GOOD COPPOLA, BAD COPPOLA

Opening this weekend:

Megalopolis--The buzz on this long-cherished, finally realized project by Francis Ford Coppola is that people either love or hate it. But you may find that duality stifling. I kind of hated this movie, and I also kind of loved it.

It's an epic with sci-fi, fantasy and surreal elements, set in a city called "New Rome." New Rome looks exactly like New York, if New York was shot in exquisitely burnished metallic tones by the Romanian cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., and if the men wore '90s-George Clooney haircuts. Against this backdrop, Coppola develops a story that very loosely parallels the Cataline Conspiracy of 63 B.C., as chronicled by Sallust.

Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) still wants to take over Rome, but in this version he's a visionary architect and urban planner who wishes to create a new utopian downtown full of futuristic, even surreal amenities, made possible by a building material called Megalon. His rival Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) has, one might say, more modest ambitions for his town.

Trouble brews when Cicero's beautiful daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) goes to work for Cesar, and despite a dark secret involving Cesar's late first wife, he and Julia begin to fall in love. Into this basic conflict, rafts of supporting players and subplots and sub-subplots and digressions are interwoven, on the whole pretty chaotically.

The movie opens with a breath-quickening sequence in which Cesar stands on the ledge of the New Rome version of the Chrysler Building, leaning out, tempting gravity and stopping and starting time with the power of his will. The movie that follows seems to be Coppola trying to do the same with his art, and struggling with the awareness that time can't be suspended indefinitely.

It's a potent start, but after that Megalopolis splutters and flails for quite a while, with short, scattered, over-edited scenes that fail to draw us in, or sometimes even to communicate what's happening and who's who in relation to who. A half-hour or so in, I was starting to squirm, thinking this could be a really punishing disaster. Very gradually, however, a story begins to take shape that we can invest in.

The intent seems to be satirical, but Coppola's tone comes across as too earnest, even naive, for any real bite. The writer-producer-director sees our society as in decline, and he wants to have "A GREAT DEBATE ABOUT THE FUTURE." This seems like a worthy goal; our current debates about the future seem pretty lacking in greatness, with one side regarding the future as a place where Jesus will come back and then the elitists will be sorry, and the other side regarding the future as a place where maybe we'll get people's pronouns right.

Coppola certainly has broader, more robust, more soulful hopes for the future than these. But his utopian ideals are unspecific, beyond a sort of technocratic optimism. Cesar's "Megalon" (no relation, apparently, to Godzilla's old rival) is a conveniently vague plot device, and much of what Coppola shows us as evidence of our decline are lots of nubile young women partying too hard.

All this and more undoubtedly makes Megalopolis seem dubious, even campy. It's the kind of grand, glittering cinematic folly that we rarely see any more, because perhaps regrettably we don't have as many auteurs with the same level of delusional hubris as we did half a century ago. Yet it's hard to shake the sense that, at bottom, Coppola is right about contemporary society; that it is time for us to pull our collective heads out of our asses. And his sense of spectacle can get to you. His style here recalls everything from Orson Welles to Abel Gance to Koyaanisqatsi to Things to Come, and after he settles down, his movie begins to get exhilarating.

In no small part, undoubtedly, this is due to the uncommonly glamorous and vibrant cast. The roles are grievously underwritten--Dustin Hoffman in particular makes a fine, energetically weaselly entrance, but then his part seems unceremoniously truncated. But these actors inhabit their pageant figure roles and flesh them out with their own personalities.

Driver is excellent, again showing his ability to be eccentric and vulnerable while retaining the commanding presence of a leading man, and Esposito's pensive, wary eyes make a perfect, puny-spirited contrast to Driver's virility. Emmanuel is able to keep Julia from becoming too much of an idealized love object despite Coppola's gauzy presentation of her.

Shia LaBeouf has a juicy turn as Cesar's cousin and enemy Clodio, and Laurence Fishburne is a reassuring presence as Cesar's chauffeur, who also serves as the movie's Greek Chorus narrator. As Cesar's rich uncle Crassus, Jon Voight, despite his real-life political leanings, gives what seems like a gleeful parody of a certain recent president from the Big Apple, and it's fun to see veterans like Balthazar Getty, James Remar, Jason Schwartman, D.B. Sweeney and even Talia Shire among the supporting players.

It's possible that the strongest performance in the movie, however, is that of Aubrey Plaza, in the role of Wow Platinum, a TV financial reporter who has snaked her way into the lives of both Cesar and Crassus. Plaza isn't subtle as the lewd, scheming Wow, and from the beginning the character refuses to get buried by Coppola's grandiose conceptions. Every time she gets up to some juicy mischief, the audience comes happily to life.

ASS THE WORLD TURNS

Opening Friday in Scottsdale:

My Old Ass--18-year-old Elliot lives on an idyllic Canadian cranberry farm, but can't wait to head to college and start her life. She confesses her feelings, successfully, to her summer-long crush, and then she and her friends camp out on an island and take 'shrooms.

Under this fungal influence, Elliot, played by Maisy Stella, finds herself sitting next to the Old Ass of the title, her 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza. Younger Elliot is eager to hear dish and glamour about her future, but Older Elliot is cagey; she just advises her to avoid anybody named Chad. Soon after, Younger Elliot meets a nice young man while swimming. Guess what his name is.

The wish to go back and offer guidance and comfort to your younger self is a human perennial, perfectly expressed in the Faces anthem "Ooh La La." My Old Ass, written and directed by Megan Park, works the premise ingeniously by taking it, one might say, ass-backwards. Thus we see the story from the younger heroine's point of view; that is, from the version of her who, being young, knows everything and is unlikely to consciously accept an older person's counsel. Yet we also see Older Elliot's healthy influence on her behavior.

Stella carries the movie sweetly as Younger Elliot, with a suggestion that she's trying to present as more daring and sardonic and above-it-all than she really is. Her supposed mortification at her provincial circumstances is a less than convincing pose. In the much smaller role of Older Elliot, Plaza's guarded, pained manner complements Stella's performance amusingly, and credibly.

Percy Hynes White, as the amiable Chad, is the other standout of the small cast. The settings--the film was shot in Muskoka Lakes, Ontario--are breathtaking, and the movie glides very agreeably through its brief running time. There's one sequence, involving a Justin Bieber song, that's truly hilarious, but otherwise My Old Ass feels, really, a little mild and undemanding.

This, paradoxically, may be what's most striking about it. Elliot identifies as gay, you see; the crush with whom she makes out early on is a (slightly) older woman. Park doesn't make a big deal about this, and she's almost equally nonchalant when Elliot finds herself attracted to Chad and begins to question her long-held assumptions about her own sexuality.

In the real world, of course, and in this day and age, this probably really does reflect normal teen development. But I couldn't help thinking about the tizzy that this would have stirred up from a teen flick even ten years ago, much less twenty. Like 2018's Love Simon, the sunny, breezy My Old Ass may be most remarkable for how unremarkable it is.

SPY CANDY

Opening this weekend...

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre--Bad guys have stolen some horrible world-threatening thingy from a laboratory, and initially British Intelligence isn't even sure what it is. Not to worry, though--luxury-loving man of action Orson Fortune, played by Jason Statham, is placed on the case, with a high-tech team assisting him.

The McGuffin, when we finally learn what it is, turns out to be disappointingly vague and prosaic. The ride to retrieve it, however, directed by Guy Ritchie from a script by Ivan Atkinson, Marn Davies and the director, is pretty enjoyable, in the usual headlong Ritchie manner. We're zipped from one exotic location to another, Morocco and Madrid and Turkey and more, via private planes and yachts and villas, and there are shootouts and car chases and helicopter duels. It's swanky, with an edge of irony and plenty of violence to distance us from the shallow glamour.

All of  which is to say, Operation Fortune is essentially an off-brand Bond flick, and a sufficiently skilled one to offer an amusing, relaxing couple of hours free of substance and ethics. Despite Ritchie's assured technique, the real appeal is the cast. Statham shrewdly keeps it low-key and lets his costars shine: Cary Elwes as Orson's nettled boss, Eddie Marsan as the boss's boss and Bugzy Malone as Orson's stalwart sidekick.

Josh Hartnett, whose existence I had largely forgotten, has a nice turn as a Hollywood star pressed into service on the mission, and Aubrey Plaza is appealingly insouciant as a slinky computer whiz, complete with closeups of her lips as she purrs directions into a mic. She reminded me of Adrienne Barbeau as the deejay in The Fog.

The standout in the company, however, is Hugh Grant as the cockney billionaire arms dealer that Fortune's team targets. It's surprising how flexible Grant's diffident persona has proven; what's even more striking is that, even as this callous, corruption-encrusted vulgarian, he still manages to be likable.

LET'S DO THE TIME WARP

Source material for film has ranged from, at the prestigious end, masterpieces of world literature and drama and momentous historical events, down the slide to pulp fiction and comic books to, in recent years, old TV shows and video games and even theme park rides. I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later somebody would make a movie based on a classified ad.

“Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke…You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.”

This ad ran in Backwoods Home Magazine in 1997. Perhaps through its combination of mysterious content and matter-of-fact language, it gained attention online, even though, as it turned out, it was indeed a joke, penned by an editor as a space-filler. Now it’s been made into Safety Not Guaranteed, Colin Trevorrow’s sweetly amusing hybrid of slacker romantic comedy and science fiction.

The heroine is Darius (Aubrey Plaza), a woebegone, vaguely snarky nerd-girl intern at Portland Magazine. She and another intern, a lovelorn young Indian named Arnau (Karan Soni) are detailed to assist Jeff (Jake Johnson) a snide, obnoxious reporter for the magazine, to travel to an Oregon seaside town and investigate the ad. It quickly becomes clear that Jeff only pitched the story as an excuse to go to the town and reconnect with an old summer flame from his teen years, so Darius and Arnau end up doing most of the legwork.

Darius soon finds that the ad was placed by Kenneth (Mark Duplass), a strange but scruffily attractive stock clerk at a supermarket. She presents herself as a respondent to the ad. He’s mistrustful, but the two gradually bond, and begin to fall in love as they prepare for the trip back—but to what time period, and why?

If this all sounds a little on the too-cute-by-half side to you, I can only tell you that I went into Safety Not Guaranteed bracing myself for the worst in urban-hipster adorableness, and was won over. The script, by Derek Connolly, has some witty dialogue, and maybe more importantly a terrific structure that’s generous to all the characters, almost like that of a Shakespearean pastoral. The movie’s brevity helps, too. I might have preferred a lighter, more ambiguous touch to the movie’s final few minutes, but that’s just a personal taste.

Better still are the performances. I regret to say I’m not strong enough, in my dotage, to resist the charms of young Plaza, with her upturned, skeptical glower that shifts occasionally into an unexpected smile.

Just about everyone else in the cast brings something to the party as well. Indeed, the subplot involving Johnson—sort of a leaner, less virile Mark Ruffalo—was for me almost more successful than the main plot, in part because of the mature, grounded sexiness of Jenica Bergere as the old girlfriend Jeff’s there to see. He reconnected with her on Facebook, of course—a much more common way, these days, of going back in time.