarrería renombre y entidad a sus personas como si estuviésemos presentes en las grandes citas de los años 30 o 40.
Ahora me queda una duda: yo planteé en su día una doble bifurcación entre Gladiator II y esta Megalópolis tras conocer la cascada de negatividad que desencadenó el film de Coppola a su paso por el Festival. Y, lo barruntaba, pese a que ambas cintas "decadentes" podrían ser imperfectas, la crítica se ha decantado por "salvar" antes el film de Scott -que por lo que llevo leído nunca arranca del todo ni tiene personalidad, todo carcasa- por encima del salto mortal del ítalo-americano. Es para hacérselo mirar ....

PD: Lo sabré a ciencia cierta el día que vea el film de Scott, también es cierto y no pasa nada por admitir que pueda estar equivocado, aunque el instinto o la perspicacia me dice que .... ggggghh
Ayer vi en Cuatro el estreno de la serie de gladiadores cocinada por R. Emmerich, me entró por un oído y me salió por el otro sin dejarme algo a qué acogerme, así que no me extraña que me dé una pereza descomunal tener cita con el Dr. Scott de nuevo.
Ah, la Roma de John Milius, aquél sí que fue un placer mayor y adulto.

El confetti parece de altísima resolución ahora, eso está claro.

Y el montacargas ya no pixela. Cosillas así.