The Media Tourist

Frances Ford Coppola’s spectacular movie mess is an overstuffed stew of past, present and future.

Megalopolis
Starring Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LeBeouf & Jon Voight
Directed by Frances Ford Coppola
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 27

This big, bloated mess-terpiece of a movie is a longtime passion project for director Frances Ford Coppola, a dreamscape of ideas he’s been stewing on for decades. Set in a near-future New York City now renamed New Rome—that looks like Manhattan dressed up for a big toga party—it’s about a crumbling American society and a visionary architect (Adam Driver) seeking to remake it into utopia. There are warring politicians, abusive cops, scheming dames, chariot races at Madison Square Garden and a mystery substance called Megalon that can repair flesh, help crippled dogs walk and make see-thru invisi-dresses. But can it create a whole new world?

Oh, and time can also be stopped, if you’ve got the mojo to do it.

It’s a lot to unpack, and it’s often wildly incomprehensible, an impenetrable cinematic chowder chock-full of ideas drawn from world history, old Hollywood, futuristic sci-fi, classic literature and modern turmoil. There’s the full “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Jon Voight dressed like Robin Hood and bragging about his erection, and Shia LeBeouf rocking a mega-mullet. Hey, is that Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire (Coppola’s sister), Jason Schwartzman (Coppola’s nephew and Shire’s son), and singer-actress Grace Vanderwaal crooning in a swing at a vestal virgin auction? Yep, yep, yep and yep! Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel wears a Red Riding Hood cloak and plays Driver’s love interest, Laurence Fishburne narrates in stately tones, and Aubrey Plaza is a horny gold-digger TV reporter named—I’m not kidding—Wow Platinum. Giancarlo Esposito—who has nearly 200 acting credits but is probably best known for Breaking Bad—is a mayor with a major secret. To boldface the movie’s preachy parallels to Rome collapsing from a mighty civilization into a fractured empire ruled by tyrants, characters are given names including Cesar, Cicero and Crassus. Just so we get it.

Massive colossus statues collapse under the sheer fatigue of world-weariness, sighing helpless and broken in the streets. A Russian satellite plummets downward on a collision course with Earth. Cars trail each other down dark, rain-soaked alleys. There’s a female body in the morgue marked Jane Doe, but who is she really? There are orgiastic parties, angry mobs and gladiators walloping each other in a three-ring circus maxiumus. An overheated sex scene is a prelude to an Ides of March-like confrontation in a steam room. In my notes from the screening, I wrote down “Caligula meets Chinatown.”

It’s impossible to miss the movie’s central themes—that America is headed down a path of self-inflicted destruction, and the world has always teetered back and forth between innovation and the status quo. With a fervent swirl of messaging about creating a better future, it’s a big, eye-popping, overstuffed spectacle, the director’s own sprawling, architectural concoction bridging past and present.

Coppola is one of the leading filmmakers of the 20^th century, an iconic director and producer who’s given us landmark movies like The Godfather and its sequel, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. But he’s also put out some real stinkers, like Jack, Rumble Fish and Twixt. He swings big and sometimes knocks it out of the park. And sometimes he misses. Megalopolis will likely go down as another ambitious, super-showy, Megaloaded, all-over-the-place movie misfire.

But hey, Shia LaBeouf gets shot in the ass with two arrows—at least those hit their mark.

—Neil Pond

James McAvoy goes into full creep mode as a monster hiding behind a friendly face

Speak No Evil
Starring James McAvoy, McKenzie Davis, Aisling Franciosi & Scoot McNairy
Directed by James Thomas Watkins
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Sept. 13

James McAvoy is a very versatile actor who’s been in dozens of TV shows, plays and movies since the 1990s. But he seems to have a special knack for masked malevolence, like the creepiness and coiled, rip-roaring craziness of his characters in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2016) and its follow-up, Glass (2019). In this psychological horror thriller, he’s Paddy, a crudely boisterous Brit who lives off the grid in the scenic rural countryside, loves hunting and bemoans the conveniences and lifestyle choices of the modern world.

When Paddy and his wife, Ciari (Aisling Franciosi from Game of Thrones), meet a more refined, citified London couple, Louise (MacKenzie Davis, who starred in AMC’s Halt & Catch Fire) and her milquetoast husband Ben (Scoot McNairy), on a vacation in Italy, they all become tentative friends.  But something seems a bit off right from the start, and it starts feeling even more off after Paddy invites Ben, Louise and their preteen daughter (Alix West Lefler, who plays Genevieve on TV’s Fire Country) to visit them at his rural home.

Alix West Lefler, MacKenzie Davis & Scoot McNairy play a London family whose countryside holiday turns into a nightmare.

Paddy and Ciari also have a young child, a boy named Ant (newcomer Dan Hough) who is unable to communicate beyond moans and mumbles. Ant’s “condition”—and don’t worry, you’ll find out more about it—gives the movie its title. But it also refers to how Ben and Laura try to act polite and mannered and not complain, speaking no evil as their pastoral retreat starts to go off the rails, before Paddy’s mounting transgressions and bothersome behaviors build to shocking revelations and a bloody fight for their lives against a sadistic psychopath.

Director James Watkins certainly knows how to tighten down the screws in a horror movie, as he did in Eden Lake (2008) and The Woman in Black (2012). In this remake of a 2022 Danish film of the same title, he remains faithful to the devilish dread of the original but gives it some new violently nasty tweaks at the end, and that’s all I’ll tell you about that.

The movie is spiritual kin to Straw Dogs, Get Out, Funny Games and other flicks that use normalcy as the jumping-off spot before deep-diving into something much darker, disturbing and deviant. One of the things I liked about Speak No Evil is how it’s not a “slasher” flick; it’s more subtle than that. The terrors at its core worm their way into our awareness without a need to see them. That might disappoint some gorehounds, attracted to the film’s BlumHouse production banner, but just knowing—and leaving some details to the murky recesses of the imagination—is supremely unsettling and jarringly nerve-wracking.

Beneath its surface, it touches on toxic masculinity, marital discord, motherhood, feminine empowerment, lost childhood and parenting, with a modern-world nod to classic Old World fairy tales about the dangers lurking in deep forests full of trolls, witches and demons. And it’s certainly a cautionary tale about stranger danger—and the twisted intentions that might be hiding behind a friendly face.

And for sure, you’ll never again hear The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” the same again after you hear it hijacked by Paddy, a monster whose initially friendly smile becomes a scowling grimace of unspeakable acts in a real house of horrors. Speak No Evil and James McAvoy work hard to get under your skin, and they certainly come through loud and clear.

—Neil Pond

Michael Keaton returns as the ghost with the most in Tim Burton’s majestically gonzo encore of the hereafter

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Starring Michael Keaton, Winona Rider, Catherine O’Hara & Jenna Ortega
Rated PG-13
Directed by Tim Burton

In theaters Sept. 6, 2024

After just a tad over 35 years, the ‘Juice is again on the loose.

Michael Keaton is back and doubling down on his memorable role as moviedom’s quippiest gross-out ghoul, while Winona Rider and Catherine O’Hara return as older versions of their characters from the first film and new additions (Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci) freshen things up with a new wrinkle or two.

And director Tim Burton also resurfaces for this majestically gonzo encore of the hereafter, a cinematic carnival ride festooned with quirky stop-action oddities, subversively dark humor and wildly unpredictable bursts of imagination. It’s like Pee-Wee Herman on a playdate with Edward Scissorhands in Dante’s Inferno. But the star of the show is clearly Keaton, as unhinged and untethered as he should be, the ghost with the most, a cadaver of cad, the lewd ladykiller slob from beyond still lookin’ for love.

And like Beetlejuice, Keaton is game for anything, throwing himself into the crazy comedic churn of a storyline that includes ghostly office drone workers with teeny shrunken heads, an RIP’d actor (Willem Dafoe) policing crime in the underworld, a soul-sucking spurned lover (Monica Bellucci), a jaded undead janitor (Danny DeVito) and a teen girl (Jenna Ortega) whose crush on the boy next door (Arthur Conte) gets her pulled into the afterlife. There’s a hustle-bustle subway to the great hereafter—the Soul Train—pulsing with disco, and a pull-out-the-stops grand finale to “McArthur Park” that out-wows even the original film’s “Banana Boat (Day-O)” scene for wonderful weirdness.

There’s a lot of connective tissue to the first film, both stylistically and thematically, with sight gags and throwback references to the original. Ortega, the star of two Scream flicks as well as the TV series Wednesday (the spinoff of The Addams Family), brings a full-circle generational spin to her role as the daughter of Rider’s Lydia Deetz, now working as a TV spiritualist. Absent: Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin, who played a ghostly couple central to the story back in 1988, as is Jeffrey Jones, whose conviction as a sex offender now keeps him mostly out of Hollywood’s spotlight—but whose former character nonetheless “appears” here in a couple of inventive workarounds.

But there’s so much going on, the no-shows are barely missed. And Monica Bellucci (above) gets the film’s hands-down best new-character entrance, as her seductive wraith Delores literally pulls (and staples) herself together after spending centuries with severed body parts scattered hither and yon. It’s perhaps Burton’s wry cinematic nod to the career of the multi-lingual Italian model-turned-actress, a journey made up of bit parts and odds and ends including portraying the bride of Dracula, Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a rape victim in the controversial Irreversible, and the oldest “Bond girl” in the history of the franchise (Spectre). In the new Beetlejuice, she’s certainly the gal to die for—and as Beetlejuice remarks, she’s certainly looking very put-together.

And Tim Burton’s grand-guignol resurrection of the bawdy Beetlejuice puts together a new dose of movie moxie for a familiar franchise that’s already expanded into TV animation, videogames and a Broadway musical. It proudly unfurls its freak flag and lets it fly anew, a spooky-fun and retro-riffic way to spend 90-odd minutes with a spunky spirit who’s apparently still got a load of afterlife left.

—Neil Pond

Sebastian Stan has a face-off with himself in this wild-twist parable about people who “don’t belong”

A Different Man
Starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve & Adam Pearson
Directed by Aaron Schimberg
Rated R

In theaters Wed., Oct. 4

 A struggling actor with a disfigured face gets a miraculous second chance at life in this wild, inside-out parable about identity, self-awareness, longing to belong and our perceptions of beauty and ugliness. Sebastian Stan (so good in Pam & Tommy and I, Tonya) is center stage as Edward, a glum recluse whose advanced neurofibromatosis makes him look like The Elephant Man. He’s a shlumpy sad sack as he moves around New York City, shunning people, trying to be inconspicuous, wishing he could be invisible. But he perks up a bit to a new neighbor, Ingrid, an aspiring playwright (Norway’s Renate Reinsve) who seems to “see” him as a person, not as a freak.

An experimental medical procedure offers a possible cure for Edward’s condition, and his face soon starts to peel off in goopy clumps. And as it does, voila—underneath is something crazy: a “normal” face, and an exceptionally handsome one at that. Edward becomes a different man entirely, taking a new name, Guy, burying his painful past and reveling in his dashing new looks as he becomes a hotshot New York real estate broker. His coworkers celebrate his success, admitting that he’s a fine piece of “man candy.” At a bar, a young woman takes him into the bathroom and pulls down his pants for a quickie. Edward can’t believe how things have turned around.

But he keeps the latex mold—a mask—made by his doctor of his “former” face to gauge how his treatment was going. It’s a reminder of the person he used to be.

What happens next, well, it’s no Beauty and the Beast, although that folktale is certainly referenced, along with Cyrano de Bergerac, Woody Allen movies and an acclaimed book by Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, about a little Black girl who wishes for blue eyes to better fit in with the Caucasians around her. Edward, who also once anguished because he didn’t fit in, finds that the grass isn’t always greener (or bluer) on the other side, especially when he meets another man, Oswald (Adam Pearson), with the same facial disfigurement he once had.  (And that’s no makeup job on Pearson, a British actor who really does have neurofibromatosis and campaigns to prevent bullying of people with deformities.)

Unlike Edward the Elephant Man, Oswald is outgoing, glib, brimming with personality and self-confidence. He plays the saxophone and has a young daughter. Oswald has embraced his face and his life, and women swoon before him when he soulfully croons the Rose Royce hit “I Wanna Get Next to You” at a karaoke bar. And Edward/Guy can only watch in awe, and seethe with envy.

The film loops itself into a Möbius Strip of art imitating life and life imitating art when “Guy” and Oswald both compete to star in an off-Broadway play about Edward and his disfigurement. And guess what? It’s written and directed by Ingrid—who has no idea that “Guy” used to be Edward. In rehearsals, Guy wears his Edward mask, and Ingrid even wants him to put it on when they’re rooting and rutting around in the sack. Edward doesn’t know if she’s turned on by it, or just finds it freakishly funny.

As Edward’s frustration, jealosy and resentment build with Oswald, everything boils over into yet another reversal of fortune—and actor Michael Shannon pops up for a Christmas meal.

In an early scene, a rat plops out of a dark, dank hole in Edward’s ceiling, falling with a sloppy splash into a bucket of yukky water. Much later, in a new upscale apartment, “Guy” is repulsed to find a cockroach has dropped into his coffee. Rats and cockroaches, things that were once hidden, things that repulse us, have now come into plain view, like Edward after his “mask” comes off.

A Different Man gives you a lot to ponder, suggesting that we can change our masks—our faces—but we can’t change what’s underneath. It might be beautiful, but could also turn out to be beastly.

—Neil Pond