Auntie Wow: Sight and Sound films of 2024
Megalopolis is like being stuck in Francis Ford Coppola's tumble dryer for an entire cycle, but that's art for you. Years ago Coppola went on hiatus after three small death-shadowed films in which stand-ins for Senate Consuls circa 63BC definitely did not appear or mill about discussing civic planning ordinances and magic malleable plastics. And yet Megalopolis aligns with them and several of his other films anyway, plus a happy ending and an old man's wish for his kids to know peace. Every time Aubrey Plaza swanned in wearing outfits from a Star Trek Roman Empire episode purring “Auntie Wow is here to help you” it felt like Coppola had successfully spliced that new form of cinema together like he always said he would.
Not that any of it is new. Influences and overlaps cascade out of Megalopolis and into your lap, but one I hadn't expected to keep thinking of was Howard Chaykin's Time2 comics. Both have architecture as a force in society and architects with great scale models, both are about urban renewal and civic corruption, both have citizen riots and a big Colosseum event (Coppola should have done Chaykin's bullfighting number between a very big bull and a very small matador), both have thought about how to stun the eyeballs of someone looking at the work, both are memorably bonkers. Both are anti-fascist, not for nothing. In Time2 Maxim Glory makes modern-art mobiles out of old bits of sharp machinery, and there they are in Cesar Catilina's mellow pad as well.
Megalopolis was on my list of the year's best films for the annual Sight and Sound critics poll without much difficulty:
American Star
British hit men in Spain, metaphysical, it's The Hit back at last.
The Beast
Lea Seydoux, modernity sucks, always has.
The Book of Clarence
Judas and Jesus have a telepathic battle over the Last Supper table as if they were Magneto and Professor X.
Civil War
Citizen snipers on US rooftops in the film, professional snipers on US rooftops for real while the film was still out.
Ferrari
A script by long-gone Troy Kennedy Martin was in Michael Mann's drawer all these years.
Furiosa
Myth back on the Mad Max menu, better than Fury Road.
Hollywoodgate reviewed here
Megalopolis
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat reviewed here
The Zone of Interest
Manufacturers of a bigger better incinerator explain how it will make your child-slaughtering more efficient, a scene that stays on your mind for a while. Clive James's old review of a book about the average German's supposed willingness to go along with that sort of thing stayed on my mind throughout.
Six of those made the overall top 50 in the poll, an unprecedented alignment between me and the collective compared to the usual overlap of roughly zero. Mind you:
These and other good films, all sluiced into an over-supplied sump of circulating product along with our efforts to talk about them, while genocides and climate collapse and political degeneracy all intensify anyway. At some point the limits of cultural activism compared to other kinds will have to be examined.
-- me in the comment box provided.
Sites introduced their year-end round-ups in the tone of a newsreader with bad news from the Palace, downbeat regret about the fact films had not noticeably slowed any slaughter or sprinkled magic dust over society but concluding we should keep on keeping on, buoyed by a feeling of film uniting us and inspiring us. Uniting whom and inspiring what was not specified. Not many sites called the situation "gutless dithering." Has art stopped Brexit yet, as they used to say where I live.
The idea that an artist could insert images into the stream of public speech and thus change political discourse has gone, probably for good.
If there is one idea that tribalists and fundamentalists of all stripes agree on, it is that art is mainly instrumental. Images are things, words are deeds. Monkey see, monkey do. They credit art with a power it does not have (but which the political ‘vanguard' nostalgically wishes it had): that of literally changing behaviour and reality.
-- Robert Hughes, years and years ago.
