Francis Ford Coppola’s 140-minute, self-financed magnum opus received a mixed reaction at its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Thursday (16 May).
The Godfather director’s new dystopian drama, Megalopolis, stars Adam Driver as Cesar Catilina, an architect-scientist who wants to better a fictional version of New York City called New Rome.
Journalists present at the screening reported booing from the audience after the film ended. However, the boos quickly turned to cheers when an “In Memoriam” segment proceeded to play for Coppola’s late wife Eleanor, World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy reported.
The director and cast then received a seven-minute standing ovation.
“Thank you all so much. It is so impossible to find words to tell you how I feel,” Coppola said after the credits rolled, introducing his family members to the audience.
…
Megalopolis has divided critics, debuting on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes with a score of 53 per cent at the time of writing.
New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri wrote that, at times, the film “feels like the fevered thoughts of a precocious child, driven and dazzled and maybe a little lost in all the possibilities of the world before him”.
At one moment during the film, an actor reportedly appeared on the Cannes stage, playing a journalist, speaking to Cesar on the screen as if he were at a press conference.
You must log in or register to comment.
The real title: Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis draws mixture of boos and applause at Cannes
Are you desperate for readers with your clickbait title?
The “clickbait” title seems the more accurate of the two, having read the article.
Especially when posting on Lemmy, we can edit the titles people. Don’t just copy the clickbait title. Folks here on Lemmy loathe clickbait and I see more things get downvoted to hell because of a lame title.
I’d rather post the clickbaity title then edit and get accused of clickbaiting myself.
I presume folks here are mature enough to note a clickbaity title, and move on to their actual comment, e.g., “Clickbaity title aside, the widget issue Alice and Bob are debating is very serious.”
The director and cast then received a seven-minute standing ovation.
Goddamn clickbait headline.
Edit. I’m now pretty sure I read the article wrong.
Is it clickbait? Sounds like the crowd was just easily guilted into applause after seeing the in memoriam. The boos sound like their actual reaction to the film.
You know what, I think you’re right.
The same length as Furiosa’s standing ovation
I think it’s actually pretty short as Cannes standing ovations go.
That’s a little ridiculous
It’s at 47% now yikes. Seems like most critics saying it’s horrible, a few saying it has some redeeming qualities, and some positive reviews that appear to be fake.
The prestige Coppola carries certainly makes reviews less reliable for this, I’d say. Industry can’t let a good marketing angle slip by.
I’ve seen very few critics opinions that I’ve agreed with, and fewer I disagree with but voice their opinion in a way that isn’t purely subjective.
Just mentioning because I’m seeing a horrible amount of journalist and journalist adjacent professionals doing very bad work.I typically agree with the aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes for about 85% of movies. Even when I don’t want to haha.
Fair.
I’ve found a lot of gems with 60% ratings. Usually the type that’s really well crafted, but requires people to watch and pay attention. The first thing that comes to mind as an example is the first season of the witcher. It was all laid out to understand, but you had to pay attention to the name drops. 68% critic score, but I thought that first season was excellent
This coupled with the reports of “old school Hollywood” misogyny on set sounds as if FFC’s dormant insanity from Apocalypse Now finally caught up and has had it’s way with the ancient mariner, and that’s sad thing
Well now I have to see it.
My take? It’s like any art/passion film. They’re very rarely universally liked on the usual level of something like the godfather, where even if you don’t like the movie, you recognize how well crafted it is.
I suspect that when it’s available for wider viewing, it’ll be a mixed bag with the usual categories being there, with the majority of casual movie goers being baffled as to what the hell is going on. You’ll have the people that think anything arty is great, you’ll have those that hate arty. There’s always going to be those. And you’ll have the ones that don’t really have a strong reaction, but want to take part in three discussion, so they voice one of those for a little harmless granfallooning.
It’ll probably be one of those movies that film geeks have debates over just for the sake of debating.
Now, I have no idea if it’ll be good or bad on any objective level; not that there’s many ways the be objective about movies other than technical stuff. But I kinda want to see it. Not enough to go to a theater, because that’s a very rare thing for me, but I’ll likely want to see out as soon as it’s available digitally just because of the scale of the process of getting it made. Nobody makes this kind of project without passion, and that means it’ll be at least interesting, even if it sucks.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
However, the boos quickly turned to cheers when an “In Memoriam” segment proceeded to play for Coppola’s late wife Eleanor, World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy reported.
New York Magazine’s Bilge Ebiri wrote that, at times, the film “feels like the fevered thoughts of a precocious child, driven and dazzled and maybe a little lost in all the possibilities of the world before him”.
“The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare.
“Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.”
Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Kathryn Hunter, Grace VanderWaal, Chloe Fineman, DB Sweeney and Dustin Hoffman also star.
“It was as if the Hollywood executives were looking for payback for all those past occasions when Coppola had criticised their way of doing business, or when he had taken their money and produced a box-office turkey, such as the romantic musical One from the Heart (1981) or his car designer biopic Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988),” he wrote.
The original article contains 578 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
