Cigar Assessor (The Cigar Assessor)

Just saw Megalopolis and wow, it was not good. If it wasn’t a Francis Ford Coppola film, I would have walked out about thirty minutes in. It was slow, the script was all over the place, no character development, it had holes in the story, disjointed and flat, campy overacting like in a bad comic book movie. No chemistry between any of the characters. It felt and sounded as if they acted against each other in different locations and they were spliced together. I wanted it to end before it did and when it did it was thrown together quickly. They all had Roman names in the era of the Roman Empire.  It felt like an acid trip even though I never did acid. And of course there’s a scumbag, cross dressing character looking for power, Clodio Pulcher who was characterized as MSNBC would describe Donald Trump. It was more overacting in the film by Shia LaBeouf.   I took my twenty year old son with me. I wanted him to experience this film in the theater. He was confused as to who was who and what was going on as I was.  When a man of Francis stature is making art, there needs to be more than only people around him who are enamored with him. He needs guard rails. He did everything on this project and it shows.  I love his earlier films, watching them many times over. However, after the 1980’s there are not many great ones.  Well, his Swan Song was a duck quack. Sometime it’s better to stop before you see the, bridge is out sign.