In October of 1991, we saw Bonnie Raitt and John Prine at an outdoor concert. It was our second time seeing Raitt, our first and sadly our only time seeing Prine.
Prine had just released one of his best albums, The Missing Years. Not that it was his only good album ... as Christgau said about a greatest hits package a couple of years later, "There aren't 41 best Prine songs. There are 50, 60, maybe more". I couldn't pick a favorite from that album, so here are three of them. "It's a Big Old Goofy World":
"Everything Is Cool":
"Jesus the Missing Years":
In 1989, Bonnie Raitt released her breakthrough album, Nick of Time (she turned 40 that year). If you ask me, the real breakthrough came with her next album in 1991, Luck of the Draw. It included what has become her signature song, "I Can't Make You Love Me":
At that concert, she gave a shoutout to those of us who had been there since the beginning, playing one of her older songs that happens to be my favorite (my wife might agree with me on this): "Your Sweet and Shiny Eyes":
And, of course, John and Bonnie had to duet on "Angel from Montgomery":
Our local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, managed to summarize Megalopolis via multiple reviews. First to speak was the paper's primary film critic, Mick LaSalle, who hadn't yet seen the picture when he called it "The movie to see this fall". His argument is that Francis Ford Coppola "is one of the greatest filmmakers who has ever lived", and thus a passion project from the master demands to be seen.
The main review, by G. Allen Johnson, said it was "One of the most polarizing movies of this or any other year, ... a gargantuan, epic vanity project unlike any other made." Johnson claims "it’s immaterial whether it’s good or bad", which is what a director can get away with when he is a legend.
But it was Drew Magary who may have gotten the attention of the most readers. Or at least his headline writer was on the ball: "'Megalopolis' is a piece of s—t". ("Do not see this movie. It is a piece of s—t.... This movie is unwatchable.")
If it's possible, they are all correct. It's a must-see movie. It's a polarizing vanity project. It's a piece of shit. And it probably doesn't matter if it's good or bad.
I'm not one for offering extended plot summaries when I write about movies, which is a good thing in this case, because Megalopolis doesn't make sense as you watch it, and makes even less sense afterwards when you think about it. It truly is one of a kind, and I know plenty of people who think that in itself makes it worth watching. It's got a great cast, although the situations and dialogue are often so stupid, the actors are wasted. (How about Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, my beloved Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, and Laurence Fishburne for starters?) I'm sure Coppola intended to make a great statement about ... well, I have no idea what he's about, but it's clearly great, whatever it is.
Last week, I saw Aubrey Plaza in My Old Ass. It was better than Megalopolis. So was Emily the Criminal, for that matter, and it had the benefit of Plaza in the lead role. Should you see Megalopolis? I don't know ... depends on if you trust the guy who said it was the movie to see, or the guy who called it a piece of shit. Or you could watch it and make up your own mind, but as Magary said, "You’ve been warned".
This is the sixth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 6 is called "Strange Beasts Week":
"Although the origins of kaiju can be traced back to long before Godzilla and indeed, cinema itself, the fact remains that the rise of kaiju in popular culture occurred in tandem with the rise of the kaiju eiga ('Japanese monster movies'). But first, we must be attuned to the fact that the kaiju eiga spans decades, covers many aesthetic trends, and varies widely in its use (and non-use) of allegory and socio-political commentary. It is not static but, like Godzilla, always evolving and adapting, according to when, how, and why it is produced, and who is behind the wheel. As with any genre, it has produced formidable works that will stand the test of time, and forgettable efforts designed to do little more than cash in on what came before it.
"Where many saw only the strange, giant monster, others recognized the art and craft behind the strange, giant monster. More than anything else, it is the art of cinema—the combination of image and sound, the collaboration of artists and craftspeople, and the considered use of the resources at their disposal—that allowed the meanings and allegorical potential of kaiju to be articulated in the first place. Beasts, creatures, monsters, and yokai—strange, giant, or otherwise—never needed cinema; it is just one medium in which they have appeared and flourished. Meanwhile, discussing kaiju as separate from cinema seems to me a fruitless exercise. Without cinema, kaiju are relatively unremarkable—just another variation of monsters of which there have been many throughout history.
"From King Kong to Clifford the Big Red Dog, the world of kaiju is vast. For this week's challenge, let's focus on the films in David Haddon's What’s That Coming Over The Hill? - Kaiju Films list and bask in the spectacle that decades of gigantic strange beasts on film have wrought."
Terror of Mechagodzilla has some historical significance in the franchise. It's a sequel to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. It marked a return for director Ishirō Honda, who had directed the very first Godzilla movie, as well as six subsequent films with the iconic monster prior to Terror of Mechagodzilla. It was his last film as a director, but he wasn't done in the industry ... he worked on five late films with Akira Kurosawa.
Sadly, Terror isn't a very good movie. It's nice in that it avoids the appeals to kids that had marred many Godzilla movies ... it's a movie for adults, with adult characters. And if you like kaiju battles, the final sequence between Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, and Titanosaurus is fun. Criterion thought enough of this one to include it in their 15-film box set of Godzilla movies.
The grandson was visiting, so we needed a family movie. Supplying the family was easy: three generations (my wife and I, our daughter, her son). Picking the movie isn't always easy, because I've never been one to worry about what is appropriate for kids to see, while others are rightfully more protective. But the grandson is 12 now, so it's mostly irrelevant. In any event, there's a new animated family movie out there, and while that isn't exactly my favorite genre, The Wild Robot got excellent reviews, and I was glad to see it.
And now that I've seen it, I'm even more glad. All of us liked it. Inventive, good voice actors, a lovely look, and it wasn't a drippy Disney musical. There was much less of the kind of emotional stuff that always feels like I'm being robbed of my dignity ... no, The Wild Robot earned its emotional pull. Perhaps best from my standpoint, none of the characters annoyed me (the fox came close). I'm not really the audience for this movie, so the fact that it won me over is pretty impressive.
Life Is Beautiful won 3 Oscars: Best Actor (Roberto Benigni over Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen, Nick Nolte, and Edward Norton), Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Original Dramatic Score. Its popularity among audiences and the breadth of Benigni's ambitions is reflected in the number of IMDB Best Of lists it appears on: Top 50 in Romance, Comedy, War, 1990s, and Drama, and #26 on the IMDB All-Time Best Of list. As you can see, I had a lot of blind spots in my moviegoing that were filled when I finally saw Life Is Beautiful.
How do we pick a movie to watch? Far as I can tell, this question arises frequently in the streaming era ... you have a choice from thousands of movies, which one will you pick? Some might see how popular Life Is Beautiful is and decide to watch it. Some of us look more to critical acclaim than popularity, and here, Life Is Beautiful isn't quite as highly ranked. It's Metascore is only 58 ("Mixed or Average"), and while there are three 100/100 ratings, the bottom of the list is dismal: "borders on the nauseating" (Jonathan Rosenbaum), "abhorrent" (Richard Schickel), "Benigni's movie made me want to throw up." (David Edelstein). David Thomson lays it out:
I despise Life Is Beautiful, especially its warmth, sincerity, and feeling, all of which I believe grow out of stupidity. Few events so surely signaled the decline of the motion picture as the glory piled on that odious and misguided fable.
Kinda makes you want to see it, just to figure out what kind of movie could get such disparate reactions.
It probably comes as no surprise that I am closer to Thomson than I am to the IMDB votes on this one. I wouldn't go nearly as far as Thomson does, but I understand where he is coming from. For me, a central problem with the film, which is comic actor Benigni's take on Nazi concentration camps, is that it isn't in bad taste. I mean, some find any hint of comedy in a film about a camp to be in bad taste, but Benigni steamrollers over that. His character, Guido, is placed in a camp with his uncle, wife, and son, and to make his son feel better, Guido convinces him that everything that occurs in the camp is part of an elaborate game with a big prize for the winner (a tank). This isn't "Springtime for Hitler" funny, it's far more subtle, which is to say, it's not funny at all, and if it's not funny, all we're left with is a movie about Nazi camps where the main character hides the ugliness to make his son feel better.
Still, taste preferences always get in the way. Most of the first half of the film is straight comedy, and I rarely laughed. That is on me ... I often miss the joke in modern comedies. By the time we got to the camp, I was already feeling hostile.