Every generation gets the Southland Tales it deserves.
From The Fountainhead, Megalopolis inherits the false cultural persona of the architect as a necessarily isolated genius: a lone cowboy or nocturnal superhero fighting for truth and beauty against the forces of conformity and mediocrity and criminality. Which are generally represented by the press, the politicians, the bankers, the rootless cosmopolites, and other usual suspects. This pernicious depiction of the architect has had the peculiar and enduring effect of leeching into the real world: by disguising dumbassery as badassery, by providing a legible persona for a specific kind of would-be celebrity “design authority” [to] to play act at a singular heroism and—so very falsely—at mere genius.[…]
The director is aged 85, and so this venture can fall into what is very traditionally called Late Work: a received category in which the artist is paradoxically indulged for reprising and rehashing bits and pieces of the old hits, and admired for showing any flashes of experimentation, however cynical or tentative.
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One is tempted, as a thought experiment, to imagine a late-work performance piece in which Coppola, instead of producing this artifact, used his real estate proceeds to build accessible housing, perhaps somewhere in the Bay Area. Back-of-envelope math suggests 500 units in, say, fancy San Jose, or as many as 5000 homes in Oakland.
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There is no architecture [here] to review. There are moving sidewalks. Adam Driver remarks that all residents are only one five-minute transparent-sphere-ride from any number of pocket parks. Whether this coincides with residents’ actual needs or wants is unaddressed.
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It’s stupid that what seems to matter in Megalopolis [the built city within the film] is how it looks, and how the buildings behave like living things, instead of the only two things that really matter: its energy use (high indeed), and how the actual living things within it—people—would live with agency, dignity, density, and delight. A small stadium with a roof like gold tissues—that ain’t it. […] Gold tissues sound neat, I guess? But what matters most is it’s Driver who answers what goes there, rather than the users and dwellers.
— Thomas de Monchaux (n+1)
Synopsis: Genius artist Cesar Catilina seeks to leap the City of New Rome into a utopian, idealistic future, while his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero, remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero, the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.