Chalamet does a wonderful job as Dylan, and the script is great.
I liked how Dylan came across as a political opportunist, protest songs and sincerity being just another part of a costume to be discarded, but his true-believer folk contemporaries also seemed phony.
There’s a difficulty to making a biopic about a beloved musician because the genre invites so many shots of our hero singing cut with slow zooms of adoring fans/ peers/ reluctantly won-over record execs. Like a…
Sexy and cluttered. Earlier in the day, I had read an essay about the legacy of Frederic Jameson, and it made me see this film as very much a product of a postmodern moment in the 90s, a moment that has passed: The film is unabashedly meta. Maggie Cheung plays herself playing a role. Art is pastiche, “images about images.” The highbrow has been supplanted by the market, a critic interviewing Cheung gleefully informs us. A character announces that “everything…
Successfully weds a conventional romantic comedy core with Safdie oversaturation and kinetic force. Once I was on a cruise boat in the Gulf of Finland, and a Russian guy accosted me: “Hey man, are you American? I love Wiz Khalifa! Smoke weed every day!” I’m glad to see his spirit captured on film. The characters are comicbook caricatures of themselves until they aren’t, though mostly they are. The Russian-English jokes are great, but Ivan needs to say типа way more.
In Archaeologies of the Future, Frederic Jameson's study of utopian science fiction, Jameson observes that it is impossible to depict utopia, something fundamentally different from the present. Thus, “at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.” Jameson died just days before Megalopolis came out, and it would be nice to think that the film's total incoherence is a tribute to the late critic. We hear a lot about utopia…
