The Flop House: Megalopolis, with Roman Mars

Roman Mars and the Flop House team dive into Francis Ford Coppola's intriguing and controversial film, Megalopolis, exploring its chaotic narrative, ambitious ideas, and perplexing execution.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  Some of the most important design choices are the ones that go unnoticed. The details that together make an experience feel intuitive, comfortable, and above all, exhilarating. At Acura, that means looking closely at how every detail can make your experience behind the wheel more rewarding. Every lesson learned and every idea refined becomes part of what comes next, and it lives inside every MDX, ADX, and Integra. That's precision crafted performance. That's Acura.

• 0:34Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job, the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:15Roman Mars?

  If you've been listening to our Power Broker Breakdown series, you know my co-host Elliot Kalin. Elliot is an unbelievably productive person who juggles way more projects than I could possibly keep track of. But I first got to know Elliot over a decade ago as one of the co-hosts of one of my first favorite podcasts called The Flophouse. It's from our friends at Maximum Fun, and it's all about movies, specifically bad movies, box office bombs, critical duds, and movies that should not have ever been made in the first place. As fate would have it, there is one movie in 2024 that lands at that exact Venn diagram of The Flophouse and The Power Broker, and that is Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis.

• 1:56Roman Mars?

  It is a difficult movie to summarize, as you will hear, but essentially, Adam Driver plays a city planner that's very, very, very loosely based on Robert Moses.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  This time you've gone too far, Catalina.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  This site is under Design Authority jurisdiction.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  And what happens if you've overstepped your mandate?

• 2:13Speaker 03

  We'll apologize.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Apologize? After the building's down? Mayor Cicero will be pissed.

• 2:19Roman Mars?

  And it is a bad movie.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  And you think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Amazonian mind?

• 2:28Speaker 05

  Entitles me?

• 2:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:29Speaker 05

  Entitles me?

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:31Speaker 05

  Entitles me?

• 2:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:34Roman Mars?

  A few weeks back, I went on The Flophouse to talk about Megalopolis not just as a movie, but as a vision of an urban utopia.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Is this society, is this way we're living, the only one that's available to us? And when we ask these questions, when there's a dialogue about them, that basically is a utopia.

• 2:53Roman Mars?

  Not that it's a very clear vision, but, you know, you'll see. Enjoy.

• 3:00Speaker 06

  On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis.

• 3:04Speaker 07

  I got a feeling this is gonna be a mega love fest.

• 3:09Speaker 06

  That's a good one. Yum, yum. Give it that. Delicious.

• 3:37Speaker 06

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Flophouse. I'm Dan McCoy.

• 3:40Roman Mars?

  And I'm Stuart Wellington.

• 3:41Speaker 07

  I'm Elliot Kalin.

• 3:42Roman Mars?

  And I'm Roman Mars.

• 3:44Speaker 07

  Wait, what? Hold on a second.

• 3:45Roman Mars?

  What?

• 3:45Speaker 07

  How did you get here?

• 3:47Roman Mars?

  How did you get in?

• 3:50Speaker 07

  Dan, I told you, you gotta have your apartment fumigated. You got the Roman Mars infestation.

• 3:55Speaker 06

  Someone much more respectable got in here somehow.

• 3:57Roman Mars?

  I got on my lit up moving sidewalk, and I landed right here.

• 4:03Speaker 07

  Wow, in the city of the future, AKA The Flophouse.

• 4:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, we, you know, this is a special movie, a very special movie. So we had to have a very special guest. Elliot, why don't you talk a little bit about Roman being on the show? Because you have been doing some work with, you've been moonlighting, you've been cheating on us with another podcast.

• 4:23Speaker 07

  That's right. It's been so exciting to be discovering new things with another host, discovering new things about myself, showing them things about me that you guys have gotten bored with.

• 4:33Roman Mars?

  It's made you a better co-host of The Flophouse, honestly.

• 4:35Speaker 07

  In some ways, yeah, because I'm more excited. I come in and I kiss you guys and I give you flowers and you're like, what's this? You haven't done this in years. And I've got a spring in my step and a song in my heart. So Megalopolis is a special movie in that it feels like it is so indebted to the ideas of city building that come from having read The Power Broker and then forgotten most of what was in the book. And so what better person have come talk to us than Roman Mars, with whom I have been co-hosting the 99% Invisible Breakdown, The Power Broker. All throughout this year, we have been taking on one of the greatest works of nonfiction writing, or I would say, writing period in American literature, The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Every month, we break down 100

• 5:16Speaker 07

  pages of it. We just recorded our penultimate summary episode. Oh, wow. We've actually made our way through most of the book at this point. Wow. And so, The Power Broker is always on our minds. And this movie, Megalopolis, there's so much about it that is so clearly indebted to a certain idea of Robert Moses, the subject of The Power Broker. And indebted in a way that is totally weird and doesn't really work and is messed up. And so, we wanted to bring Roman on to talk about that aspect of it. And also, have a little bit of synergistic cross-promotion between these two endeavors. But-

• 5:52Speaker 03

  I thought because we're talking about a movie that's all about new Rome, we would bring in the best Roman we know.

• 5:59Speaker 06

  Name-based pun scenario.

• 6:01Speaker 07

  An actual Roman, yeah.

• 6:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:02Roman Mars?

  That's right. That's right. No, I'm very, very happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And I don't think, if, I kind of needed a sort of a work excuse to see this movie, because I was, it looked a little bit, I don't know, like something I wouldn't necessarily see on my own. And so-

• 6:19Speaker 07

  You mean, you wouldn't make this, as I did, the only movie I've seen in the theater for the past couple of months?

• 6:24Speaker 06

  That's amazing.

• 6:25Roman Mars?

  As soon as we decided that I would see it for the show, I was very excited to, you know, to take it in. But anyway, we'll get to that.

• 6:37Speaker 06

  I'm on this show all the time and I had a similar experience where I'm like, well, I mean, maybe it's partly because I'm like, well, we'll probably have to watch that eventually. So I don't need to run out to the theater to do it. But then when we all decided to do this together, I'm like, oh, great. I can see it on a big screen. I can see all the the nutty vision of Francis Ford Coppola, all of the ideas that he's been saving up for decades and put them all in one script, whether they all belong in the same script or not.

• 7:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  What was the last one we did in Last Flophouse in the Isles we did?

• 7:07Speaker 07

  Last Exorcist, I think. Last Exorcist, the one with Russell Crowe.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Was Madame Web since then?

• 7:12Speaker 07

  Oh, Madame Web was, oh, do it. No, you know what?

• 7:15Speaker 03

  I saw it in the theater.

• 7:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. That was a theater movie. Yeah. So.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Guys, can we talk about Madame Web?

• 7:21Speaker 07

  I mean, another time, maybe.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  You know, Web connects us all. Kind of like how Megalon connects all these houses.

• 7:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, sure. The, the, so the other thing about this movie is that I wanted to see it in the theaters because unlike every other movie we've seen, where there's a reasonable expectation it will be available for home viewing. And like, they're like, gotta see this new Marvel or Star Wars movie or whatever in the theaters. I'm like, I don't have to because I'll be able to see it on my nicely sized PC at home. This movie conceivably could disappear. It is a Francis Ford Coppola owned thing. It's amazing to me that it was a national release movie and it, it's very possible that it may disappear after this. I don't think it will. I think it will be home viewing somewhere. But this is, this is such an indie film in so many ways that it's potentially unavailable at a certain point, you know? So we had to see it when we could see it.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  I guess I see what you're saying in the sense that the response to this was so, I mean, there, you know, there are people who are like, wow, big swing. Love you, Francis. But like, for the most part, very negative that there could be a part of them that's like, well, I'm taking my ball and going back to my vineyard, you know? But like,

• 8:27Speaker 07

  Oh, I mean, even.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  He doesn't have a vineyard anymore.

• 8:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, he sold it. He only sold part of it. He only sold part of the vineyard.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  But he wants to recoup anything, like it has to go to streaming. It has to be available somewhere.

• 8:38Speaker 07

  It's more that, so it was distributed theatrically by Lionsgate, but it's more like I can see a world where a large distributor is like, we don't want to handle this. And so he has to scramble to find some way. And maybe it's up on, maybe it's Francis Ford Coppola's YouTube channel that he uploads all of Megalopolis to in 10 chapters or something like that.

• 8:54Roman Mars?

  Yeah, his TikTok channel, he just splits it all up. Wait a minute, didn't Lionsgate also distribute Borderlands this year? Man, they're having a tough one.

• 9:05Speaker 07

  It's been a great year for Lionsgate. But in a world where even movies that are owned by corporations are not readily available, the way that they maybe once were, or that we assume they are, to have a movie that is one, one, literally one guy paid for it himself. It is, anyway, I just all along with saying like, I had to see it in the theater because it was the first time in years that a movie has come out where I'd be like, this might be my only chance to see this movie. And of course, maybe it'll be on HBO Max next week. I don't know. But I was like, this could be my only shot, you know?

• 9:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:34Roman Mars?

  There was only one theater showing it when I was looking for Bay Area. Well, it was, there was maybe a couple, but it was like showing at 3pm or something at Emery Bay.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Makes sense with the Bay Area, tech companies hate this guy.

• 9:46Speaker 07

  That's Coldplay country. That's the Bay Area. You know, his offices were in San Francisco. He lives up over in the Napa area, like.

• 9:54Roman Mars?

  And then we ended up seeing it at the Kabuki, my wife and I saw the Kabuki Theater in Japantown in San Francisco, which was, it was, we went to dinner ahead of time.

• 10:01Speaker 07

  Pretty on the nose name for a theater in Japantown.

• 10:05Roman Mars?

  But it was, it was, it was a weird experience. That was a weird vibe.

• 10:09Speaker 06

  I want to ask, what does, how does your wife feel about our podcast now?

• 10:15Roman Mars?

  There was about midway through the, through the movie where she looked at me and she said, why is Francis Ford Coppola doing this to us?

• 10:26Roman Mars?

  But it started, but it started from the very beginning. We sat down, empty theater. It didn't stay empty, but it started empty. We were there early, like just, you know, we just got there after dinner and the place is completely empty. And then this older white woman comes and sits. Right next to my wife, like, the theater's empty, there's two of us.

• 10:46Speaker 07

  Your wife is a very friendly person, there's something very welcoming about her, so I get it, yeah.

• 10:49Roman Mars?

  I was like, and it already started, I was like, oh, this is, there's a weird vibe here, that you would wanna sit right next to us in this little pack. And then it just kept on getting weirder, because more and more people sat, like, glommed on right around us. Maybe they just wanted to sort of like, sit mostly in the middle, because it's a spectacle and whatever, but, but it started out weird, it just got weirder.

• 11:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, speaking of how weird it gets, Stuart, you, you took notes, you, we all saw this, as we said, in the theater, because that's the way we could do it. I respect you for-

• 11:21Speaker 03

  I took the notes in the, in the dark of the Alamo.

• 11:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, being able to do that.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I mean, we're gonna see how good these notes are, since I transcribed them onto note cards, and I'm like, what the fuck does this say?

• 11:33Speaker 07

  But to be fair, to be fair, this is-

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Surely you couldn't say that about Claudio?

• 11:37Speaker 07

  This is an intricate puzzle box of a movie, every link indelibly forged to the next, so that it just like, it's airtight. The thing, the movie's airtight, so.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  So I'm gonna need some help here, guys. So, Megalopolis, movie opens with what, uh, like, uh, but it, like, a title card, right? That's why, Megalopolis a fable.

• 11:58Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, and it like, right off the bat is like, hey, uh, modern society's kinda like Rome, if you think about it.

• 12:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a movie that is, it is a movie that, one, anytime a filmmaker puts a fable at the end of their title, you go, this movie's not gonna make sense. This is, this is, this is, that's, calling it a fable, really, it's like, um, when we did North a while back, uh, I was thinking about these, these interviews I've heard with Alan Zwybel, who wrote North, and he just kept saying, "It's a fable, like, it's a fairy tale, why do people dislike it?" It's like, you can't just, you can't bandage over a movie that doesn't make sense by calling it a fable.

• 12:37Speaker 06

  It is the equivalent of being like, "I washed my hands of this," at the beginning of the movie.

• 12:41Speaker 07

  Well, it's, it's like when a, it's like when a, when a political candidate says something racist, and they're like, "It was a joke, come on, everybody," like, well, people have liked it, you wouldn't say it was a joke, but, anyway, that never happens, so don't worry about it. But you're right, Stuart, at the very beginning, they start with their thesis statement, "Hey, America's kinda like Rome, is America gonna fall like Rome does?"

• 12:57Speaker 03

  And we have, and we have like, title cards that look like they're chiseled into marble, so you're like, oh, that's like, classic Roman shit. Um, okay, so-

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Let's just talk about some of the characters and then we'll get into the plot.

• 13:09Speaker 06

  That sounds good.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  I think that's easy. So our hero-

• 13:11Speaker 07

  Easier than trying to walk us through the actual sequence, which is baffling. Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Our protagonist is Caesar Catalina, played by Adam Driver. It's impossible to say this name and not smile. I mean, come on.

• 13:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, because you're eating a Catalina Island.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Uh huh. And it's a Caesar salad. I love it. He-

• 13:30Speaker 07

  The ultimate fantasy of eating a Caesar salad on Catalina Island.

• 13:33Roman Mars?

  Or with Catalina dressing on it.

• 13:35Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Stop it. Stop it, guys. Turn the cameras off.

• 13:39Roman Mars?

  It's two types of salads in one.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  So he is the-

• 13:44Speaker 07

  They prophesied a sandwich like this, the Ultra Salad.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  He is the genius head of the design authority of New Rome, whose task is to design things like buildings and plan out the city, right? City planning type stuff.

• 14:00Speaker 07

  He is the master builder of New Rome.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  He is also the inventor or discoverer of Megalon, a magic super substance.

• 14:10Speaker 06

  Yes. And he also-

• 14:11Speaker 07

  The Medal of the Future. Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 06

  He also has the ability to stop time.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 14:16Speaker 06

  And I do not object to this film having a magical realist component. I don't even particularly object to it not being explained why he can do this, because what explanation would be appropriate?

• 14:32Speaker 07

  Would be necessary. I mean, it's, I would, I-

• 14:33Speaker 06

  But-

• 14:34Speaker 07

  The problem with the-

• 14:35Speaker 06

  Hold on.

• 14:35Speaker 07

  I'll leave it in there.

• 14:35Speaker 06

  But this is a very large bizarre element to be added to the film with no apparent, like, I mean, I wouldn't say no apparent, but like, it seems like it should have more thematic heft or something if you're going to put this thing in there. I mean, I might be just too dumb to realize what's going on, but-

• 14:54Speaker 07

  I think you're right that it's, it does not work on a plot level. I mean, I would say that when you say magical realist, the issue is that there is no realist aspect to this. It's just all magic. And Adam Driver's character is so clearly a stand-in for the artist, and in this case, the filmmaker. And I think his ability to stop time is supposed to be the artist's ability to- Reshape the world around them even more explicitly than him just building buildings and stuff like that.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  True.

• 15:21Speaker 07

  But you're right, he doesn't do anything with it. Like, he never uses it for anything.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  As a plot device, it is like an anti-Czechov's gun. Like, it never pays off in any meaningful way of how the story goes. Especially when you're talking about someone who is struggling in a power play. You would, you think, why don't you use some of your time-stopping powers to like, yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 07

  Stop time and pull the mayor's pants down so he looks ridiculous, so you start timing again.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  If Megalopolis was released as a series of episodes, the nerds in the Megalopolis subreddit would be like, why isn't Caesar using his powers?

• 15:52Speaker 07

  They'd be like, I know, in the last episode, he's gonna use his powers to do X, X, and Y, and then when the show doesn't do what they thought it was going to do, they'll be like, this show sucks.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  This show sucks. The, I think also, to me, an element of, of this time-stop power is like, it plays into the fantasy of a guy who is trying to achieve something amazing, but he is beset by all this other stuff, all this background noise, so many things like distracting him from what he's trying to do, and the fantasy of being able to just stop everything and focus on the one thing he wants to work on. Does that, like, to me, especially for like, a filmmaker like Coppola, I'm sure that that's part of it for him.

• 16:29Speaker 07

  Well, it reminds me of the, it reminds me of the, the story of, I've heard about Stanley Kubrick and Jerry Lewis talking, that they were both editing movies at the same facility, and both took a break at the same time, and Jerry Lewis was like, well, you can't polish a turd, and Kubrick says, you can if you freeze it. And it's sort of this idea that if you can just stop time, then you can, you can do the work that otherwise would be impossible. You know, if you could just freeze something in place, you know.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Sorry, I got a leg cramp, so I'm, I'm dancing around my chair. Okay, so, that's Caesar Catalina, we know who he is, he's super cool. Now, the mayor of New Rome is in a bit of a pickle, that's Mayor Frank Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito, who plays a little hammy. I feel like, uh, Adam Driver is pretty straight in this one. I mean, well, I was saying, I mean, he's, like, Driver is...

• 17:20Speaker 06

  Big, like you can't not be in this movie. I mean, like the one, I mean, there are some performances that aren't big and they suffer for it. I think that I admire.

• 17:27Speaker 07

  And the best performances in the movie are the biggest performances, I feel like.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  Well, I, here's what, here's what I'd say. There are very hammy performances in this movie that are fun to watch because what else are you gonna do in a movie called Megalopolis with all this stuff in it than chew the scenery? And then there's Adam Driver, who magically seems to create a grounded and consistent character despite the movie around him being gibberish. Like, he's amazing. And then there's, we'll get, we'll get to her, but like the female lead is sort of lost in this movie because she is giving a small performance and the movie is not helping her out.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Natalie Emanuel, who is the daughter.

• 18:02Speaker 06

  Is good in other things, but is, is sort of not served by the film at all.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, did you see her in that John Woo killer remake where she does the very realistic jump and then latch her legs around a guy's neck and spin around shooting every other dude in the room? It's amazing.

• 18:17Speaker 06

  It's a solid move.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  It's cool. I mean, if you're gonna use a move.

• 18:19Speaker 07

  That's why people do it all the time. That's why it's such a common move. Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  It's a great move, but you can only do it once. Um, okay.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  Now, Adam Driver is set up, it feels like it's set up at first, this is the movie I was expecting at least, was it is a battle between the mayor and the designer over the future of this portion of the city. And they each have competing goals and we're gonna see the pros and cons of each. And it quickly becomes, even though Adam Driver is kind of a Robert Mosseff character, it quickly becomes, no, he's a genius. And everyone needs to just like, STFU and let him do whatever he wants to do, you know?

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and this kind of comes to a head in the first scene where we're also introduced to the mayor's daughter, Julia Cicero, who seems to be a vapid club girl, but she, but it turns out that she's much more than that. If anything, because she is able to witness Caesar when he stops time, she, she, it stops for her as well and she can see what's going on.

• 19:13Speaker 07

  She, she can, she can witness the stopping of time and it doesn't affect her, which seems to be an indicator, yeah, that she has a hidden, she has the hidden artistic, you know, ability or at least intellectual skill that Caesar has.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  And then the last, like, big faction, I guess, in this is Crassus, who is the owner of the largest bank. He's a very rich old man, played by John Voight, who, guys, I think he knew, I think he knew what he was doing here. He's, he brings a lot of juice.

• 19:41Speaker 07

  Well, as we'll see, he does deliver the best line in the entire movie, uh, later, later towards the end of the film.

• 19:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, he's had a lot of, uh, practice play, like both playing and being ritual asshole, so.

• 19:52Speaker 07

  And doddering.

• 19:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's his thing.

• 19:55Speaker 07

  Now, there's, now, we should mention also, there's a lot of little side minor characters that pop up around here. They're all played by, for the most part, but like Dustin Hoffman shows up, James Remar shows up, like DB Sweeney shows up, like, it's all these well-known faces.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  DB Sweeney?

• 20:08Speaker 06

  From the cut again?

• 20:11Speaker 03

  I know. Uh, like Jason Schwartzman has a very good scene later on where he plays drums.

• 20:16Speaker 07

  Yes, like Talia Shire, family member of Francois Coppola shows up, like, there's, but it's a, it's one of these, where it feels like one of these movies that is overstuffed with people, and you have to imagine there is hours and hours of footage.

• 20:28Speaker 06

  Did you mention Laurence Fishburne, who, uh?

• 20:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, Laurence Fishburne, who's the narrator slash chauffeur, yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  And we also haven't even touched on the other two characters, other two important characters. We have the son of Crassus, Claudio, played by Shia LaBeouf.

• 20:43Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  And, uh, Wow Platinum, uh, journalist extraordinaire played by...

• 20:50Speaker 07

  She's very, she's very clearly a take on Maria Bartiromo. Maria Bartiromo, the, the money bunny, because she calls herself the money honey in this, right? Or is it the other way around? Maria Bartiromo, she's now, she's just a straightforward Trump, Trump all the time person. But her whole thing was she was the CNBC kind of like lady reporter, and they used to call her, whatever one Wow Platinum is in this, she's the other one of either the money bunny or the money honey, and I don't remember which one is which.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Listeners, write in.

• 21:17Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Or don't.

• 21:19Speaker 07

  But these are, but these are, I mean, we'll get like, much as, uh, is it Jared Leto in House of Gushi, who, uh, right, much as his performance is at the level the movie wants to be at, I feel like these two are at the level the movie wants to be at, which is cartoonish, you know?

• 21:32Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it feels very much like Aubrey Plaza's doing a performance of her character, April Ludgate, doing a performance of this character almost.

• 21:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  So we're kind of introduced to this drama and these different personalities at a press conference that is held over a scale model of what the city is supposed to look like, I guess, where they're like walking around on like, what, gantries and like?

• 21:57Speaker 07

  Now, Roman, you know, you know, urban studies stuff. Is this usually how like a new, a new city development is, is unveiled by everyone walking on a catwalk over it? And it's very dimly lit and people are arguing with each other in the catwalk?

• 22:08Roman Mars?

  Yeah, it's similar to all the ones I've been to for sure. But is it the dramatic lighting, all this sort of thing? It just, this is where the beginning of the nonsense, especially that the big talk with nothing inside of the big talk.

• 22:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, then, apparently Adam Driver had a speech that he was supposed to deliver in this scene. And Coppola, to loosen him up, said, why don't you just go out there and do the To Be or Not To Be soliloquy from Hamlet? And he did it. And Coppola was like, I like that more. I'll put that in the movie. So that's why Adam Driver just goes out and does To Be or Not To Be. And it's a, it's not a bad performance of that soliloquy, but it, it's the whole, the whole time I was reaching to be like, why is he doing this in this moment? Because I wasn't yet far enough into the movie to realize there's not really a logical reason for a lot of the things to happen in the movie.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Right. So we get a little bit of further backstory. We get, turns out that Caesar Catalina has a tragic backstory. His wife was potentially, what, like, killed by him? Is there, that's the belief is that he may or may not have been involved in her death or a car accident that she was injured?

• 23:05Speaker 07

  She was found, she was found drowned in a car at the bottom of the lake or bottom of the river in a, in a shot that is an explicit call to The Night of the Hunter, to Shelley Winters in the, in the drowned car in Night of the Hunter. And so we already know that before he was mayor, Giancarlo Esposito was the DA and he brought Adam Driver up on charges and took him to court accusing him of that murder. And he was acquitted of that murder. And so, yeah, there's, there's bad blood and he's a bad boy. It's bad blood over a bad boy.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Now, speaking of bad boys.

• 23:34Speaker 07

  Driver, ironically, they said that he drove her to death.

• 23:39Speaker 06

  That is ironic.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  That's ironic. Thanks for explaining irony to me. So, uh, he's a bad boy because he's also kind of secretly dating WoW Platinum. And they have this scene where they are kind of hooking up in a very messy hotel room or apartment. He kind of spurs her, uh, spurns her affections. There is the lovely line where she is down on her knees and says, Caesar, you're anal as hell. Luckily, I'm oral as hell. And I was like hooting and hollering in the theater.

• 24:07Speaker 07

  That's the Academy Award winner for the screenplay for Patton, who wrote that line.

• 24:11Speaker 06

  Shot off your pistols into the air.

• 24:16Roman Mars?

  Should we set up here one, one thing when there are, um, in this press conference, talking about the different visions for the city? I think the mayor wants to do this sort of garish, you know, Biff style casino in this space. And, um, and then Adam Driver is like talking and he quotes Hamlet and stuff, but there's no presentation of what his ideas are really, or did I just miss them?

• 24:42Speaker 07

  No, it's kind of, I think it's kind of taken for granted on his part and maybe the movie's part that everyone already kind of has a sense of Megalopolis, his, his dream city that he wants to build. But he does not present, I think that was probably the speech he was gonna give in the original screenplay.

• 24:56Speaker 06

  Well, that's the thing, like I also, you know, look, casinos are basically never the answer, but the way it's at least presented.

• 25:04Speaker 07

  They're the answer to where can I get a cheap steak at three in the morning?

• 25:07Speaker 06

  The way is it is at least presented here is the mayor is like, hey, you've got all these, you know, pie in the sky ideas, but like there are people who need things right now and I'm going to give them to them. And in the absence of Adam Driver's character having any argument, I'm like, I don't know, it sounds like he's making some sense. Like, why am I supposed to, uh, sympathize immediately with Adam Driver? Cause he can stop time? Great.

• 25:33Roman Mars?

  But he, he, he says something to the effect of like, let's just give the people what they want. We need to serve the people and this is the way we serve the people to this casino. And then, and then Adam Driver does, offers, right, no counter argument whatsoever. So I was trying to get like, this is my, my, this is the beginning of my frustration with this movie is like, is.

• 25:52Speaker 07

  Up till now, you were totally on board. You're like, I love it. I love it.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. You showed up wearing a Caesar Catalina t-shirt.

• 26:00Roman Mars?

  Foam finger and everything. But it's, if you're gonna be broad stroke fables, then you have to present ideas. You know what I mean? Like, if the characters are not gonna make sense and they're gonna be completely arched and not have natural dialogue, if the sets are all fantastical and stuff, that usually means that you're clearing the way of all this nuance so you can tell, you know, like a war of ideas, of good and evil or whatever. And this is where I begin to like, what is the premise of Megalopolis? You know, like, what is this utopia mean other than the word utopia? What is the casino? Like, is it really about serving the people? Is it about corruption? Is it about both?

• 26:45Roman Mars?

  None of these things are clear here. And I'm just like, I'm just at sea with this idea of like, and so much of it is like, is that the deflation of this moment of like, oh, it isn't that Caesar is a Moses-like figure. It's, oh, he is just a genius. Like, he's just great.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's the thing kind of Elliott pointed out. Like, it'd be one thing if the idea was that Caesar is this guy who, he believes that people don't understand what they actually want or need. And that he's at odds with the mayor and there's an actual question as to which one, who's right. But the movie is like, nope, Caesar's right. You gotta listen to the smart guy.

• 27:27Speaker 07

  I really think the way that it makes sense to me is just if I look at it as a metaphor for Francis Ford Coppola, the genius. And the mayor is a studio executive and he's saying, make me a superhero movie. We gotta serve the people and that's what they want. They want a flashy casino. And Francis Ford Coppola's like, no, I wanna build them the movies of the future that will create new ways to think and feel. And I have this new element, Copilon, I mean Megalon, like, that's the only way. And I don't know if it was that.

• 27:53Roman Mars?

  It would've been funnier if they called it Copilon.

• 27:55Speaker 07

  And I don't know if it's that explicit in his head or if that was intentional. That's the way I can read it as a metaphor where it starts to make sense.

• 28:02Roman Mars?

  But that's the only thing that makes, that's the only way it makes sense.

• 28:05Speaker 07

  But he also seems to think that it makes sense on a political level of like, this is a story about politics and populism versus.

• 28:13Speaker 07

  It's one of those things where it's like, obviously populism is bad. We need a genius who can cut through things. And it's like, well, that's fascism.

• 28:22Speaker 07

  The thing you present is like the mob gone unruly. Your only solution is that we all just trust Adam Driver's magic metal, you know?

• 28:29Roman Mars?

  But that's the thing of like, as you're doing the synopsis, that the main thing that is like to be conveyed about this moment is that the ideas are almost there as if there's some kind of thing to be said or some point, but they don't connect. And instead, it just moves on, you know, like, and it's very, very weird. That's what I was like, I was like, what is it? What does it mean to serve the people with a casino?

• 28:56Roman Mars?

  I just like these ideas, like, none of them stick, none of them are consistent. And, and, and it just keeps rolling on.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  I think Giancarlo Esposito or Mayor Cicero, my mistake. His plan, actually, there is something, he's saying, we need to build a casino because it'll, like, the people want it. At least that's a concrete thing explanation. Like, I can at least understand that.

• 29:17Speaker 07

  I mean, we learn more about what Megalopolis will be like later. You'll get to it, Stuart, the plant buildings and the glowing, moving sidewalks.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  The plant buildings are home for everyone, with apparently tons of space now. I don't know. I'm like, did half the population die? Did everybody get?

• 29:33Speaker 07

  There was, you'll see, there's a disaster that opens up quite a bit of extra space for building.

• 29:36Speaker 06

  15 minutes of this, two and a half hours.

• 29:38Roman Mars?

  I'm sorry for moving us backward when we should be moving forward. So, so this scene happens, you realize his relationship with Wow Platinum.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  With Wow Platinum, exactly.

• 29:46Roman Mars?

  I kind of enjoy that name. That was one where I was like, I'm into that.

• 29:49Speaker 07

  Everything about, everything about Aubrey Plaza's performance and character is on the level of a political editorial cartoon, which is kind of where this movie wants to exist, you know? And she knows how to play these characters, you know?

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, Julia Cicero bluffs her way into the office of Caesar Catalina. And we have a little bit of a verbal sparring between the two of them. She wants to get in on this Caesar Catalina Department of this Design Authority stuff. And he is initially, go on.

• 30:18Speaker 07

  Well, she like sent him a, like, a letter to insult him, right? And then she wants it back. She doesn't want to embarrass her dad.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  And she also like, but she's also like, I think she's interested in him. She saw him stop time for God's sakes.

• 30:30Speaker 07

  This is like.

• 30:31Speaker 06

  He looks like Adam Driver.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  And he looks like Adam Driver, which is not to everyone's taste, but you know, most people.

• 30:37Speaker 07

  This is where he tells her to go back to the club, which is a moment that in context, it does not seem as bonkers as it does when it's, when it's.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  A fun reading is what it is. It's a fun line reading.

• 30:45Speaker 07

  And he's trying to make fun of, he's trying to make fun of the idea of the cool club.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  He also, this is also where he says like, like what, why do you deserve to be exposed to the riches of my Emersonian mind or whatever, which is also a very funny line.

• 30:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Uh, it's great. Um, and then he like.

• 31:02Speaker 06

  It's everyone on Twitter.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's great. He then takes her, he then takes her to, uh, a skate, a not, probably not perfectly to scale cardboard model of the city. And has her walk through it with her eyes closed and she pictures the megalopolis that could be, uh, you know, with again, like floating walkways and streets. And everything's glowing and looks like it's made out of plants. It's super bio organic.

• 31:27Speaker 07

  It looks like every CGI rendering proposal of a skyscraper in, in New York, when they're, when they're like, here's what we're going to do with this space that opened up. And it's always a CGI rendering where everything's super glossy and there's trees all over and.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it looks like, like the cover of a super, super melodic tech death, uh, album cover, you know?

• 31:45Speaker 07

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  I also hate to slow us down, but in terms of like the look of this film.

• 31:49Speaker 07

  I hate to slow us down, but in.

• 31:54Speaker 06

  I'd like to do the Bob and Ray Slow Talkers of America sketch.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  Great sketch.

• 31:59Speaker 06

  The, the, the look of this movie is, is all over the place, partly I assume because, you know, some of it was filmed years ago. And then some of it was filmed more recently and was all sort of jammed together. And, you know, he, it's what affects. I mean, even though this is $120 million of his own money, it wasn't enough. And like, it's what he could afford in certain scenes like, but I think that there's some scenes that are genuinely like beautiful and visually striking. And some of them look like, uh, you know, maybe a C tier, uh, CGI, uh, FX companies reel. And some of it looks like they got it off of Storybox or something, you know?

• 32:41Speaker 06

  Which is, you know, there's some beautiful stuff on there, a former, uh, a former sponsor of ours.

• 32:45Speaker 07

  Has a lot of great footage, but it's not what you would expect from a, a major motion picture.

• 32:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's odd to see what seems to be stock footage just sort of interspersed in this thing.

• 32:55Speaker 07

  This is definitely the story, there's a, so they were making a documentary about them making this movie at the same time that they're making the movie and it hasn't come out yet. And I'm so curious to watch it because I have to imagine there were huge swaths of the film that were changed at the last minute because of budget reasons and things like that.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  So the mayor finds out that his daughter's been spending some time with Caesar and he's not a big fan of this at some, uh, right around now he goes, uh, he has a parade and everybody's like mean to him and don't like him.

• 33:22Speaker 07

  They're all booing him, yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Uh, I think also this is where a random guy gets recruited off the street to be one of Claudio's henchmen. I think that's the same guy.

• 33:30Speaker 07

  In the marching band, he gets recruited to go off of Claudio. And I'm like, I guess this is going to be an important character, but it's not really. Like they spend a surprising amount of time with the marching band, wondering where this guy went to, considering we barely ever see any of them ever again.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Okay, uh, fast forward a little bit there. It is nighttime Caesar jumps in his car and goes driving through the rainy streets of New Rome. He is pursued by Claudio and Julia in separate cars. They, we have like a little rainy street chase, I guess.

• 34:00Speaker 07

  And this is where we have one of the, there are a couple of moments in this movie that I do think are brilliant and beautiful. And this is where he's going, driving through the city and he's seeing the statues of the city, these huge kind of Greco-Roman type statues are literally sagging out of fatigue and dropping the things they're holding and leaning against buildings. And it's like such, I think it's such a, it's a beautiful way of getting across the idea of a society that is exhausted itself, that is losing the energy that, that made it. Great ones. And I'm like, oh, this is the kind of beautiful, straightforward metaphor that that he's not achieving through most of the movie, in my opinion.

• 34:33Speaker 06

  Right. Well, it's a sort of directly expressionist look that I think part of the problem is it doesn't settle on one thing. If it was all sort of poetic in the same way, it would feel better. But there's a lot of disjointed, different ways of doing it.

• 34:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 34:50Roman Mars?

  I had the same feeling when I saw this. This scene was the most where I was like, oh, this is what this kind of fantastical imagery is. This is where it's achieving what I think it's supposed to be achieving the whole time. This is where it hit me. And I was like, I can deal with this artifice. I can deal with the fact that this all feels like green screen, but not, you know, like purposeful, you know, kind of green screen. And it just felt that that was my favorite visual moment in the whole movie. Was the statues and the and the sort of dilapidated parts of of New Rome. That worked on me totally.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  And it's it's a bit of a sledgehammer, but I feel like it is very clear what it's trying to say. It's not as messy as some of the other stuff.

• 35:31Roman Mars?

  But that's where it delivers being a fable, is the thing. That's like, I want it to, yeah. I want it to be a fable.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. When you saw those statues, you're like, we have title finally. So.

• 35:41Speaker 06

  Rob and I have a movie for you called The Fableman's that you might enjoy more.

• 35:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a real fable. Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 06

  Fable oriented.

• 35:48Speaker 07

  It's about a little mouse.

• 35:52Speaker 07

  That's sorry, that's Fable Goes West. I apologize. It's an American tale, Fable Goes West.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Caesar's car stops in front of a mysterious glowing flower stall that appears in the middle of the street. Julius sees this and says, that doesn't make sense. And I'm like, it doesn't make sense. You're right. And then he takes the flowers he buys and goes up into a dilapidated apartment building. She pursues him. In his mind, he sees that he's walking into an appointment, like a well-appointed room with attendants and his wife is in the bed. But in reality, he's just like sitting on a bed, right? Like, there's there's no wife there at all. He's like.

• 36:29Speaker 07

  He's hallucinating that his wife is still alive and is being cared for, and he's visiting her. And Julia seems to see. Both reality and the hallucination. She sees reality, but seems to understand, oh, he thinks his wife is there.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  And Claudio is also spying on on this as well, but he doesn't see the hallucination, I don't believe.

• 36:46Speaker 07

  It's also, I never could quite figure out why, I know why Claudio gets mad later. I could never quite figure out why Claudio cares about Caesar right now.

• 36:54Speaker 03

  He has like a burn book of all the people he doesn't like and Caesar Catalina has written down on that.

• 36:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, maybe that's it. This character doesn't need a motivation. I mean, and Shia LaBeouf, I think he's harnessing his natural unlikability for this character in a really strong way.

• 37:09Speaker 06

  No, that's true. You don't need a backstory. You're like, oh, this guy's just, you know, he's just a jerk. Who doesn't like this guy?

• 37:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  I just assumed that Caesar Catalina, like, I don't know, accidentally threw some logs in the fire when they were sitting around the fire and it burned off Shia LaBeouf's eyebrows. So that's why he hates him. Cause he has, he has like painted on eyebrows or something, right?

• 37:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, just like Superman and Lex Luthor. Yeah.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  Okay, so shortly after this, I guess it's like the next day or something. Caesar takes Julia up in his private elevator to the top of the Design Authority, where he has his like, I don't know, like thinking area, which is like a clock on its side and a bunch of ledges and girders that looks kinda like the, to me, it looked like a, like a set for like a play, right? And where they can like gaze down upon all of, all of New Rome and kind of see as everything moves.

• 38:03Speaker 06

  It's sort of like they're hanging out on top of like a mobile, like you put over a, either a baby or you'd have in an art gallery on, on either side of the sort of spectrum of mobiles.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  I think it's, I think around now, he kind of explains what he's doing or what he's thinking, but I don't really remember this scene outside of them just hanging out on clocks.

• 38:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Meanwhile.

• 38:28Speaker 07

  I think there's a, there's, yeah, there's nothing, in my notes, there's nothing particular. It just says clocks. Yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, we get a wedding between Wow Platinum and Crassus, uh, the banker guy. Is that, I don't remember his last name. Is it, is that his last name?

• 38:46Speaker 07

  I think Crassus is his last name.

• 38:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, Crassus John Voight.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, John Voight, okay. So this is clearly, Wow Platinum is, this is a power play for her. She wants access to his money.

• 38:56Speaker 07

  Hamilton Crassus the third.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Thank you. Hamilton Crassus the third. Thank you. Um, and so we have a big fancy wedding. It has, it's a wedding that has everything. It has gladiators. It has guys riding chariots around on the inside of a coliseum. Caesar shows up and a pop star shows up wearing a dress made out of-

• 39:15Speaker 06

  Wedding.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 06

  To me, honestly, guys, I was just like, oh, they all went to the circus. And I was like, fine with that as an explanation. I'm just like-

• 39:26Speaker 07

  I don't know if it's-

• 39:27Speaker 06

  They're at the circus now.

• 39:28Speaker 07

  I don't know if it's necessarily the wedding, but it's- It's a celebration of their, of their patroal though, right?

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Maybe it's a little reception. Who knows?

• 39:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, but that's why they're doing it. Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And there's a pop star wearing, I, I can't remember if this is the same pop star from later, Vestas Sweetwater, who shows up wearing a dress made out of megalon, which is-

• 39:45Speaker 07

  This is Vestas Sweetwater.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  This megalon dress is perfect camouflage. Does not matter for later. There's no moment where you're like, oh, you can use megalon if you cover yourself like the predator can't see you or something. That doesn't matter.

• 39:59Speaker 07

  Nope. It's just a one-off idea that it's a dress made out of megalon where it's, there's cameras in the back that project what's behind you on the front. So you turn invisible and that's, that's it. Just an idea, just an effect.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  There's a ton of Roman stuff. We haven't really even talked about the outfits and stuff. Like everybody has like vaguely futuristic Roman outfits. You know, it's futuristic cause like men's suits have slightly different collar cuts.

• 40:24Speaker 07

  Yeah. Like sometimes they don't have, it's like a severe suit cut, but they also have little, they have like little uh, laurel wreaths behind their ear, you know, leaves behind their ears. So it's like-

• 40:32Roman Mars?

  Kind of epaulettes to make them like their shoulders very broad, lots of capes and stuff like-

• 40:37Speaker 07

  It's the kind of stuff that has been done on stage in productions of Julius Caesar since at least the 1930s.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:42Speaker 07

  Where it's like, mm, well, we'll pull out how it's like modern political times by having everyone wear suits, but they still have like Roman haircuts, you know, that kind of thing.

• 40:52Speaker 06

  You know, Roman talked earlier about when the movie started to sort of lose him, uh, and, uh, I want to present-

• 40:59Speaker 07

  You meant when he lost himself in the film, right, Roman?

• 41:01Speaker 06

  He lost himself in the moment. No, I want to talk about the inverse, where the movie, which up until this point, had only baffled and dismayed me, started to get me a little bit. And that like during this whole circus sequence, I'm like, oh, like it started to engage me in spite of myself, partly because I was like, oh, I don't need to care what any of it means. Like, at least the movie at this point was throwing a bunch of stuff at me. And I appreciated that. Like, this is one of the sequences, maybe, you know, before they started running out of money, it felt very like, full of splendor and ideas. And none of it necessarily

• 41:44Speaker 06

  hung together in any thematic way that made any sense to me. But I'm like, oh, okay, movie.

• 41:50Roman Mars?

  It's kind of delivering the bread in circuses, that to placate, you know, people in the audience.

• 41:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm one of the idiot rabble.

• 41:59Speaker 07

  You're like, finally, I can relate to someone in the movie, the people screaming for blood in the stands.

• 42:06Roman Mars?

  It is throwing a lot. It's, but it's like, I think the point, which is easy to get into, is the sneering at the, at the, at the wealthy and, you know, sneering at their excess and stuff like that. And it just, it's totally, I mean, it works, that works.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  And Caesar seems to be doing his best to play along, but he is clearly kind of disgusted by this whole situation. He ends up getting very drunk and getting himself into trouble. Meanwhile, scheming little Claudio, who is, who is, I think he's in drag at this point, he sneaks into like, the control booth and he puts a, he frames Caesar and Vesta Sweetwater, who has been, who is a, like a Taylor Swift style pop star. And the idea is that she is supposed to be a, like a young virgin, right?

• 42:58Speaker 06

  Yes, she's both made a big deal out of, like, I'm going to keep myself a virgin. And she's presenting herself as being younger than she is. So this is.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Learned later, yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is like statutory rape, it seems, but it's not actually.

• 43:13Roman Mars?

  But isn't the premise of all this like that these old men, the old rich oligarchy is betting on her virginity, like betting, is that happening?

• 43:23Speaker 03

  I believe that's true, yes.

• 43:25Speaker 07

  They're like betting that she's gonna keep her promise, right? Like, they're not auctioning off her virginity, right?

• 43:29Roman Mars?

  I thought that's what that was happening there, like that, but, but you guys took notes, I didn't.

• 43:34Speaker 07

  Somehow, somehow the economy of this city is balanced on her promise of staying a virgin until marriage, yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I thought they were sort of like bidding to keep her a virgin somehow, but I don't know what the mechanics of that would be.

• 43:47Speaker 07

  I mean, it's ancient, it's ancient Rome stuff, though, because it's like, right? That like the Vestal Virgins, their virginity was one of the things underpinning the safety of, the spiritual safety of Rome and like, that like, that's part of the, part of the issue with, um, with trying to compare, do a metaphor where you're like, ancient Rome is like nowadays, is that the basic foundational underpinnings of society are so different compared to ancient Rome and like, Rome, yeah, they had a senate, yeah, that's true, but also like, religion and politics were the same thing, and like, it was just taken for granted that if the city was having trouble, you'd make some sacrifices to the gods and hopefully that'll keep things right the way you thought, like.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  In a way, don't we do that these days?

• 44:25Speaker 07

  You're right, Stu, I'm the one who's being naive, yeah.

• 44:28Roman Mars?

  But I did interpret this as way more sinister than, than maybe it was.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, my notes say fundraiser, question mark, pledging for purity, question mark.

• 44:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think they are, I think they are, I think it's like a, it's like a marathon fundraiser, where like, you're pledging someone to run a marathon, I think they're pledging for her to just stay a virgin. And so, when it, when they see her on tape, supposedly in bed with, uh, with Caesar Catalina.

• 44:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're like, I wasted all that money.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and everybody, and it makes everyone.

• 44:57Speaker 07

  The underpinning of our city is all wrong, yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, everyone is incensed by this, like, the crowd is, is banging for blood.

• 45:03Speaker 07

  This is after her big musical number, though, right?

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, after her big musical number, I didn't talk about it, but you, do you want to talk about it, Elliot?

• 45:09Speaker 07

  She does, she does this big musical number where there's suddenly like six of her singing all at the same time, and, again, doesn't make sense, doesn't really work thematically, never explained, but it's a, it's a cool thing.

• 45:20Roman Mars?

  Looks bad.

• 45:21Speaker 07

  A cool looking scene, and I have to say, actually, the Vesta stuff is. Her, her, the last we see of her character is one of my favorite moments in the movie also, but we'll, we'll get to that. Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Please get to it because I don't have it written down in my notes.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  That's where, okay. Well, when it's, I don't remember if it happens here, but like the scandal comes out that this video has been shown by every, to, uh, you know, uh, Shia LaBeouf arranged for this video to be shown on the Jumbotron of her in bed with, uh, with Adam Driver. And then suddenly like the screen fills with fire and there are headlines that are like, Vesta reimagines herself and suddenly she is singing like a bad girl song. Now she's reimagined herself as like a sinful bad girl and she's a superstar again. And it's so, it feels so much like Francis Ford Coppola is like, who are the scenes into? Taylor Swift? What does she do? Okay. I'll do something. I, this is my understanding of what that is. And it happens so it's like the movie suddenly turns into an advertisement for something else, for some other movie.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think that, that's a little sequence that happens a little bit later and it's done like a totally like classic MTV News style, like explosion bit and then like scenes of societal collapse. Um, okay. Uh, Adam Driver, Caesar Catalina gets too drunk, gets beaten up by some guys. Uh, he gets whisked away. The cops arrest him, uh, for statutory rape because of the video. Um, but then Julia goes into the archives and finds out actually Vesta Sweetwater is older than she's been telling everybody. So she exonerates him, problem almost immediately solved.

• 46:49Speaker 07

  But also, and don't we find out that the video is fake?

• 46:52Speaker 06

  The video is fake too. They like double up the explanations of like why this is fine.

• 46:57Speaker 07

  It feels like, it feels like the movie is feinting towards, feinting F E I N T. Not feinting like, oh, stars and garters. Oh, you know, the vapors. Yeah. It's taking a feint towards this guy might be a genius, but he's not a good guy. But instead the movie is very quickly be like, no, no, no, he's a good guy pretending to be a bad guy. And he's, he tells Julia, you gotta pretend to be bad or people lose interest in you or, or something like that. And they're like, not only was she not a minor, he also didn't have sex with her anyway. So it's fine. He's double good. He's, he's, nothing to do. He's just, he's a startling saint, you know?

• 47:28Speaker 03

  So around now, we have Caesar and Julia meeting on top of his girder watch ledge. And they have a conversation and with her help, he's able to stop time again. He had kind of lost his powers for a little bit.

• 47:41Speaker 07

  Like Spider-Man, sometimes he loses his powers when he's in a bad mood or depressed.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  And then they, then they have a kind of sloppy make out session. I thought that was pretty great. And then, then we get, and they like decide to work together and we get a montage of them like kind of falling in love and doing some work in his, in the, at the design authority.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  The

• 48:00Roman Mars?

  Which by the way, has really boring design. Like, I really wanted those jackets to pop a little bit more. I was really bummed about that because I was like, design authority. All right, let's spend some time in the design authority. Nothing, nothing.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  Moog layer would be upset.

• 48:17Speaker 07

  Robert Moses would be upset. He was all about, say what you will about him in his early work, at least he's got a real design eye, you know?

• 48:23Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Claudio, meanwhile, one scheme foiled. He's got more schemes to be had. He starts trumping it up. He sees what's going on and he's like, starts getting the, getting the masses all angry. They start backing him. Later on, there's a scene where he's giving a stump speech and the stump is literally char, carved into the shape of a swastika. Is that, is that right? It's pretty messed up. Okay.

• 48:48Speaker 07

  That's, I think that movie's pretty subtle. I don't know if that, something like that would happen in this movie.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  We find out that Julia is pregnant. Uh oh, there's a baby on the way. Master builders, build a baby. Mayor Cicero doesn't like this idea. He doesn't like the idea that they're going to have a kid. So he tries to, basically tries to buy off Caesar. He's like, hey, you can do whatever you want. Just don't like leave my daughter out of this. Get out of this.

• 49:17Speaker 07

  Stuart, you're doing a great job of condensing this movie. Did you skip over the part where the mayor has a dream where a cloud with a hand grabs the moon and his wife accurately says that that's an omen? Yeah, okay.

• 49:29Speaker 07

  I just want to make sure that we get the, we're getting some, the full.

• 49:32Roman Mars?

  I'm sorry.

• 49:33Speaker 07

  I don't want people to listen to this and be like, this movie doesn't sound that crazy. And it's like, oh yeah, what about the scene where the mayor has his dream about a cloud grabbing the moon?

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it doesn't, doesn't really figure into much, but it looks cool. I don't know when it happens in the movie, but so I just want to say the visual that has stuck with me, there's like,

• 49:51Speaker 06

  They're under the water and there's some like people who are rocks. They're like painted as rocks and then they sort of move and you see that they're people. And I, and it is like, just like half a second. But I was like, that's a really gorgeous image right in the middle of this thing that I'm not sure what it's saying.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's like tons of stuff in here. Like there's moments where Caesar is like, has like a floating mirror that shows his memories made out of Megalon.

• 50:18Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  And then.

• 50:21Speaker 07

  Megalon mostly, Megalon is like Herbie the robot from the Fantastic Four cartoon. Or like, uh, who's the little alien that hung out with the Flintstones? What was that guy's name?

• 50:29Speaker 06

  The Great Gazoo?

• 50:30Speaker 07

  The Great Gazoo. The Megalon is just kind of a lump that kind of floats in the air around Caesar's apartment and does stuff sometimes. But he'll just be working and the Megalon will kind of float too close to him and have to push it out of the way. Cause it's getting too close to his face. And it's like, was it like, it's such a, it's such a strange, like goofy thing to have. And it's like, oh yeah, it's this is the miracle medal of the future. Anyway, I got a lump of it and it just floats around my apartment. It's kind of irritating.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  And they have like a family dinner at one point where they invite the mayor and his wife. Uh, and they're like playing cards in this like weird magical Megalon house, right?

• 51:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  And they're like discussing string theory and shit.

• 51:04Speaker 07

  It's like a Megalopolis exhibit. It's like an exhibit of what Megalop, Megalops would, would be like, or something like that.

• 51:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. Does that come after the, the destruction of the city?

• 51:14Speaker 07

  That's before the destruction of the city, but after we learn that a Soviet satellite is falling to earth and will crash into the city.

• 51:19Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  Why? I forgot about that satellite.

• 51:24Speaker 07

  Out of, there's a, there's a Soviet satellite that, yeah, is, they're like, anyway, it's, it's orbit has decayed. It's going to hit the city and they're like, whoa, oh, and then they don't do anything about it for a while.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  Man, I'm starting to realize that taking these notes in the dark, it was a lot easier to take notes on Madame Web.

• 51:41Speaker 06

  A more straightforward film that, you know, follows a screenplay formula that has been entrenched in Hollywood that, uh.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  So, yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 07

  By this, by this point, I think we've also, Adam Driver has also kind of shown us his, some of the visual visions of what Megalops will look like. And the buildings all look like plants and the idea is like the, the buildings grow as people need. Them like like it's it's a there's homes for everybody because the buildings can grow and change with the needs of the people. Which is a beautiful idea. Roman, how how close are we to that?

• 52:11Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 52:12Speaker 07

  Has anyone tried that yet? Growing buildings?

• 52:14Roman Mars?

  I mean, in in a way, like Hunter Vassar was like really into. Like mold and letting things grow because it was like true organic space and that. The straight line is the godless line and you're gonna want like.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Oh, Jeff Vandermeer.

• 52:28Roman Mars?

  You're gonna want.

• 52:29Speaker 06

  Of course, he died from the mold in his lungs, I assume.

• 52:32Roman Mars?

  Totally. So there's a lot of there was there have been big lofty ideals about a kind of like organic architecture. In it in like in a literal way, like to make it and then and then there's the term organic architecture like Frank Lloyd Wright style. That is that just means it's reactive to it, you know, and changes to people's needs. So that's all kind of. That those ideas are out there. That that is the closest thing this sort of dunder headed movie gets to an idea.

• 53:00Roman Mars?

  That and and it's it's the first time you sort of get to this. Yeah, like what does this utopia mean that it's that it's like organic and reactive? And serves people is actually that that's an actual idea. Everything else has just been like glowing. Walkways and nonsense like where I'm like, what is this for? Like, what do you have to have like? Utopias like have to have a concept or something and this one.

• 53:25Speaker 07

  Like, what is what is the you part of the topia? Like, what does it do? Yeah.

• 53:29Roman Mars?

  It really is. It's it's it was it's really weird, but that's one idea like that'd be great, like having.

• 53:36Roman Mars?

  Magical substance that requires like no thought or care or design or whatever, like politics.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Creates no waste, requires no energy to and it just does it all.

• 53:47Roman Mars?

  And this is like like a huge problem, like like that you're going to use some technology is going to save us rather than people like. Coming together and actually coming with solutions and working stuff out is like is just. It's just a nonsense idea that you the thing you're exploring for a couple of hours.

• 54:03Speaker 07

  You say that until Megalon does it, works its magic. Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Speaking of Megalon working its magic, at this point Caesar Catalina, probably right on the verge of explaining everything about his utopia, meets with a young 12 year old fan who actually turns out to be a hired assassin and shoots Caesar in the face.

• 54:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. Okay, so this is after, this is then after the city is destroyed by a satellite falling to earth, right? Because like, yeah, maybe, like, this is a, yeah, well, an amazingly large thing to happen and then not really be addressed that much. Like, we get some, like, scenes of catastrophe, like shadows being cast on the wall. The reason I bring it up is just because that card game, I was wondering about, one of the things that strikes me about this movie is, as we said, this is a movie that Coppola has been writing for decades and decades. I can only assume that the screenplay grew and grew and grew. And at certain points,

• 55:03Speaker 06

  it feels like they just shot every other 20 pages of it. Because people's relationships to each other will change wildly between scenes without explanation. Like, Juan Carlos Esposito was like, just saying, like, you know, trying to pay off Adam Driver to get away from his daughter. And then, like, in the next scene, they're all sort of like, you know, they don't love each other, but they're having a genial card game together. I'm like, okay, well, what happened here? And the only thing I can think of is like, oh, the city was destroyed, so they all came together. But it's not said or anything.

• 55:37Speaker 07

  I'm looking at my, because I wasn't sure if I was gonna have to do the summary today or not. So I took some notes also. And there's also, but you're right, Dan, because like, Dustin Hoffman's character, who's an assistant to the mayor, he dies off camera. We hear about, oh, yeah, he's dead now.

• 55:49Speaker 06

  We get one scene of like, a thing toppling and falling on him. And I'm like, that had to have been a whole sequence.

• 55:54Speaker 07

  And Shia LaBeouf runs for his position of alderman. And his guy, and then it's after that, that the mayor goes to Caesar and says, if you leave my daughter, I'll give you the evidence that I lied when I was prosecuting you. And you'll be able to destroy me and I'll put my support behind your projects. And at the same time, wow, Platinum approaches Catalina and is like, hey, look, why don't you come back, be with me again, and you can have all of Crassus's money. Everyone wants to be in the Caesar Catalina business. And he's like, no, no, no. And that's when.

• 56:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, and she seems to hypnotize Crassus into giving her control over the bank. And then Caesar is shot in the head by this child who, he should have been suspicious when a kid asked him to sign his book for him. Like, there's no way this kid is reading Caesar Catalina's book.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  I don't know, man. Everybody loves Caesar Catalina. I think that's pretty clear. Okay.

• 56:46Speaker 07

  But Stuart, how do they heal him?

• 56:48Speaker 03

  So he has this moment, at this point, I don't know about you guys, I'm like, wow, they killed him. That's crazy. And he has this like weird death dream, but then they end up healing him by fusing his head with some Megalon.

• 56:59Speaker 07

  They just stick Megalon on his head, on the open skull that's there, and this truly is an amazing building material.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  So we, at this point Caesar then goes.

• 57:09Speaker 07

  Oh, but then having the Megalon in his face gives him lots of like new powers and things like that.

• 57:13Speaker 06

  Like the multiple man?

• 57:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, he shows up at Crassus, Hamilton Crassus's apartment.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Claudio tries to harass him. Wow Platinum tries to make a move on him, but he reveals his Megalon, half-human, half-Megalon face, and it causes multiple images, and everybody is wowed by the majesty of his face.

• 57:34Speaker 07

  Especially WoW herself. And she is, so he's going there because she's frozen all of his bank accounts, using her power at the bank, in order to force him to something.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Force his hand, yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 07

  And then, yeah, she off herself again, and Crassus kind of interrupts it, but now who does WoW set her sights on if she can't control Caesar Catalina?

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Of course, she's gonna, she's gonna pick, I guess, the next best thing, and that's Claudio Crassus, that's right. And so she, we have a little sex scene. You were probably into this, right, Dan? It was like a, like a Game of Thrones-style sex position scene?

• 58:07Speaker 07

  It was kind of like a Game of Thrones-style sex scene where it's all about power and you're like, uh, is this, is this what they think sex is like? Or she's like, stick your face in my butt. Okay, now go over there. Lie down there.

• 58:18Speaker 06

  I mean, it can be like that.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, if you're doing it, right?

• 58:21Speaker 06

  I, I, by the way, I just, I just really love being on the Zoom call and watching Roman's face as he relives the plot. Like, he's like, oh, yeah, that did, that is a thing. Like, what?

• 58:32Roman Mars?

  I, I, I have been going through that where I was just like, the satellite, yeah. Oh, oh, my God. Yeah. That really is, oh, my God, this is a bunch of nonsense. Like, I had streamlined it into like, a much tighter movie in my memory than, than, than all this. I'm just like,

• 58:49Speaker 07

  you missed all the good parts. Long, winding road. Here's, here's my note for that satellite. I wrote, the mayor learns the Soviet satellite may crash into the city, dash, and then it does, question mark. So it did happen. And it, I think the upshot of that is the idea that it now has opened up even more land for building on. In real life, the real Roman Moses had to evict people. He didn't have Soviet satellites doing the job for him.

• 59:10Roman Mars?

  This is just, just a stew of really, truly problematic and nasty great man, like, tropes that like, that like, he's canceled for like 20 seconds, but he's such a genius. Like, obviously, all that stuff that they say about him is fake, you know, and, and, and should be forgiven in the first place because he's so great, or is all made up and a bunch of these me too, made up nonsense is, is coming after him and trying to take him down. All the people are conspiring in these like horrible ways. And it, and there's no notion that, that Adam Driver is just wrong. You know what I mean? And, and also, the idea of like, of, of what comes, like, how necessary destruction is to build something.

• 59:53Roman Mars?

  And then there's this god particle that fixes everything so that no one has to have like, actually hard thought and compromise. And it's, it's just, it's just, it's just, this is bad stuff. I mean, this is, this is real, like, like 13, 14 year old. Like, I can't believe an old man wrote this. You know what I mean? Like, this is like, this is what-

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  It feels like something made by somebody very young or very old.

• 1:00:15Speaker 07

  I know. I feel like I believe in either a very young man or a very old man.

• 1:00:18Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I guess.

• 1:00:19Speaker 06

  Or a very stoned man, which apparently he was.

• 1:00:21Speaker 07

  Or a gary old man.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  A gary old man? Uh, it, uh, it feels a lot like somebody like-

• 1:00:29Speaker 07

  Gary old banana, gary old banana, gary old banana.

• 1:00:31Speaker 06

  Gary old bananas?

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  It feels like somebody was like-

• 1:00:34Speaker 07

  Gary old man.

• 1:00:35Speaker 06

  I know what you're saying.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  Somebody was like, I want to, like, Coppola's like, I want to make a movie about city planning. And then he got high and read like, one Yodorowsky meta barons book. And he's like, I'm gonna do it like this.

• 1:00:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, it kind of feel, yeah, he was, he's like, eh, should I read the power broker or the ink call? Uh, I'll read them both. I'll just alternate pages.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Exactly. Um, okay.

• 1:00:56Speaker 07

  This is, so wait, I wanted to ask you guys, so this next part, I wanted, so Stuart, summarize it, and then I've got a question for everybody. Okay. Cause I just want to let you know, I have a question about.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Well, I was just talking about Wow Platinum and Claudio scheming to take over the bank. They do it over sex and then Crassus collapses.

• 1:01:11Speaker 07

  Yeah. I'd like, uh, I'd like, uh, two eggs over sex, please.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. My, my Google calendar says sex meeting at 10 o'clock. Um, okay. So, uh, yeah. So then Crassus collapses. He seems to have, what, like a stroke or?

• 1:01:28Speaker 07

  He has a heart attack or a stroke. Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he, he collapses, leaving Wow and Claudio in charge.

• 1:01:34Speaker 07

  Now, then it seems like spring comes, you see flowers blooming and Catalina and Julia get married in their car. Laurence Fishburne sits in the driver's seat and they sit in the back, not Adam driver's seat, but the, the driver's seat of the car.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:01:45Speaker 07

  And, and marries them. And then there is a montage of December holidays.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:50Speaker 07

  In, in this kind of Abel Gans's Napoleon triple screen thing where, and it's suddenly it's winter again. And I was like, did I hallucinate that it was spring and now it's winter again? I don't know what, and, and it can't be the next year because the baby is, is just, is the same age as when they got married. But this, let's explain, so did you guys have any sense of why there's suddenly a montage of, of winter holidays?

• 1:02:11Speaker 06

  Well, I would have to remember.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  I also have to ask Elliot, my notes, I just wrote down Elvis? What does that mean?

• 1:02:18Speaker 07

  Yes. So an Elvis impersonator is out on the street singing America the Beautiful.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:02:23Speaker 07

  I think as part of Claudio's like, Claudio's like, like, um, like pandering to the masses. I'm not sure. Or maybe it's a busker and it's, and it's a statement about the, the plastic artificiality of American value. Yeah, that happens. I don't, I'm not quite sure.

• 1:02:37Speaker 06

  I love this new bit. Stuart decipher's his notes, by the way.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ, what did I write? Um, yeah, I don't, I don't know what's going on with that. Uh, I mean, I did write winter holiday montage in my notes.

• 1:02:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, that happens.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  So around now.

• 1:02:51Speaker 07

  And it goes on for a while. It goes on for a while that we're watching people opening presents, people spinning dreidels, people celebrating Ramadan, you know, it's like a.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, everybody's represented. I love it. Uh.

• 1:03:01Speaker 07

  Well, everybody, I mean, three religions.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  The, now the city, the city is inflamed with riots. The masses are rioting against the mayor, inflamed by Claudio, of course. Uh, the mayor's family has to escape through secret, uh, secret train car tunnel.

• 1:03:16Speaker 07

  Yep. They go through the antique subway car tunnels that have been closed off for for years in the city. You know, there's that I looked like I think it was the subway station that is beneath City Hall that has been closed ever since September 11th. I mean, it's not been in use for a long time, but it was closed to tours and things after September 11th. I think that it looked like that place. I wonder if they shot it there. It's possible.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  This is around when Wow Platinum and Claudio are celebrating their good fortune. They have successfully taken out their rivals. Nothing bad could ever happen to them. And they wander into the bedroom of Hamilton Crassus III.

• 1:03:50Speaker 07

  They pride goeth before more success. The old, the old, the old aphorism.

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  So they go into Hamilton Crassus's bedroom and something, it seems like he's pitching a little tent.

• 1:04:00Speaker 07

  So this is, so I want to get Roman's take on this. By far the best, I saw this movie in a theater. It was just me and four other people, not strangers, not people I know. They were watching the movie stone faced, very serious. And when this line came out, I laughed so loud and they, and nobody else in the audience reacted and I did not regret it at all. And so does anyone want to say what?

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  Well, Elliot had been like, John Voight has the best line of the movie. And the whole time, like, did I miss it? Was it one of those? Like, was it just a line that is silly because Elliot's smarter than me?

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  Well, I haven't told you all about that, but let's get Roman's.

• 1:04:36Roman Mars?

  Well, I don't, I have to be refreshed to the exact line. I remember the moment.

• 1:04:40Speaker 07

  It's roughly, I'm not quoting it direct. I mean, I'm trying to quote it.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  I can quote it direct.

• 1:04:44Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. So say, so this you wrote down.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Turning to his son and wife, he, he says, what do you think of this boner I got?

• 1:04:52Speaker 06

  Then he reveals what the boner is.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  It's a crossbow.

• 1:04:58Speaker 07

  It's so funny. If he whips the blanket over and he's got a crossbow and it's like, it's so, this is, this whole, if the whole movie had been at this level, I would have been like, yes, a thousand percent, you know, but the last thing I expected was him to say, hey, what do you think of this boner I got? Seemingly totally sincere. You don't know it's a trap at that moment. And I was like, this, this movie, I can't, I can't guess.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  And they're so shocked. He shoots Wow and kills her. And then he shoots Claudio and hits him in the ass. And he, Claudio manages to escape only to eventually be beaten up by his own mob.

• 1:05:32Speaker 06

  Well, we'll get back to, of course, the most important thing, Roman's reaction again in a moment.

• 1:05:36Speaker 07

  To John Voight's boner. Yeah. Or alleged boner.

• 1:05:41Speaker 06

  Interesting thing to me is like, this is a world where guns exist because we saw Adam Driver get shot in the head. So he made a real choice. I'm going to kill these people with a crossbow so I can do this boner bit, you know?

• 1:05:54Speaker 07

  You think a gun wouldn't have been able to make enough of a tent in the seats?

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  I mean, he's a prideful man.

• 1:06:00Speaker 06

  No, that's true. So.

• 1:06:02Speaker 07

  I think there is a, my guess is.

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  The theatricality of it, though, is.

• 1:06:05Speaker 07

  I think it's the theatrical, I think my guess is he needed a way for Claudio to survive and escape. And an arrow to the butt is a classic slapstick way to get somebody to leave a room. But also, as we're recording this before our Caddyshack 2 flop TV episode, a movie which also includes someone getting hit in the butt with an arrow.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Somebody find out on Saturday.

• 1:06:27Speaker 07

  I mean, find out on Saturday before this episode comes out. But there's also a, I assume, I wonder if there's something he's playing off of, some either ancient thing or some story he knows that involves an arrow that he's referencing, since there's so many references in this movie to other things that are floating around in Francis Ford Coppola's head.

• 1:06:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's the problem with this movie for me. Well, one of the many problems. But I'm apparently an atypical man in that I think of the Roman Empire almost never. So I don't have the background in history that I would need to understand all of the.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  What about their like turtle formation where they lock all their shields together? You don't ever think about that?

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  I'm thinking about it now.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  They look like a turtle, but with spears.

• 1:07:11Speaker 07

  Dan, how often do you think about the Civil War? Because that's the other thing I feel like American men think about a lot.

• 1:07:17Speaker 06

  Rarely. I think about.

• 1:07:20Speaker 07

  Do you think about ghoulies?

• 1:07:21Speaker 06

  Ghoulies go to college a lot.

• 1:07:23Speaker 07

  Oh, Ghoulies goes to college. Okay, so that's your Roman Empire.

• 1:07:26Speaker 06

  Movies about small monsters, ghoulies and gremlins and munchies.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, Frankie Freako, available on VOD right now.

• 1:07:35Speaker 07

  Some stealth marketing for Frankie Freako right there. Featuring the voices of the flop.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  It's pretty open.

• 1:07:40Roman Mars?

  To answer your question, Elliot, when this happened in the movie theater, it was when Audrey Plaza got shot, actually. Where I was like, I was like, ho! I was like, alright, you know, like, something's happening. Like, I was kind of delighted, but it was like, it was the real classic, just, this was so different and shocking. I mean, the, you know, when Caesar got shot in the face, that was a little shocking, because it had a real pop sound, like, like a Godfather movie pop, you know, like a, like a real, like, I was like, I was like, oh, I remember that guy. I like that guy's movies, you know?

• 1:08:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, like, the guy who directed maybe the greatest person being shot in the head scene in any movie ever made, you know? That whole sequence.

• 1:08:19Roman Mars?

  Totally, but the, but-

• 1:08:20Speaker 07

  And then the second greatest guy being shot in the head moment, when Mo Green gets killed.

• 1:08:24Roman Mars?

  The best.

• 1:08:25Speaker 07

  At the end of the same movie.

• 1:08:26Roman Mars?

  He's, he's really good at shooting people in faces, and-

• 1:08:29Speaker 07

  I mean, he was, in 1972, yeah.

• 1:08:30Roman Mars?

  It's kind of wasted in this movie, to tell you the truth. But that, that was a move, that was a moment of delight, just because of, it was the shocking violence. Like, I had no idea that that was what was about to happen, so it was kind of like, alright, this thing's alive.

• 1:08:42Speaker 07

  But his, but him talking about his boner just left you cold.

• 1:08:45Roman Mars?

  Well, no, I mean, I think the boner was, was like, calm, it, it just was, it really happens kind of all at once. There's not a lot of time in between, so I didn't have processing time.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was taking a big slurp of my soda and just spit it all over everyone.

• 1:08:58Speaker 06

  Speaking of fearing missing this, I knew that there was this line, you know, all I'd heard about was this line, about how John Voight had this great line, and the movie is very long.

• 1:09:08Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Speaker 06

  And I-

• 1:09:09Speaker 07

  It's not, well, it's not that long, but it feels long. It is, it's like about two hours, a little less than 220, you know?

• 1:09:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay, it's, it's, it's longer than, to my mind, the ideal length of a movie, which is less than-

• 1:09:21Speaker 07

  It comes into a station, you know? It's longer than the first movies.

• 1:09:25Speaker 06

  It's longer, the, the important thing is, it's longer than my bladder can stand. So, all through this movie, I was like, I gotta wait out for this John Voight line. And then I finally, like, I'm in physical pain, like, I have to, I have to leave the theater.

• 1:09:39Roman Mars?

  Repinching, pinching it with your-

• 1:09:41Speaker 06

  It's not, no.

• 1:09:43Speaker 07

  You're literally pinching your urethra shut with your fingers?

• 1:09:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was pinching my urethra shut.

• 1:09:47Speaker 07

  Like you're trying to control a fire hose?

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  I had to pee so badly, I was, I was hurting.

• 1:09:51Speaker 07

  Roman is really rethinking, dropping this into the 99's DVD.

• 1:09:56Speaker 06

  I thought to myself, surely, surely it will not happen at this exact moment. If I run to the restroom, I will not miss this iconic line. And of course, it is exactly when this happens.

• 1:10:07Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  And then you came back and the audience was rolling on the floor laughing.

• 1:10:11Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, fortunately.

• 1:10:12Speaker 07

  They were cheering, firing guns into the air, singing all that side. Yeah.

• 1:10:16Speaker 06

  So I looked up the line and fortunately, you know, someone had put most of the scene on TikTok, not the boner line. Like, I saw the, I saw the rest of the scene that I missed.

• 1:10:27Speaker 07

  Leaving a lot of gold on the table.

• 1:10:29Speaker 06

  Well, then in the description, it was like, like, dude, right before this, the guy said this line about his boner.

• 1:10:38Speaker 06

  Cause like, apparently like they whipped out their phone. They're like, oh man, I missed the key point, but something else crazy has got to happen with this setup, you know?

• 1:10:45Speaker 07

  Cause the other thing is, it's not like it's an, it's not a funny line in and of itself. What is funny is that it is appearing in this otherwise serious minded allegorical movie, said by Jon Voight in a scene near what you have to assume is the climax of the film. It is such a, it's such a, it's, uh, there's something about how it is the least eloquent thing. I think a character has said in any movie I've seen in years.

• 1:11:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. What a, what a performance. Okay. So, uh, so as we said, Crassus gets his revenge. The riots are running wild around New Rome. Caesar appears as like a hologram or something and he gives a speech, talking about like time and things like that and calms everybody down and like, and like shows visions of his utopia. Is that, is that correct? Is that what happened?

• 1:11:37Speaker 07

  Yes. This is the, this scene, so this is the classic. The man of genius comes out and he gives a speech that enthralls the crowd and calms their passions and wins them to side. And the speech he gives is so, it's such, it's just such vaporware. It's such empty conceptual nonsense and the, and it does not speak to any of the actual needs that these people have shown up to this point and why they're reacting. It's, it's like, say what you will about Donald Trump, the terrible, terrible person, just a, just an evil, bad man. But when he speaks, he is directly reacting to the needs he feels in the audience members that he is talking to, the ones he wants to appeal to. Whereas Adam Driver, when he's giving the speech, I'm like, I don't even know. I don't know who you're, I don't know who you're winning over with what with this.

• 1:12:20Speaker 07

  And so to see the audience, kind of, the crowd be like, you're right, you're right. What a true leader.

• 1:12:25Speaker 06

  Yay, platitudes, yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 07

  As, as an audience member in the theater, I was like, I don't understand what he's saying. Like, I don't, this doesn't mean anything to me.

• 1:12:32Roman Mars?

  And this is another part where I'm just like, so, I'm so out with this movie, where it's like, where it's like, it, it really tries to have it both ways. Like, it, it, it has great contempt for almost all the rich people, which is fine. Like, you can hate all the rich people all you want.

• 1:12:48Speaker 07

  The job creators, Roman?

• 1:12:49Roman Mars?

  Crassus, Crassus totally sucks, and all of Crassus' family sucks. Obviously, it has this exception for, for Caesar, because it was sort of genius. And, and what it rests on is this idea that you have to serve the people, give the people what they need, but it has complete contempt for the people. They, they're just this dumb mass of people that follow Claudio, or they're this dumb mass of people that are just like wooed by nonsense language. I mean, there's no actual common people represented at all in the movie.

• 1:13:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's, there's no, the only characters we see who come close to being actual on-the-ground people are that one guy who plays the tuba in the marching band in that one scene. And the kid who shoots Caesar in the face, I guess, but you're right, there's no, like, there's no ordinary citizen point of view ever presented in this. A movie where you have to assume hundreds, if not thousands, of people are killed by a falling satellite that devastates the city. And that is, and that's, like, I just, I just watched Life Force recently, and that's a movie that, about a, about a space vampire, about a nude space vampire that sucks the life out of people. And that showed more, more feeling for the ordinary, everyday English person than this movie shows for the people of New Rome, you know?

• 1:14:02Roman Mars?

  Well, it's ostensible ideas are about, like, serving people in the public and how to make a society, and, and society is completely unrepresented in any realistic or meaningful way. They're all just, they're all really just pawns who are like dumbasses who follow Claudio, or sort of dumbasses that are wooed by nonsense language. It's just like, it's, it's weird. Like, I, I totally get that. You can have Shakespeare plays that are all about kings and shit. I, you know, that's fine. Like, you, you don't, the commoner has to be represented in every form of media.

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  The tragedies, and there is kings and shit.

• 1:14:34Speaker 07

  I'm so desperately trying to think of what Shakespeare title I can turn into a pun about another word for shit.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  But it's

• 1:14:42Speaker 07

  King smear. No, that doesn't work.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  I said king smear.

• 1:14:47Speaker 07

  King smear, that works pretty well. Yeah, yeah. Toilets and Cressida, is that?

• 1:14:53Speaker 06

  Why did we go down this road of all the roads?

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  Okay, speaking of roads, so Caesar promises these magical floating glowing robes that are all like the Rainbow Road in Super Mario. Claudio's mob turns on him. Crassus is overcome by the glory of Caesar's vision, so he leaves all of his riches to Caesar Catalina. So that's going to allow him to build this utopia. Mayor Cicero and his family join Caesar on this voyage. They stand upon this glowing bridge. People are all very excited, they're celebrating, and he manages to stop time for everyone except

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  for little baby Caesar, Julian Caesar's baby.

• 1:15:42Speaker 06

  And let's say that this is a very strange looking shot, too. This is shot from below, they're all like standing on glass or something, shooting through it, and there's like green screen behind them.

• 1:15:53Speaker 07

  This is also, this is such an upsetting moment. I think it's supposed to be a moment of like, hope for the future, like this ability to exist outside of time and be a creative genius is now in their child as well. But it's like, time has stopped, except for this baby. Who's gonna feed this baby? Like, who's gonna unstop time?

• 1:16:12Speaker 07

  Not since Under the Skin have I been more worried about an onscreen child who's being abandoned in front of me.

• 1:16:16Roman Mars?

  But the baby is the one stopping time, right? Maybe?

• 1:16:19Speaker 06

  It must be, because the others are frozen.

• 1:16:22Roman Mars?

  Because she's the one moving and everyone.

• 1:16:23Speaker 07

  But I thought she, but I thought, doesn't Julius hate to tell Caesar to stop time? Maybe I'm misremembering it, I don't know.

• 1:16:29Speaker 06

  But then they're frozen, like, I mean, I think she does, but it doesn't.

• 1:16:32Speaker 07

  It's the baby that does it. Well, the baby doesn't know what she's doing. It's very upsetting to me. It's a very upsetting way in the movie.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  The feeling I get is that they're leaving the future for the next generation.

• 1:16:41Speaker 07

  For the sequel, Megalopolis 2, Babyopolis.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  My notes then say pledge allegiance. Did something happen after this? Was there like a speech or something?

• 1:16:50Roman Mars?

  There's a title. And I think it's the narration, the narration read by children.

• 1:16:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:57Speaker 07

  And it's like, we pledge allegiance, like to the human race or something like that.

• 1:17:00Roman Mars?

  I pulled this up in front of me because I wanted to make sure we had it.

• 1:17:03Speaker 07

  It meant so much. You printed it out and laminated it.

• 1:17:06Roman Mars?

  It's put up on the wall. I pledge allegiance to our human family and to all the species that we protect. One earth indivisible with long life, education and justice for all is what the kids say.

• 1:17:19Speaker 07

  So stick that on a placard in front of your house for the next election. The values in this house. Yeah.

• 1:17:25Speaker 06

  I, look, I, I, I, the problem with that is that it comes at the end of Megalopolis. I do like the idea of a pledge that is not a nationalistic sort of just like.

• 1:17:38Speaker 07

  Oh, I think, I think we can all stand, we can all stand behind the, the values of the human race and everybody getting justice and. Education. It's, it doesn't fit with this movie, which this movie is about.

• 1:17:48Speaker 06

  Doesn't really.

• 1:17:49Speaker 07

  It's a real, it's a real Robert Moses viewpoint movie where it's like, the people don't know what they want. The people are sheep. They have to be shown by a genius what is best for them. And someone needs to make the decision. It is a movie that I think is, the person making it thinks they're making a pro democracy, pro equality, justice movie, but they are making a, essentially in many ways, a fascist movie. About, because there is one man who understands and he needs to take control and you should not question him. And eat no matter what he does. And I'm just, and maybe I'm just mad because I realized I should have said toilets and Tronicus. Because toilet's impressive as a poem, right? Like it's not a play. So.

• 1:18:25Speaker 06

  No, toilet's impressive as a play.

• 1:18:27Speaker 07

  Is it play? What am I thinking? What's that? What's his epic poem then?

• 1:18:30Speaker 06

  Um, I don't know. I, I am less familiar with.

• 1:18:33Speaker 07

  Viewers, right? Shakespeare, if you're listening, write in and tell us which way you want to have a toilet.

• 1:18:41Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, we're getting into the final judgment sort of area, but like that's, that's, there's much that is striking about this movie. There are parts of it that sort of took me sort of in spite of myself, but.

• 1:18:54Speaker 07

  Guys, toilets and Cressida, I was thinking of the poem by Chaucer and then Shakespeare wrote the play. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:18:59Speaker 06

  But.

• 1:19:00Speaker 07

  So toilets and Cressida work.

• 1:19:02Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:19:03Roman Mars?

  Okay, let me just amend the scoreboard.

• 1:19:05Speaker 06

  Okay, get it out.

• 1:19:07Speaker 07

  On further review, the call against toilets and Cressida has been overturned.

• 1:19:13Speaker 06

  You've crystallized something for me, Elliot. Like, the only thing that makes sense to me about this movie as a statement, the only way I can read this is Francis Ford Coppola being like, geniuses are good and above everyone and they shouldn't be questioned. And maybe I'm one.

• 1:19:33Speaker 07

  I think you strike that maybe from the record when he's talking, yeah.

• 1:19:37Speaker 06

  Politically, it's all over the place. It doesn't make any sense. It's not staking out any particular understandable philosophy. It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

• 1:19:50Speaker 07

  So instead of a fable, it should say a bunch of, Megalopolis, a bunch of stuff that happened. Which is literally like the fifth chapter in every Dogman book is called, chapter five, a bunch of stuff that happened or a bunch of stuff that happened next. So maybe Francis Ford Coppola should have made that Dogman movie. Stuart, what do you think?

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  Dogman, yeah, I think he should have made that movie. Is that, is that where, are those, are those the guy, the player character race you can play in Riff's that have the body of a human, but like the head and some of the traits of a dog? Is that?

• 1:20:17Speaker 07

  I mean, that's, that's kind of like a, what, like a sinusophoric or canisophoric? That's the kind of thing you see sometimes in Old Tales of the Saints. Some of them have dog heads, but no, that's not what Dogman is about. He's a police officer with a dog's head.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:20:29Roman Mars?

  Oh, that's too bad.

• 1:20:30Speaker 07

  And it's a bestselling book of, a series of books for children.

• 1:20:34Speaker 06

  We should get into our final judgments, but before we do, I just want to give.

• 1:20:37Speaker 07

  I thought he'd started already.

• 1:20:37Speaker 06

  I want to give Stuart some plaudits for how he handled that.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  That's cool. Anyone else want to give me plaudits?

• 1:20:44Speaker 06

  Earlier.

• 1:20:45Roman Mars?

  I got all the plaudits.

• 1:20:47Speaker 06

  No, I just, you know, I was keeping an eye on time and early on, I'm like, oh, man, we're never, this is going to be a four hour episode, but Stuart, you, you got us through. You.

• 1:20:56Roman Mars?

  You landed a plane.

• 1:20:57Speaker 06

  You have to pass.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  The trick, the trick is forgetting things like satellites falling on you.

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

  But of course, this is where we give our final judgments, whether we thought that Megalopolis was a good, bad movie, a bad, bad movie, or a movie we kind of liked. Is it a, is a movie where you get some joy out of its badness? No joy to be found in Mudville? Or did we actually like it a bit? I am going to say. Good, bad in the sense that you so rarely get something this personal and big. Like, I kind of, in a weird way, didn't know whether we should do this at first, like, until, you know, like, we got so many people, "You gotta do Megalopolis. I wanna hear what you say about Megalopolis." But part of me was like, "Well, I don't wanna, like, take someone down for..."

• 1:21:48Speaker 07

  "I wanna give the masses what they want. I'm a genius. I know better than they do."

• 1:21:52Speaker 06

  Well, I feel bad about, like, taking, like, a passion project down. Like, even if it's misbegotten, like, I do appreciate the swing. Um, I don't think that this movie is successful, and there's large chunks of it that are boring. But I say good, bad in the sense that, like, I would not discourage anyone with any curiosity about this movie from seeing this movie, because it is quite an experience, you know? If you're interested, if you're willing to commit the time, yeah, sure, watch it, 'cause there's gonna be some stuff in it that's gonna have you grasping your head and shaking your fists to the heavens. So that's what I say. Stuart, what do you think?

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I feel I have less of an issue with, like, targeting passion projects, 'cause I feel like passion projects often suffer from a certain amount of, like, great man syndrome and delusion of genius. Um, but, I don't know, I feel like this movie would fall somewhere in the, like, between a good, bad movie and almost like, there's parts of it that are a movie I kinda like. I mean, it's, uh, I feel like time is going to be kinder to this than at least current critics are. I feel like it reminds me, in a lot of ways, of either a Neil Breen movie, or if Neil Breen had directed the Star Wars prequels. Um, because it feels a lot like those movies, like, they're, they're, like,

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  at least it doesn't feel like mass-produced garbage, but it is still kinda like garbage.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  So I guess that's not a direct answer, but like, I'm glad this, I'm glad this movie exists. And I feel like if you're interested in it, you should check it out. It's, it's a mess.

• 1:23:38Speaker 07

  I feel similar to Stuart. It's a, I think it's good, bad with it. There's some things about it that I like that are enough to make it a movie I am glad to have seen, you know, even if I'm, I'm never going to watch it again, probably. And I feel, I think you're right that-

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  Not with your kids?

• 1:23:53Speaker 07

  Well, eventually, eventually. Dad, can we watch Megalopolis? You're not ready yet. You wouldn't understand. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get them to watch Metropolis, another kind of politically mushy movie set in the city of the future, and they have no interest, even though it's, that's a great movie. But they, there's, I think the future film critics will look back on it knowing what it is and being able to pick out the few kind of pearls that are in the morass of sludge, rather than us looking at it now, expecting something different than it is, which is a, what we're expecting is a coherent story with interesting characters. And instead, future generations will be like, well, that was a fascinating capstone to Francis Ford Coppola's career. And now we can, the same

• 1:24:34Speaker 07

  way that I just finished reading Patrick McGilian's biography of Alfred Hitchcock, and in that he's able to treat Hitchcock's later movies, which at the time were considered abysmal, and which are certainly not among his best. But now you can look at them and be like, here's the good things in them. Here's the not so good things in them. I think it'll be kind of like that. But at the moment, it's kind of nice to watch this movie now at a moment when you're, it's rare that I see a movie that has this level of production behind it and this level of artistic vision behind it, where I'm like, what? Like, what is he doing? Like, what, why is he doing that? And there's, that's something, like you're saying, Stuart, in an era of mass-produced, you know, casinos made for the people by, by the mayor, you know, that's something to be at least glad that someone's willing

• 1:25:18Speaker 07

  to put their, the, the shares they sold in their winery where their mouth is, you know? Roman, what do you think? You loved it, right?

• 1:25:25Roman Mars?

  I think that, you know, what is it, like 15 years of watching bad movies says rotted y'all's brain, because this is a bad, bad movie.

• 1:25:38Speaker 07

  Roman, I've seen things you couldn't imagine. A crap movie is glittering off the shoulder

• 1:25:43Roman Mars?

  Here's the thing, I think this is a bad, bad movie and I think that if you compare it to other, this is like a false premise of like, it is interesting whereas all like superhero movies are boring, at least this thing exists and it has some kind of vision, whatever. But that is not what you are, what this thing is occupying space of. It is occupying the space of like, take time to stare at a loved one's face for two hours. Or something like that.

• 1:26:11Speaker 07

  Roman, if that's the way you think, you're never gonna be able to make it in this business.

• 1:26:16Roman Mars?

  Literally do anything else. Learn a language.

• 1:26:22Speaker 07

  Certainly there are better ways to use the limited time you have on earth, for sure. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:26Roman Mars?

  I mean, it's just, if it had this vision and was messy and was chaotic and whatever. But it's just like, as you dig into the ideas of the movie, I think those ideas are bad and dangerous ideas. Like, I think that they actually are pernicious, like, that make the world a worse place. That's why I like, I kind of, I was almost wooed by this idea of like, the passion project that you don't want to take on and criticize. Except for that the passion project is kind of this weird, like, defensive, great man, genius, that this idea of this fake populism of like, caring about the people and that even the movie cares about people and serving people, but then ignores them, ignores their needs.

• 1:27:11Roman Mars?

  Like, that there's this, there's this like phony, like kind of me too crisis in the middle of this thing that's completely dashed by like, facts that exonerate this man. You know, all that sort of stuff, like, if it was, if the underlying core of this was sort of more benign or innocuous, I would have more charity towards its big swings. But I think that it actually has terrible ideas at its core.

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  I feel like that almost makes it more interesting to this guy.

• 1:27:44Roman Mars?

  I get that, yeah. And so like, if you're like, again.

• 1:27:46Speaker 07

  In case you're worried that this movie is gonna sway people.

• 1:27:48Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think it is either, but I just feel like, I feel like it should be held accountable. For its dumbness. You know, like.

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  But I would argue it does because he like spent so much of his money for a huge flop that is being publicly pilloryed.

• 1:28:04Speaker 06

  Saying he owned himself.

• 1:28:05Roman Mars?

  But you know, but you know, and I know this too, cause, cause we went, we're all like, I'm a little older than you guys are, but like, you've watched. But, thank you. But like, you've watched like really misguided millennials in Gen Z resurrect the, the, the Star Wars prequel trilogy and, and talk about its secret genius. And you're like, no, you don't understand. We were there. It's fucking awful. Like, you have to trust us on this. The book is closed on, on that matter. And, and, and you're right. This is going to be resurrected and people are going to find things in it. And, um, and it's just going to be just, that's going to be such an irritating process to witness in 20 years.

• 1:28:49Roman Mars?

  Because, because it truly is like of the moment, just to take it in the moment, it is dealing with these ideas of, you know, populism and politics and, you know, like, and greatness and being sort of, you know, great men being sort of like somehow thwarted in their, in their great, you know, like, what's so crazy about the movie is like, with all this crazy stuff that happens, like, you know, everything is just given to Caesar. Like he, you know, he has this magic particle that heals his face. Like the richest man in the world, uh, gives him all the money he needs to do his thing. A satellite clears the land for him,

• 1:29:30Roman Mars?

  um, to build his thing. It's just like, it is, it is full, like, uh, this moment of like billionaires and so-called geniuses and bad populism and, and pretending to serve people. Like this, these are bad ideas to play with, uh, poorly right now. And that's, that's, that's what I think. That's the part that really like incenses me about it as a movie. So.

• 1:29:53Speaker 06

  You've given the passionate, swaying the masses speech that the movie fails to hear.

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fair. I'm one of the dumb masses. I'm, I want to follow this guy. Tell me about your utopia, Roman.

• 1:30:06Roman Mars?

  But I want it to be so much better. Like, I can deal with all the nonsense of it. In fact, one of the things I think it's the most, the miracle of this movie is that I think Adam Driver, at the center of this, comes out pretty unscathed.

• 1:30:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:19Roman Mars?

  Like, he is, he commits to this nonsense in this way that is almost, I just don't even know how he does it. Like, he, you know, he, he sounds like he just leans into it, but he's not hammy. It's just like, that's the part where I'm like, I liked him more coming out of this movie than, than, not, not than I ever have, but like, it just added to my esteem of him.

• 1:30:42Speaker 07

  Well, it's something that we see a lot in the movies on the podcast is that when you're an actor who's in a movie that doesn't make sense, or is not good, you never win points by being openly disdainful of the movie, or by acting like you know it is. Like, I think one of the things that helps with Adam Driver's performance is when he's saying nonsense, or he's doing things that doesn't make sense, he is still acting as if the things that he's doing make sense and are rational and coherent. And I think you're right, he comes out of it, I mean, I feel like there's, there's, most of the main performers in this come out pretty well, you know.

• 1:31:13Roman Mars?

  They're goofy and stuff, but I'm just surprised like how he comes out, like, he, he, there's a lesson in here with like watching him, and maybe that's worth watching, which is like, even in life, or in a movie, or as a piece of art, or whatever, just lean in and do the thing. You will be cooler if you just do it, rather than try to resist.

• 1:31:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, that's also like, from what I understand from hearing people talk about it, like, he had a much better sort of experience on the movie because he leaned into the, the working process of the movie, and I understand that like, you know, if you don't want to lean into that, that's fine, because it sounds like this was not a good working experience for a lot of people.

• 1:31:49Speaker 07

  If you don't want to be like, told to do something different every single moment, and then for a couple of seconds, suddenly kiss you when you don't want it.

• 1:31:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, so I'm not, I'm not necessarily making an argument to ignore that, but I am saying that he, he seemed to embrace like, okay, like, as an artistic thing, I'm going to roll with this and be like collaborative and like, really like commit to it, and that's probably part of why he does come out feeling like he.

• 1:32:15Speaker 07

  I mean, we also, I don't think we need to get into it, but I'm sure there is also an element of Francis Ford Coppola probably treating him better than he treated

• 1:32:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:32:21Speaker 07

  other people, you know, because he's the star that he identifies with in the movie, you know.

• 1:32:26Speaker 06

  True.

• 1:32:26Speaker 07

  And he saw, and he loved 65. So he saw that and he was like, you were, you were shooting dinosaurs.

• 1:32:31Speaker 06

  No, no, Francis, those weren't real dinosaurs.

• 1:32:34Speaker 07

  He's like, I saw that movie you made where you got away from that comet that hit the earth with the dinosaurs. So I'm having a satellite hit the city. Let's see if you can get away from that one. And then Francis Ford Coppola's watching his own movie. He's like, son of a bitch did it again. He got away from another thing falling out of the sky.

• 1:32:49Speaker 07

  And Adam Driver's like, Francis, you made this movie. Like you knew what was gonna happen.

• 1:32:52Speaker 06

  I don't think so.

• 1:32:53Speaker 07

  I don't think so. I don't know how you did it. It doesn't seem like my movie.

• 1:32:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, my, my movies are good. This one, I don't, I don't know.

• 1:33:02Speaker 07

  I mean, what if it was like Severance where when he went to set, he had a different personality than when he, when he left set.

• 1:33:12Roman Mars?

  After the break, more from the Flophouse. This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every design thing began as something someone imagined, a chair, a sign, whatever device you're listening to this on. Design is imagination with a plan. Claude is an AI built to help you with both. Start with your rough idea, then work with Claude to sketch it, shape it, test it, and build it. Anthropic built Claude to help you discover more. Learn more at claude.ai/99invisible. When your mental health is suffering, therapy can help, but sometimes it's not the whole answer. Talkiatory gives you access to real psychiatric care with licensed clinicians who

• 1:33:56Roman Mars?

  can diagnose and prescribe medication if it's right for you. It's a simple way to get effective treatment right from home. Talkiatory is a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and more. You can meet with a licensed psychiatrist who takes the time to understand what's going on, builds a personalized treatment plan, and supports you over time with consistent, evidence Based care. All 800 plus clinicians are in-network with major insurers. So you can use your existing insurance instead of paying monthly subscriptions or out of network costs. Head to talkiatry.com/invisible to complete the short assessment and get matched with

• 1:34:41Roman Mars?

  an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T A L K I A T R Y dot com slash invisible to get matched in minutes. Talkiatry.com/invisible. Ready to give your home a style refresh? Article makes it easy to create a stylish, long-lasting home at an unbeatable price. They offer a curated selection of mid-century modern coastal and Scandi-inspired pieces that will make a perfect addition to your home. All Article collections are carefully curated, focusing solely on high-quality, meaningful pieces that will stand the test of time. And with Article's 30-day satisfaction guarantee, you can shop with confidence. I'm trying to think of any of the Article furniture I haven't talked about at this point. I have couches.

• 1:35:25Roman Mars?

  I have dining room sets. I have sideboards. I have, what do you call it? A media center? Thing that you put a TV on? Side tables, end tables, chairs. All of them are still in heavy use in my house, and all of them have held up great. Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com/99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com/99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. The best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're heading to work, going out, or keeping things casual. And this time of year, Quince makes finding something great for everyone else just as easy.

• 1:36:07Roman Mars?

  Quince focuses on high-quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. All timeless, versatile pieces that feel special to unwrap and become everyday favorites long after the holidays. I'm a huge fan of the whole line of Quince sweaters. I have button-up ones, zip-up ones, black, gray, brown. I use them when I just go upstairs, when I get on a call, when I take the dog for a walk. These are favorites that everyone would love. The gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too.

• 1:36:48Roman Mars?

  And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know that it was 99% invisible. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:37:02Speaker 06

  Let's answer a couple of questions from listeners. This one is from Nilo Last Name withheld.

• 1:37:08Speaker 07

  This is from FF Coppola. Uh oh.

• 1:37:10Speaker 06

  Or perhaps Nilo, I don't know. But they write intergalactic greetings floppers. I have a gigantic projector built in space capable of projecting a movie onto the moon. What should I show on it? And of course, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is from the earth to the moon. You want to see that moon man get, you know, a rocket in his eye.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  Yep. Yeah, everybody, everybody's gagging for it.

• 1:37:38Speaker 06

  Everyone wants that to look up and be like.

• 1:37:40Speaker 07

  See this big as finally the real moon's going to get the just desserts that the film moon.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  Finally, the stand up and cheer moment of the year.

• 1:37:46Speaker 06

  But what else? A moonfall, maybe?

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  Uh, I was going to say Akira for that scene when Tetsuo blows up part of the moon.

• 1:37:54Speaker 07

  I mean, so I'm going to think about this a little more practically. We don't have sound, right? Cause it's just being projected.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, Akira works perfect.

• 1:38:00Speaker 06

  So you have to tune your radio to a certain like frequency.

• 1:38:03Speaker 07

  Oh, maybe, yeah. I'm trying to think of something that would be kind of like that. The visuals would pull all of humanity together as one shared family.

• 1:38:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Speaker 07

  Once it's projected on the moon.

• 1:38:12Speaker 06

  One week by Buster Keaton. I don't know.

• 1:38:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, sure. Yeah.

• 1:38:17Speaker 06

  I mean, I mean, you're basically talking about the biggest movie in the park that you can imagine for the summertime. And so it's going to be like Toy Story. That's the only thing that's going to work.

• 1:38:26Speaker 07

  Worse things you can go with than Toy Story.

• 1:38:27Speaker 06

  No, it's going to be some Pixar movie that you can bring all the kids to and then, and that's it.

• 1:38:32Speaker 07

  Well, the thing I want it to be family friendly because if my kids are out looking at the moon, I don't want them seeing something that they shouldn't see. Yeah.

• 1:38:39Speaker 06

  Different kind of movie.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  What shouldn't they see? It's on the list.

• 1:38:43Speaker 07

  I mean, I don't think they're ready for Akira.

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  Well, when are your kids gonna be ready for Akira?

• 1:38:50Speaker 07

  Daddy, daddy, why is, why is Tetso expanding into a techno, techno organic mass?

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  I mean, why is he crushing Cowrie when he's trying to love her?

• 1:39:01Roman Mars?

  One of these crimes of the future.

• 1:39:04Speaker 07

  So Dan, that's your vote is crimes of the future?

• 1:39:08Roman Mars?

  Oh, you're saying Roman? Sorry.

• 1:39:09Speaker 03

  I said, I saw Paris is burning in Lincoln Center outside and that was a lovely experience. So, you know, that could be one that you could do.

• 1:39:17Speaker 07

  That'd be great, that's a movie, yeah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 06

  I like it. Uh, this second and final letter is from Anne Marie who writes, hey y'all, and this is a, this is clearly in response to our recent, uh, break into Flop TV. Um, uh, episode we had.

• 1:39:36Speaker 07

  Tickets and season tickets available now for Flop TV, season two.

• 1:39:38Speaker 06

  I wanted to add an additional theory about how someone could dance on the ceiling. A few years ago, I played Dancing on the Ceiling for my then four-year-old niece. And she said it was her favorite song. I showed her the music video and she kept asking, how did he do that? And then posited that he had sticky stuff on the ceiling so he could stick to it like a bug. So there's another.

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's how bugs stick to things.

• 1:40:03Speaker 06

  Alternative.

• 1:40:03Speaker 07

  That's a good theory. Well, it's not really, I don't think it's really how they stick to stuff.

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  That's, that's how it, how it works in Inception too, right? Is the, is Chris, Chrissy Nolan just smeared sticky stuff all over the ceiling and?

• 1:40:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt bounced off of it?

• 1:40:17Speaker 06

  Yep. Um, so.

• 1:40:20Speaker 07

  So was there a question there, Dan? No, it was just, it's just sharing an idea?

• 1:40:22Speaker 06

  It's a charming tale of a child's imagination.

• 1:40:28Speaker 06

  Sort of like, you know, I don't know, ET, I guess that's not imagination, but it sparks imagination. Anyway.

• 1:40:33Roman Mars?

  I mean, I love, old, old special effects are great. My, the greatest special effect of all time is Kermit riding a bike. It, it'll never be beaten. It'll be the greatest. Like, that's, that's the thing that's wowed me the most for, for all my life.

• 1:40:44Speaker 07

  There's also a scene, a woman turns, goes from nice looking to evil looking. In in camera in a movie called Shh, The Octopus in a way that uses makeup that only shows up on certain colors of light and they had to gel their movements. And that effect, it's from a movie from the 30s and the effect looks amazing.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I still think the best effect is that scene where the guy falls over in the movie, The Gate, and he turns into a bunch of little guys.

• 1:41:08Speaker 06

  That's pretty good.

• 1:41:11Speaker 07

  And also, there's the moment in Throne of Blood when Tashir Mafune gets an arrow through the neck. And I'm always like, did they really kill him?

• 1:41:22Speaker 06

  On that note of credulity, let's move on.

• 1:41:24Speaker 03

  Actually, Elliot, I just checked. Tashir Mafune is dead.

• 1:41:28Speaker 07

  No, they did it. Officer, arrest Akira Karasawa. We've solved the cold case.

• 1:41:34Speaker 06

  Let us move on to our final segment, our final regular segment of the show, which is.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  Dan, I'm looking as you scan through your letterbox. I see Dick's the Musical on there. That scene with Nathan Lane spitting spitting lunch meat on those puppets, isn't that great?

• 1:41:49Speaker 06

  I appreciate the spirit of Dick's the Musical. I didn't enjoy it as much as I think you did.

• 1:41:55Speaker 07

  So why are you recommending it, Dan?

• 1:41:57Speaker 06

  I'm not. This is, again, I haven't even introduced the segment, which is.

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  I'm just looking over Dan's shoulders. He scrolls through his letterbox.

• 1:42:03Speaker 06

  We're recommending movies that we have seen of late or just like that might be a better use of your time than, say, Megalopolis. Take Roman's advice. Either stare at your loved one's face or watch one of these.

• 1:42:17Speaker 07

  Just stare at their face for the full runtime of Megalopolis, which is like two hours and 18 minutes.

• 1:42:21Speaker 06

  They'll be like, what are you doing? Can you stop that?

• 1:42:25Speaker 07

  Is Megalopolis showing on my face?

• 1:42:29Speaker 06

  I recently just I just rewatched Lost Highway, which I hadn't seen since around the time it was new. David Lynch's Lost Highway. And, you know, because I'd seen it when it was new, it kind of had never struck me like, oh, how much this is a dry run for Mulholland Drive, which is not to say it's not valuable in its own right, but it's like, oh, okay, like, you're revisiting so many of the themes. I didn't even think about that of sort of. You know, Lynch's films, I think it's a bad idea to try and just decode them. But if you're gonna go down that road, like, there's a lot about sort of.

• 1:43:08Speaker 07

  Is that road Mulholland Drive?

• 1:43:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. Disassociation after sort of a horrible event. Trying to make sense of your life through these like sort of fantasies. Lost Highway was his first trip down that lost highway to Mulholland Drive.

• 1:43:26Speaker 07

  And you're gonna wanna go down Lost Highway, you're gonna take a turn onto Mulholland Drive.

• 1:43:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Speaker 07

  It's gonna get you to the inland empire.

• 1:43:33Speaker 06

  Yep. If you wanna see Bill Pullman just wail on a saxophone as well.

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:38Speaker 06

  That's your best chance. I don't know.

• 1:43:41Speaker 07

  Some would say your only chance.

• 1:43:44Speaker 06

  There's not much to say about, I mean, if you like Lynch and you haven't seen it, that's strange. If you haven't watched it, if you're not a Lynch person.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  What if you're like a huge Robert Blake fan?

• 1:43:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, but not his movies, more his personal life.

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  Not his eyebrows.

• 1:44:02Speaker 07

  I love Robert Blake, I just hate when he has hair below his forehead.

• 1:44:06Speaker 06

  Oh, have I got a picture for you?

• 1:44:09Speaker 07

  That's one of those movies, I feel like Lost Highway is the, is, is the opposite of Megalopolis in that it is a movie that when it came out, I remember the reviews were like, what? They were scathing because it had a, like a nonlinear, not totally rational plot. But you watch it now and you're like, oh, like, now I know what Lynch does. I understand what he's doing. And I honestly, the fact that film reviewers saw it at the time and weren't like, oh, it's a David Lynch movie. I have to watch it through David Lynch glasses.

• 1:44:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know if I ever told this story, but I remember seeing it at like the very small independent theater in my hometown. And it was a late screening and we got out and I was driving my friends home. And I remembered, you know, driving up to a red light, the light turned green and then it turned red again. And I had just sat there the whole time because my brain was processing what I just watched.

• 1:44:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. Let's go in the same order we did our judgments. Stuart, what do you have?

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm gonna recommend a movie I saw a couple of weeks back. I saw Enora, the new Sean Baker movie. It's. A, I guess, a offbeat comedy love story about a young sex worker who marries the son of an oligarch in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. It's a very New York movie in that way. There's a scene where they fucking go to Tatiana's in Brighton Beach. And I was like, whoa, I go there. And yeah, I mean, I'm like a Nora. It, yeah, I mean, I feel like it really captures

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  the like rush and craziness of like love and hope. And also like hoping against the crushing power of capitalism and shittiness. And then, of course, it's things start to, you know, come back to earth and things get a little bit rough. It's got, you know, an incredible central performance by Mikey Madison as the title character. Yeah, I think I thought it was great. I love it. Yeah, check it out.

• 1:46:08Speaker 07

  Cool. I'm also gonna recommend an offbeat comedy romance, but not the same one. This is a, I'm gonna want to recommend the movie You and Me from 1938. This is a movie directed by Fritz Lang, director of Metropolis, the movie I mentioned earlier, but it's a very different movie than Metropolis. And Sylvia Sidney is a woman who works at a department store. The department store makes a point of hiring ex-convicts to give them a second chance at life. And George Raft is one of those ex-convicts and they fall in love. She doesn't want him to know she's also an ex-convict because when you're on parole, you're not allowed to fall in love and you're not allowed to get married. And so that she has to hide from him that she is also a convict and that the repercussions of that involve him getting

• 1:46:49Speaker 07

  back involved in crime. And it's a surprisingly sweet movie for a movie about criminals directed by Fritz Lang. And it also has some musical numbers in it with some of the music written by Kurt Vile. So it's a like, it's a, it's a real strange movie. It's this kind of somewhat anti-capitalist romance, drama, comedy, crime movie with, but with Sylvia Sidney, George Raft. But I really loved it. I really enjoyed it. It's the kind of movie that you could crank out in the 30s because they were making so many movies that sometimes one of these popped out where it was like, this is kind of a stranger movie than it had any right to be. It could have been a pretty down the middle movie, but there's some great scenes in it. And, and, you know, Sylvia Sidney's been on my mind since there's that new Beetlejuice movie. She's not in the new one, but you know, since she was in the old one, you know.

• 1:47:34Speaker 07

  So that's you and me.

• 1:47:37Speaker 06

  Play Juno.

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:39Roman Mars?

  I, I was, I was, I have a hard time thinking of what to recommend, but I think the one I'd settle on is um, Hearts of Darkness of filmmaker's apocalypse, which is the documentary Eleanor Copla made of Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now. Um, the, one of the things that ends the, the, the movie of uh, Megalopolis is at the very end, it says for Eleanor, which is sort of like this moment where I'm feeling like kind of seething for this thing. And then there's a sweet moment of their long-term relationship and, and how she was such a gifted filmmaker, as evidenced by, by this piece, that did like make me think, okay, this, he, he did what he wanted to.

• 1:48:20Roman Mars?

  It's all okay. I, you know, like, and, and uh, that was a nice sort of like homage to her. But she was an extremely good documentary filmmaker. Um, it made me appreciate Apocalypse Now so much more. It gave you so much insight into, to making a movie. It's just like, has so much drama. It's so fascinating. I, I really love Hearts of Darkness. I, I saw it as a kid, well, not a kid, I guess I was pretty soon after it came out. I guess I was 15 or 16 and um, uh, Hearts of Darkness, not Apocalypse Now. I had not seen Apocalypse Now. I caught this like on HBO or something and then I saw it afterward. I'd kind of heard about Apocalypse Now. And um, it, it just, it gave me the blueprint for appreciating another sort of like good mess of a movie.

• 1:49:05Roman Mars?

  You know, that's a, I think that's a good mess Apocalypse Now in a lot of ways. Um, but I, uh, I love this. It's one of the reasons why I love documentaries. I, I think it's just expertly made, beautifully made. So.

• 1:49:16Speaker 06

  I think I also saw it before I saw Apocalypse Now. I saw it with my like college girlfriend. We were at, at her house in Cleveland and we went to like, we was like young like film buffs and we're like, what arty thing can we get? We'll get this. I know it's a good documentary and it is a testament to like even without having seen the movie, like this is, this is fascinating in its own right and then gets richer once you've seen the film. Or like most people, you probably see Apocalypse Now first and then catch up.

• 1:49:42Roman Mars?

  I mean, it's weird. I mean, I think people take things in a lot differently now and like you never know. But, but I, I think this movie is great. I think it's actually better than Apocalypse Now. But you know, but that's, that's my own flavor of, of, you know, that, that, that to me is like not defensive. Let's just taste, you know, it's.

• 1:49:59Speaker 07

  That's just a personal choice. Dan, there are people who saw Spaceballs before Star Wars. People watch things in all sorts of crazy orders, you know?

• 1:50:05Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:06Speaker 06

  These, these days.

• 1:50:07Roman Mars?

  I thought you were about to mention a documentary about the making of Spaceballs. That'll be fascinating.

• 1:50:13Speaker 07

  People see May the Schwartz be with you, a filmmaker's journey.

• 1:50:16Speaker 06

  That's not what Balls of Fury was?

• 1:50:18Roman Mars?

  Yeah. How'd they, how'd they rig up that bit where Rick Moranis goes flying through the?

• 1:50:23Speaker 07

  Gotta watch the documentary to find out.

• 1:50:26Speaker 06

  Was that real?

• 1:50:28Roman Mars?

  Did they kill Rick Moranis?

• 1:50:30Speaker 07

  Moranis in that moment?

• 1:50:31Speaker 06

  All right. Well, uh, we should wrap this up with a big thank you.

• 1:50:35Speaker 07

  Now I wanna see, now wait, sorry. Now I wanna see a comedy sketch in a show where they're like, okay, they're trying to lead actor on a movie set and they're like, we saved this last stunt till the end of the shooting because you're going to die when you do it. The only way to get the shot is to kill you while you do it. Oh, okay. That's why we shot all your scenes ahead of it. So, uh, I don't know if that's a good idea. No, it's okay. We shot the rest of the movie already. We shot it already. We're done. You know, we're wrapped on that. So this is your last thing you have to do. We'll be covered.

• 1:51:00Speaker 06

  Before I say, before we say goodbye, uh, I wanted to say thank you to Roman, uh, for being on this episode. We all know how busy you are and so we're always charmed when you make time for our shenanigans.

• 1:51:13Roman Mars?

  Delighted. Longtime fan and supporter. I'm so happy to be here. It makes me very, very happy.

• 1:51:18Speaker 06

  What were you gonna say, Elliot?

• 1:51:19Speaker 07

  If you want more, if you want more shenanigans like this, just tune into the 99% Invisible Breakdown, the power broker.

• 1:51:24Speaker 06

  Exactly the same.

• 1:51:25Speaker 07

  It's exactly like this show. It's just like it. Yeah.

• 1:51:28Speaker 06

  Um, just cutting it up. Uh, before we go, uh, thank you to our producer, Alex Smith. He goes by the name Howell Dotty on the internet. He does music. He does Twitch streams, does a lot of stuff. Look him up. Uh, thank you to our network, Maximum Fun. If you go to MaximumFun.org, there are a lot of great other podcasts you can listen to about culture, about comedy. You'll find something you like. Uh, but that's it for this episode. For the Flophouse, I've been Dan McCoy.

• 1:51:57Roman Mars?

  I'm Stuart Wellington.

• 1:51:58Speaker 07

  I'm Elliot Kalin.

• 1:52:00Roman Mars?

  I'm Roman Mars. I gotta take that again. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:52:05Speaker 06

  That's it.

• 1:52:07Speaker 07

  A little professional.

• 1:52:07Speaker 06

  Bye!

• 1:52:10Speaker 06

  Professionalism undone.

• 1:52:13Speaker 07

  Roman's like, let me make sure I say that the right way. And then Stuart's like, ooh.

• 1:52:26Speaker 06

  On this episode, we discuss Megalopolis.

• 1:52:33Speaker 07

  Do you want me to have one? Do you want me to do one?

• 1:52:35Speaker 06

  No, I'll just start it over again.

• 1:52:36Speaker 07

  Stuart, you leaned in like you had one. So I didn't say anything.

• 1:52:40Speaker 06

  We're embarrassing ourselves in front of Roman. Okay.

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  No, no, no, Roman knows we're cool.

• 1:52:44Speaker 06

  This is the whole experience.

• 1:52:51Roman Mars?

  You can listen and subscribe to The Flophouse wherever you get your podcasts. And after all that, if you still somehow want to watch Megalopolis, it's now available on VOD.

• 1:53:07Roman Mars?

  The real cost of a break-in isn't your valuables. It's the feeling that your home stopped being safe. SimpliSafe keeps danger away from your family with three layers of protection. One, smart AI cameras and live US-based agents help stop intruders before they break in. Two, we sound the alarm at points of entry. Three, our agents request emergency response. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 70% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/sxm. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/l licenses for alarm license information. Hello, beautiful nerds. It's Roman here. If you're loving 99% Invisible and you want to hear new episodes ad-free and get access to exclusive bonus content, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastplus to start your free trial today.