Spoiler Alert: unfortunately, The Avengers do not show up at the end of either film.
REAGAN
This lofty slowpitch for a biopic caught after that regurgitates every commonly-known cliff note and bullet point about one of America’s quintessential 20th-century figures is only as controversial as you allow it to be.
Ultimately, proud conservative actor Dennis Quaid, as serviceable as his scans as “The Gipper,” looks more like Richard Nixon than he does Ronald Reagan.
Shot three years prior, the film wrestled to find ample distribution—and even this was marred by blowback due to, unsurprisingly, its wide release cast for the final sprint of yet another divisive Presidential Election cycle.
In a Fox News appearance back in August, Dennis Quaid was “baffled” by Facebook cracking down on promotional material for the film on its platform, and the social network’s subsequent explanation that this could be chalked up to automated content containment—nothing more, nothing less.
"It seems to be automated that way for some reason. No one's responsible for that," Quaid said. "This happened several times, actually, and we were suspended two days in a row … The last time I heard, Reagan hasn’t been on the ballot in 40 years and not only that, he’s not even eligible to run because he served two terms."
The film itself dares to depict a surely flawed man as the most relentlessly scrupled man who ever lived, let alone served as Head of State. It’s good popcorn fodder, but cinematically it’s no “Oppenheimer”—what can be?—and therefore needs not incite a flurry of think-pieces, or worse.
It’s not revisionist history, merely a slice of a life spent killing audiences with the kindness of its protagonist—until of course he’s driven to say “it” with reverberating and iconic fervor.
Antler-framed at its bookends with the March 30, 1981 attempt made on his life, and his command to “Mr. Gorbachav” to tear down the wall six years later, director Sean McNamara fills in the rest with Reagan’s ascension from B-movie leading man, to communist union-busting President of the Screen Actors Guild and so forth.
“Our first priority must always be world peace,” Reagan spoke from a debate stage podium in real life, and Quaid-as-Reagan did as well. “Use of force should always be a last resort.”
This seemed to be the method to the crafting of the film’s madness as well. It holds a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, but that is unfair. Vanity Fair called it “pure hagiography”—that is, the biographical depiction of a saint. Say what you want about this approach, but it did break more bank than it was projected to, so to speak, making $28.6 million against a $25 million budget, as of October 4.
By all intents and purposes, it seems to be exactly what it set out to be: an amalgam of the biographies that more fully portray the true architect of the “Make America Great Again” ideology.
Interestingly enough, they do so in a way that touches close to home—with Lindenhurst’s own Dan Lauria (“The Wonder Years”) tabbed as Tip O’Neill, a staunch Reagan opponent who still respected the hell out of the man; precisely as it should be, but scarcely is any longer.
Plus, Jon Voight as the composite character telling the story—one “Victor Petrovich,” who in the modern day recalls keeping close tabs on Reagan for the Soviets over the years; only to instantly recognize him as the one who could—and would—lead their people out of the darkness.
However, do not let Voight’s prominent role here distract from the fact he co-starred in a much ballsier film also recently released to theaters, and from a filmmaker with an all-time pedigree (with no disrespect to Sean McNamara, as the previews for “Bali: the Artist” look quite promising).
This film may not come close to breaking even as “Reagan” did, as it just so happens to be the most expensive independent film ever produced.
MEGALOPOLIS
Those who are even somewhat dialed into the movie-verse know the deal going in: “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” director Francis Ford Coppola double-down on his all-hands-on-deck model that brought forth the later to deliver what he insists is not, but could very well be his swan song.
Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” quasi-revisited? Thy name is “Megalopolis.”
Coppola first broke the story, a time-manipulating architect tussling with a corrupt mayor—what timing—and a litany of fiery red tape in order to rebuild a Fall of Rome-infused alternate present New York pastiche called “New Rome” into a utopia—in the 1970s.
An early 2000s movement was forged to make the film, but after 9/11, the disaster and devastation elements of what’s visually still very much the Empire State sent Coppola’s uncompromisable vision into indefinite turnaround.
After his tear of breakout masterpieces, Coppola spent much of the 1980s and 1990s taking “for hire” directorial jobs on assignment just to will himself out of the debt he accrued through self-financing 1981’s “One from the Heart” in particular.
In a "life imitating art" stroke, as he entered his 80s, he realized his own legacy would register a smidge incomplete if he did not borrow from the big swings of his early years to tell the tale of what could damn well be a semi-autobiographical version of himself. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) sports an unparalleled creative tenacity. In-universe, it’s the kind that can impact the entire culture even more than Coppola’s “Godfather’s” shaped his–and our—own reality.
And so, Coppola staged a “Megalopolis”-flavored breakout of the development hellscape by putting up his entire winery fortunate amassed to raise the $120 million budget, with Lionsgate even making him foot the bill for marketing. He has declaratively left none of his wealth to his children—all creators in their own right, and whom he empowered to cut their own cloth from the get, as evidenced by daughter Sofia’s Academy Award-winning “Lost in Translation” (2003).
Though he is grateful for how his kin have operated in actuality, “Megalopolis” supposes a world where the reign of the ruling family is soon to fold like a house of cards runneth over because the spoiled younger generation ostensibly on the rise simply do not “get it.”
They are not adequately molded to take over, nor are they remotely trusted to, because they never knew the hardships of building something out of literal nothing—grandeur from the ground floor. Therefore, they could never know real victory, because they have never lost a thing, and only know the way of the handout.
Coppola seemingly cast controversial figures like Jon Voight and Shia LaBeouf, one passed over for roles due to his politics, and the other due to his behaviors, as a grandfather and grandson tandem spinning the wheels of the state. However, their misguided pride, greed and lust for more power leads them to take their eyes off the ball in ways Driver's Cesar, a shameless Howard Roark type, could never.
“If we don’t learn from the past, we’re condemned to repeat it” seems an appropriate motif rife within the text of Megalopolis and the context of its production.
In a bleakly not-too-far-away land that struggles to reconcile what should be prioritized, the individual or the collective, Coppola, who hasn’t been shy in declaring along the promotional circuit that “America will have an Emperor in the coming months…”—whatever that means—ultimately leans into the Sci-Fi spectacle remind us this is but a movie.
And yet, the sum of its parts—as complicated, and truly out there as it is—remind us that it’s not.