"A fly-on-the-wall documentary about the making of an $120 million movie that nobody saw and even fewer people liked, Mike Figgis' "Megadoc" - shot on the Fayetteville, Georgia set of Francis Ford Coppola's "Megalopolis" - boasts all the fineries of a DVD bonus feature, and makes little effort to contextualize its footage for anyone who isn't already on a first-name basis with immortal characters like Clodio Pulcher and Wow Platinum."
""Cinema is the only art that kills what it's trying to preserve," Coppola declares, and the last 30 years of his career - starting with "One from the Heart," but very much including "Jack" - have stemmed from his efforts to capture that thing without snuffing it out. To create a cinema that doesn't feel like a succession of taxidermied images. To his mind, movies are so moribund because people approach them as work; as fossilization rather than cre"
Mike Figgis' Megadoc records the making of Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis on its Fayetteville, Georgia set, delivering fly-on-the-wall footage with DVD-bonus polish but minimal explanatory context. The documentary privileges intimate, often eccentric moments and assumes viewer familiarity with mythic characters and scenes. The film highlights Coppola's persistent ambition to preserve cinematic vitality and his childlike optimism alongside the production's theatrical excesses and self-destructive tendencies. Specific grotesqueries and staged deaths underline the film's baroque imagination. The resulting portrait reaffirms what felt vital about Megalopolis while documenting why the project functioned as a singular trainwreck.
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