(In bed with) the Russians

Late at night in bed we talk about Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed new film. Unlike most people out there, we were impressed and touched by it. Coppola dissects American society and its media propaganda machine only the way foreigners usually managed to do in the past — people like Paul Verhoeven with Starship Troopers and Robocop or Neil Blomkamp with Elysium. Maybe that’s why most mainstream critics hated it. It’s both wildly experimental for a big budget film and also classical, almost neorealist, in its humanistic ethos…taken from David Graeber, who Coppola was inspired by.

For an iconic Hollywood director and a minor oligarch in his own right, Coppola comes off as a saint and a ray of light aka Valis, trying to break through the Black Iron Prison to get to the people’s minds and hearts. Unfortunately he was not very successful at it since people’s brains have been so rotten out by our bread and circus entertainment complex.

That’s the first half of our talk. At the end we talk about Sofia Coppola, who seemed to inherit her dad’s outlook on life and Hollywood and is often hated as well.

—Evgenia

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