The Madness of 'Megalopolis'

I attended a very special, and very strange, preview screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis a few days ahead of its official release. Before the film ran, the screening audience was treated to what was surely meant to be a great privilege, a discussion, live-streamed from a stage in New York City, in which Coppola, Robert DeNiro, and Spike Lee talked about Coppola’s filmmaking. But it was not the lesson in film history nor the glimpse into cinema genius that we select viewers might have expected. For us, it was mainly three aging men muttering at each other while straining half-successfully to remember things.