Search for a better tomorrow

 MEGALOPOLIS (2024)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Utopianism, some argue, is essential for the improvement of the human condition. But if used wrongly, it becomes dangerous. Utopia has an inherent contradictory nature here."

— Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A very short introduction (2010)

Entrancing, achingly beautiful, resplendent imagery and its narrative focus on the making of a better tomorrow, Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis," a long-gestating labor of love, will no doubt divide or conquer viewers with its ambitions and intentions. I hope many will want to conquer it and wonder if its positive message of a utopia is remotely possible.

Set in the fictional city of New Rome (quite obviously based on New York), the first scene shows Adam Driver's pioneering architect at the top of the Chrysler Building as he somehow stops time, then restarts it. This is Coppola's fable so I would not take those scenes too literally. The architect, Cesar Catilina, has hopes of building and restructuring New Rome with his invention called Megalon, a bio-adaptive material that has the shape of some floral organic material and can also be used to rebuild one's facial structure! The frequently booed Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) has greed in his veins - he just wants to build multiple casinos. Cesar wants a utopia, a better tomorrow where crime, homelessness and police brutality do not coexist. 

"Megalopolis" is Coppola's purported homage to "Metropolis" yet other than a shared crucial handshake moment, they could not be further apart in terms of tone and style. Coppola implements the same visual and editing strategies that he used in his bombastic 1992 version of "Dracula." We have montages galore, parallel actions often taking place at the same time through split-screen technology or superimpositions or both. This is to be expected because if you are making a film about ancient Roman epicurean delights, the visuals should not be any less epicurean. Flowers or flowery shapes are frequent symbols not to mention clocks and the ticking sound in the soundtrack. Speaking of clocks, there is one amazing sequence that might have delighted Salvador Dali where Cesar and Julia, Cicero's daughter, are walking across a giant clock, though whether it is near the Chrysler building or not is hard to say. As I mentioned earlier, none of this should be taken literally especially when Cesar sits on top of a series of scaffolds hundreds of feet up in the air. No barricades or safety protocols are needed in this world, unless you are shot in the face and then Megalon will serve one of its many utilitarian purposes. 

The performances range from operatic to half-serious and somewhere in between. Shia LaBeouf plays a flamboyant nephew of Cesar's whom at first I thought was a fashion-designer or guru - no eyebrows makes for an unrecognizable LaBeouf. Aubrey Plaza is the tabloid TV journalist with low ratings who is something of a gold digger since she marries Crassus (Jon Voight), a wealthy CEO banker, yet still tries and fails to keep Cesar as her love interest - she could care less about any utopia, she's just greedy. Giancarlo Esposito is an actor who has shown enormous range and a high degree of understatement in so many films and TV shows, and here he is spectacular and gives a controlled performance as Cicero - you know he respects Cesar's future plans even if he won't admit it. Big shout-out to the sprightly Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia, a young woman who is far more optimistic than her dad would like and shares Cesar's vision.

"Megalopolis" is a flamboyant, riveting and highly experimental film, and also rather inaccessible to average viewers. Adam Driver, ultimately, is the star of the show - he is like a magician waving his wand to make the impossible possible. His presence always suggests someone larger-than-life and this makes the film highly watchable - any other actor might ruin it. I do wish the film spent more time on what that better tomorrow would look like and its own complications. As it stands, a fascinating film operating on so many levels that you wish cinema would take more chances like this. We can always hope for a better tomorrow.  

What can Woody Allen do now?

 RIFKIN'S FESTIVAL (2020)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Color me disappointed that Woody Allen consistently drifts towards the kind of angst-ridden romantic comedy bursting with Ingmar Bergmanisms that incorporated his work since "Manhattan" and beyond. Allen invented it, furnished it with his comic wordplay, and has every right as an artist to embellish and embroider it with his own continuing life experiences. Only now that Allen is in his 80's, is he still having the same life experience of an older man with a younger woman as he did in 1979? Is it getting creepy? 

Wallace Shawn, a remarkable actor, finds precious little inspiration in his neurotic archetypal Woody Allen role. He is Mort Rifkin, a film critic and rigid film studies teacher who loves Truffaut, Bunuel, basically all the "European filmmakers." He has a disdain for some American classics, feeling that any commercial movie that makes money must be fraudulent (those are remarks Woody once said in a book). Rifkin is at the San Sebastian International Film Festival where Sue, his less than doting wife (Gina Gershon), is a press agent for a man she clearly adores. The man in question is Philippe (Louis Garrel), a French film director being honored for his optimistic anti-war film that just might be a tad pretentious. It is a mistake for Woody to never show one clip from the film - I would imagine it would've been ripe for comic material more so than hearing some passerby at the festival saying, "Hey, did you see the director's cut of a Three Stooges short?" It is also a mistake to not show some of his actors in profile despite his habit of shooting with little to no coverage. I finally discovered who Steve Guttenberg was playing and, not unlike "Shadows and Fog," some other cameos might be missed. 

You can guess the rest. Rifkin is stubborn in his old ways as an intellectual who wants to write a book on the level of Dostoyevsky, finds solace with a drop dead gorgeous female doctor named Rojas (a spirited role for Elena Anaya) to whom he feigns chest pains and ear aches, senses that Sue has more than a business interest with Philippe, and we get beautiful scenery of Spain. Shawn is a definite riot as Rifkin, a weary man who is aware that his marriage is coming to an end but there is nothing there that you haven't heard before and better from the Woodman. I did like some of the black-and-white homages to Fellini, Godard and Bergman but it all rings as hollow as the excessively tired plot (although Christoph Waltz is a joy as Death). 

Rifkin's closing line is "What do I do now?" I think Woody Allen should move on from this type of movie and go to "Midnight in Paris" or "Match Point"-type of movies or heck "Another Woman," one of his greatest films. This old suitor shtick just doesn't suit him anymore. 

Coppola's personal tragedy results in stillborn movie

 B'TWIXT NOW AND SUNRISE (2022)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

When Francis Ford Coppola works on any film, it either has to be epic or scaled down as an experimental feature ("Rumble Fish" comes to mind as the latter example). "B'Twixt Now and Sunrise" is certainly scaled down as a peculiar nightmare movie about intermittent writer's block mixed with the eccentric town where the town's clock tower has different clocks that run at different times. Either this is Coppola aiming for Ingmar Bergman territory with a personal twist or just a loose, informal narrative that starts strong and then travels a zillion different directions. I am sure the original version of this movie isn't any more focused.

Val Kilmer is a ponytailed author named Hall Baltimore, a sort of low-rent Stephen King, who has written a horror book about a Witch Hunter. His book sales are not fantastic and the latest book signing is at a hardware store! One person gets an autograph, a jaunty sheriff named Bob LaGrange (Bruce Dern) who is a true fan and has ideas for a horror story. The sheriff has a young girl in a morgue with a stake through her heart! Mr. Baltimore has no interest in seeing the girl's face but the town holds a certain fascination for him. Outside of the unusual clock tower, there is also a run-down hotel that Edgar Allan Poe used to frequent. There is also a goth biker community where one chalky-faced, probable vampire named Flamingo (Alden Ehrenreich) quotes Baudelaire in French. Oui, oui, would you like to eat a croissant with your Baudelaire order? Lest I forget, there is some young girl in a tattered white dress with braces on her teeth (Elle Fanning) who might be a vampire as well. Meanwhile, Mr. Baltimore needs his publisher to give him an advance based on this gothic horror tale idea that he may or may not share with the sheriff who originated the idea in the first place.  

The dream sequences utilize the color red quite effectively, especially in the dilapidated hotel where several kids might be buried underground. As I said earlier, "Rumble Fish" also isolated bursts of color in its black-and-white imagery. Still, "B'Twixt" doesn't have much of a pulse and its opening scenes with narration by Tom Waits carry more of a charge than anything else in the film. There is something deeper in Baltimore's guilt over the death of his own daughter (mirrored by a real-life tragedy that befell Francis's own son) and some of that springs to life towards the end of the film, but that is too little and too late. Would you believe we get a ridiculous Ouija board scene, and the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe advising Baltimore on how to end his novel? We are also saddled with a cartoonish, hellishly laughable version of a nightmare descent that is all inside Baltimore's head. It's just not half as stimulating as the opening and closing passages of this stillborn movie.  

Same old, Same old voyeurism

 REAR WINDOW (1998)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

If the late Christopher Reeve had made a dramatic entry about his unfortunate paralysis and the medical progress he was making with stem cell research, not to exclude his personal relationships and maintaining a career, I might have been more supportive. "Rear Window" starts off that way with his character, Jason Kemp, who suffers an unfortunate car accident that leaves him paralyzed with a severed spinal cord. He is a successful architect that manages to hold on to his job and still keep an ex-wife looking out for him. Here are the makings of a TV-movie like they used to make, not quite the disease of the week but close. Instead Reeve is saddled with a paper-thin, largely undercooked and visually unstimulating remake of a Hitchcock classic. 

Reeve's Kemp is still working his architect job, though from home with the help of two nurses who make sure his breathing apparatus works and he is laid to bed. There is also an ambitious architect (Daryl Hannah, the Grace Kelly character) who helps him complete his latest project. To make the voyeurism new and wildly different from its 1954 counterpart, a video surveillance equipment has been installed so that Jack can keep an eye on an abused woman and her boyfriend, a sculptor. Unlike the original film, there is little to no drama in the other apartments whom Jack observes, including a gay couple, a single brunette who repeatedly takes off her clothes in silhouette, and some guy working on a computer. Not the most interesting bunch and nothing comes out of their situations because there is no drama. The only hint of drama is the poor blonde woman who then disappears, and Jack thinks she has been murdered.

"Rear Window" is not poorly done but it is mediocre in its character shadings and tension, and has nothing to stand out from various other voyeuristic thrillers in the wake of Hitchcock's film. Reeve is a standout here and makes us care about his plight and his weakened condition, mainly because Reeve really was a paraplegic. Daryl Hannah is no Grace Kelly, though, and Robert Forster's plain detective has a few colorful moments but far too few - unlike the original film, there is no camaraderie between him and Reeve since the detective only knows him because of the car accident. The killer is generic run-of-the-mill whose threatening nature you can spot his a mile away

"Rear Window" has no flavor, no real attitude towards its material and plays it too safe. Visually it is flat as a pancake without the three-dimensionality of the Greenwich Village apartment view of the original. There is a little suspense towards the end but the movie has no momentum, no real pizazz. If it were only a made-for-cable thriller with no connection to the Master of Suspense, I might have given it slightly higher marks.. And just like Christopher Reeve's sedentary character, the movie just sits there.

Habitual existence and electric blankets

 MY DINNER WITH ANDRE (1981)

A Look Back by Jerry Saravia

Time is a funny thing. Films like "My Dinner With Andre" are not introspective enough for a prepubescent child, certainly not in my case when I saw the film in 1982. You would think a simple story of two adults talking in a restaurant for two hours would be boring. You might be right, whether you are nine-years-old or a fully grown adult. It takes a special skill to make a fascinating film about two people talking. After all, could you look at two people talking for two hours in a restaurant? Of course not, unless you are participating in the conversation. At this middle portion of my life, I learned much while watching "My Dinner With Andre" and found many of the participants' talking points revelatory and, indeed, fascinating. It is a remarkable film full of much truth about life and the theatre world, and learning to find oneself in whatever environment works for the person.

Wallace Shawn, playing himself, is a failed, struggling playwright who is invited to have dinner with a successful theatre director, Andre Gregory, also playing himself.  Gregory is a man who left the U.S. to presumably find himself, to frolic and immerse himself in nature that went beyond the concrete city confines of New York. He had traveled to India, a forest in Poland, the rough Sahara desert, and yet he never exactly found himself. He abandoned his New York family to "truly feel alive." As Gregory explains, "it led to an immediate awareness of death." To truly feel connected to life, he will feel just as connected to death. When Gregory recounts that he attended a Halloween-themed event in Montauk Point (gee, I am almost curious to revisit Montauk myself), he has to be stripped naked, be photographed (!), write a will and wear a blindfold as he is buried alive. Yep, that might make the life-death connection even sharper.

Wallace often listens to Gregory for the first hour or so, believing in being a "detective" or sorts since he likes asking questions. After some inordinate time of listening and eating pate with fish and potato soup, Wallace takes issues with Gregory's exotic trips to foreign lands and that we are living in a "dream world" where our perception of reality is gone, that we are in a trance or some sort of fog. Living habitually, Gregory argues, is "not really living." Shawn begins his spiel about how he appreciates comfort in knowing he can have a good cup of coffee, having warmth with an electric blanket, and that things merely are coincidences and not everything is predicated on chance from a fortune cookie or some esoteric book that seems to speaking what you are going through. You need not climb Everest to really live when you can discover just as much at the local cigar shop down the street.

"My Dinner With Andre" is an entertaining, profound and experimental film about the beauty of language where just talking to someone and being engaged by various topics can be fruitful. In today's world, a film about people talking without the benefits of technology may seem alien to most, perhaps boring. Not so with Louis Malle's film which seems to make it animated, hilarious at times, and often unsettling. Shawn and Gregory are well-defined by their radiant personalities and by their ability to truly delve into the modern world, the absurdity of doing nothing for moments at a time, the abrasiveness of the world, and how to really live. How could this be boring to anyone?

The Afterlife sure looks like fun

 BEETLEJUICE (1988)

A LOOK BACK by Jerry Saravia

"Beetlejuice" is one of those rare Tim Burton films that I've seen only once, though I have some fond memories of it. It is a supernatural ghost comedy yet it is so far removed from the world of "Ghostbusters" (one of its primary influences according to the writers) that it may as well exist in some other planet. Well, some other otherworldly realm for sure.

This is Burton's film all the way, and it is sheerly amazing that he did not create this story at all (actually conceived and written by Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson, and co-written by Warren Skaaren). "Beetlejuice" (spelled Betelgeuse) is some sort of freelance bio-exorcist from an otherworldly existence, who advertises himself to spirits as an entity who can scare the bejesus out of the living. He is a foul creature with moldy, green skin and spouts crude jokes that land flat on their face. Some jokes are funnier than others, such as stating that "The Exorcist" gets funnier each time he sees it. Otherwise this demented, perverted spirit is one who consistently grabs his crotch and flirts with female spirits who slap him if he gets out of line. Is this the guy that the Maitlands want? The Maitlands, by the way, are a married Connecticut couple who died when their car crashed through a covered bridge and fell into a lake. They need help driving out a new family that moved into their idyllic country home - the quirky family known as the Deetzes. Before Beetlejuice can be conjured by saying his name three times, the Maitlands partially succeed in a possession that involves the Deetzes and some dinner guests involuntarily dancing to Harry Belafonte songs such as "Day-O."  

"Beetlejuice" begins with sweet, good-natured scenes between the excited Maitlands, Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam (Alec Baldwin), and their need to stay home for vacation and decorate their house. After their demise, the movie is flat and antiseptic for a while with the introduction of the Deetzes that includes former real-estate developer Charles (Jeffrey Jones), his shrill wife, the sculptress Delia (Catherine O'Hara - truly marvelous) and their goth/death obsessed daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder). Even with the introduction of their colorful interior decorator, Otho (Glenn Shadix), the movie still felt devoid of any energy and scenes between them rang unfunny and spiritless. That is until the wild introduction of Beetlejuice and the Belafonte songs, and the movie picks up steam and had me howling with laughter at its sheer inventiveness and wacky humor. The special effects are spooky stop-motion animation moments that I'd love to see more of in today's CGI-infused climate. I also like the otherworldly waiting room for the dead (who are all civil servants), including the shrunken head explorer and the woman with half of her torso sitting separately. Sylvia Sidney's appearance is the cherry on top.

What is most fascinating is that the Deetzes and Otho eventually spring with such liveliness that you wonder why they seem like such unlikable boors at the beginning. And watching Catherine O'Hara dance to "Day-O" is one of the greatest cinematic pleasures I can think, at least for the latter 1980's. "Beetlejuice" also has exuberant Michael Keaton having a wild party time as the bio-exorcist, a spirit who is more content lifting up Barbara's skirt and hanging with women than scaring anyone. And Ryder gives the movie a soul, a girl who can't quite commit to everyday life's expectations yet is more eager to hang with the Maitlands than the Deetzes. I can't blame her.   

Not quite on the level of the Beatles album

 BACK IN THE U.S.S.R (1992)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

From what I gather in this lumbering, plot-holish disaster of a movie, there is a religious icon that the Russian mafia wants. A priest also wants it after it was stolen from him. And a museum curator demands it. Just about anyone is willing to kill for it. Its monetary worth and why these people crave it are questions never answered and possibly never asked by the filmmakers of this completely nonsensical thriller. It may as well be a comedy.

Frank Whaley, always diverting no matter what he's doing, is the naive American named Archer visiting Russia and eager to see the "real Russia." This includes going to some punk rock club, getting mugged, having sex with a Russian prostitute who steals the icon in the opening sequence, getting beaten by Mafia goons and getting shot in the hand by a criminal businessman (Roman Polanski, doing a reprise of his "Chinatown" character). Oh, and the terminally stupid Archer is wanted for murder all over town! The Russian girl's friend wants Whaley's precious sneakers. So much for that "real Russia." And on, and on, and on, to the point that I just gave up and admired the overcast Russian skies and was fascinated by the run-down areas of Moscow. I also enjoyed watching Natalya Negoda as the Girl who has one trick up her sleeve that you can see miles ahead. A final, infernal (a dual meaning there) twist will make you wonder if you are supposed to be stupefied or to laugh, or to do both. 

I could say you've been warned but in the spirit of the former Soviet Union and glasnost, I'd rather take it to another level: it is a DEFCON 4 warning.