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.

TAKING (OR LEAVING) THE CURE

Opening this weekend: 

The Death Cure--Well, that would be an impressive medical breakthrough, wouldn't it?

This is the third film in the Maze Runner trilogy, based on the young-adult sci-fi novels by James Dashner. This time the pretty-boy hero (Dylan O'Brien) and a few of his more characterful comrades are on a quest to rescue an old pal (Ki Hong Lee) from his days imprisoned in "The Glade" back in Part One. They infiltrate the city stronghold of the sinister agency known by the anagram WCKD--their marketing department should perhaps have put in a little more time on that branding--where his friend is being held as a possible key to a cure for the disease that is turning the human race into zombielike creatures known as "Cranks."

The first film in the series, 2014's The Maze Runner, had the title labyrinth to help generate intrigue and mystery. In The Scorch Trials, from the following year, the boys had escaped their inscrutable prison, and the results were far more routine adventures, with the same overlay of teenage masochism. This third film is a further step down, alas. The dialogue is banal and the plot, as with The Scorch Trials, is full of elements that recall older, better sci-fi flicks, most notably The Omega Man.

The Death Cure is not without strengths, however. Director Wes Ball, who helmed the previous entries, handles the initial big action scenes excitingly. There are a number of capable vets in the cast, including Giancarlo Esposito, Barry Pepper, Will Poulter, Rosa Salazar, Aiden Guillen, Patricia Clarkson as the WCKD honcho and Walton Goggins in a small but memorable role as the noseless revolutionary leader of the Cranks. Thomas Brodie-Sangster, the kid from Love, Actually, is once again touching as our hero's loyal friend. With the help of these actors and others, the film remains watchable enough until the torturously drawn-out, Wagnerian, sturm-und-drang finale wears out our patience.

This movie is another example of a striking recurrent motif in post-apocalyptic yarns of recent years, however: Walls. Walls erected by the frightened powerful to hold the feared and dispossessed at bay have shown up in the Divergent flicks, last year's Resident Evil finale, War for the Planet of the Apes and now this film. It seems like our collective mind has begun to, well, Hit the Wall.

SHOW ME THE MONEY (MONSTER)

Opening this weekend:

Money Monster—George Clooney plays a buffoonish TV financial pundit in the Jim Cramer mold. Julia Roberts plays the long-suffering director of the silly show he hosts, and Jack O’Connell plays the scruffy disgruntled loser with a gun who takes him hostage on the air, demanding to know what happened to the $60,000 he lost to an investment that the TV guy claimed was safer than his savings account.

The screenwriters, Alan Di Fiore, Jim Kouf and Jamie Linden, aren’t exactly Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, but they do manage to give the dialogue a certain amount of snarky, unpredictable wit, and the director, Jodie Foster, stirs up a lot of whirling frenzy around what is essentially a static situation. So the movie generates a Front Page-like energy that carries us along quite enjoyably, even as the story’s complications grow harder and harder to swallow.

It helps that Clooney, who also co-produced, doesn’t seem to mind looking like a stooge onscreen. We’re asked to believe that, in this crisis situation, the host, director and crew of this show would swing into action as highly competent investigative journalists, swiftly tracking down the secret that led to the loss of the guy’s money. But helping us accept this laughable conceit is the look on Clooney’s face—scared, but also glum and guilty; the look of a man who has known all along, at some level, that he’s just a shill, but is only now confronted with the reality of his irresponsibility.

Roberts gives a maternal authority to her role—she’s as much a nanny as a director—and some of the other actors, notably Christopher Denham, Giancarlo Esposito, Caitrona Balfe, Lenny Venito, Emily Meade, Dennis Boutsikaris and Condola Rashad, bring speed, charm and a surprising amount of comedy to what they’re given. Money Monster is too conventional, too close to superficial, to be a really scary monster—I doubt it could be considered much more subtle in its dissection of matters financial than the shows it's spoofing. But it’s fast and well-made and entertaining, and the cast gives it heart.

A personal note: I was sworn to secrecy until it opened, but my pal Gayle Bass, lovely co-host of Right This Minute, appears briefly in Money Monster, playing the complex role of Gayle Bass, lovely co-host of Right This Minute. So even if there was no other reason to see it…

TIGERS & BEARS, OH MY!

Opening this weekend:

The Jungle Book—Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book is probably my favorite of that studio’s animated features. This is partly sentimentality—it’s the first movie to which I can remember being taken, when I was four or five years old. But it’s also looser, lighter, funnier and far richer in personality than a lot of Disney fare, with vibrant primary colors, wonderful voice acting and a couple of catchy big band numbers.

It was hard to imagine that this same charm could be captured in live action. There was a live-action attempt in the 1940s, made by the Korda Brothers and starring Sabu. Heavily narrated, it used live animal footage, but also had a much more human-oriented story.

But Disney’s new version of Kipling’s tales of Mowgli the wolf-raised “Man-Cub,” featuring a live actor as Mowgli and CGI as his animal co-stars, takes a different approach from either earlier version, and finds some unexpected grit and emotional range. Directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Justin Marks, the film uses bits of Kipling’s language and gets across some of his near-peerless storytelling panache. Bits of his icky colonialist presumption inevitably creep in here and there, too, though to my mind this film wasn’t nearly as bad on this score as The Lion King.

As before, young Mowgli (Neel Sethi) is menaced by the scarred tiger Shere Khan (voiced by Idris Elba), who bears him a grudge. It’s decided that the black panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) will return Mowgli to the “Man Village,” and episodic adventures ensue. He’s befriended by the leisure-loving bear Baloo (Bill Murray) and threatened by the python Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) and the primate King Louis (Christopher Walken), here presented much like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, before he and Shere Khan have their big confrontation.

It’s an odd hybrid, with the Brit actors declaiming high drama alongside Murray’s Chicago-accented shtick, but mostly it works. Lupita Nyong’o, voicing Mowgli’s lupine mother, brought tears to my eyes with her avowals of love for him. It should be noted that there are a few funny but retroactively wistful lines spoken by the late Garry Shandling, as the porcupine.

There are also a few missteps, the most glaring, for me, being the decision to allow Murray and Walken to perform their character’s songs from the 1967 film. Both are great performers in their own right, but musically Murray is no Phil Harris and Walken is no Louis Prima, and they seem to know it—their numbers feel halfhearted, almost sheepish.

Parents of smaller kids—and anyone sensitive to animal suffering—should be aware that the film is violent at times, especially by current kid-movie standards, and that a couple of characters are killed in the course of the story. As the saying goes, it’s a jungle out there.

TRIAL & TERROR

Opening this weekend:

The Scorch Trials—The screen version of James Dashner’s novel The Maze Runner, released a year ago this month, was about a bunch of teenage boys with no memory, living in an encampment surrounded on all sides by an enormous maze that only opened during daylight hours. At the end they got out, to find they were test subjects of an evil scientist (Patricia Clarkson) in a post-apocalyptic society.

This sequel follows the surviving boys, and one girl, as they escape from yet another sinister complex, only to find themselves in the Scorch, the godforsaken, sandblasted ruin of an American city. As they try to reach a (possibly mythical) resistance, they’re beset by zombies (here called “cranks”) and other menaces, and are pursued all the while by the scientist’s minions.

The first film was fairly routine masochistic young-adult-fiction melodrama, but that mysterious maze gave it a certain fascination, at least until everything was overexplained toward the end. Scorch Trials doesn’t have anything that tantalizing. It’s just a jumble of sci-fi chase movie tropes. Everything seems to have been borrowed from other movies—The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, The Road Warrior, Coma.

Director Wes Ball, who also helmed The Maze Runner, manages the big action scenes well, and several fine character actors—Giancarlo Esposito, Aidan Gillen, Barry Pepper, Lili Taylor and Alan Tudyk, among others—provide some energy. Most of the kids are attractive but on the uninteresting side, with one big exception: a young actress named Rosa Salazar joins the gang about midpoint, and gives Scorch Trials a much-needed dose of soulfulness.

Black Mass—Jonny Depp plays James “Whitey” Bulger, a notoriously brutal South Boston gang boss of the ‘70s and ‘80s, in Scott Cooper’s somber, violent true-crime drama. Cooper’s focus is on Bulger’s unholy alliance with the FBI, apparently the result of the boyhood hero-worship that one of the agents (Joel Edgerton) had for him.

Depp is convincing and scary but repellent, and you may find yourself wondering why you should care about this charmless monster. Not, of course, that he would be less of a monster if he was more charming, but part of the dynamic of the gangster picture is the transgressive thrill it offers in making gangsters so charming we forget they’re monsters while we’re watching.

We certainly don’t forget it here. But the cast is strong—Benedict Cumberbatch stands out as Whitey’s respectable brother—and the movie packs plenty of punch.

By the way, for the tens of readers out there who are no doubt wondering why there was no Monster-of-the-Week yesterday, the feature is on hiatus. Probably at least until October gets here.