Make Time for This - GSPN's Podcast for Pop Culture and Other Things · GSPN, Blue Wire

Megalopolis is a one of a kind original epic overflowing with ideas, for better and for worse

·1 hr 36 min·4 clips

Coppola sold his wineries including his own name brand to fund Megalopolis.

The conversation starts with Megalopolis. Andrew Schneider says he is catching up on missed movies this year and watching a lot more films now that baseball is not filling his evenings, and that seasonal detail gives the episode an easy, grounded start before the talk widens. It stays loose from there. A lunch-break walk, a shuffled Spotify track, and Guy Clark's 'Dublin Blues' turn into a small running joke about Dublin Happies, and Adam McGee and Andrew let that offhand banter sit long enough for the show to settle into its rhythm. Then they circle back to Coppola. The film becomes a test case for how much a viewer should let the room, the crowd, or the surrounding narrative shape the experience, and Andrew pushes back hard on the idea that those forces should decide the opinion for him. He sounds tired of that. He says that at 32 he feels more cynical than he used to be, more willing to make his own judgment and less interested in being swept along by reaction, and that feeling runs through the way he talks about Megalopolis. The argument sharpens there. They talk about people who call a movie the stupidest thing they have ever seen, and about the different kind of reaction that forms when a film is treated like a future cult object before anyone has even had time to watch it properly. That pressure matters. The episode keeps returning to the idea that waiting for a movie to become a shared joke or a morbid curiosity can poison the act of watching it, and Andrew treats that as a bad way to approach anything. He would rather not do that. A stretch about The Substance brings that into focus, since they talk about seeing it early, before the discourse had fully hardened, and about how different the experience can feel once expectations have been laid on top of the movie for weeks. The same logic applies here. A joke about a Wicked screening and people singing turns into a firm refusal, and the comedy of it also makes the larger point clearer: some audience behavior is just bad vibes for a screening, and pretending otherwise is nonsense. They are not sentimental about it. Even when the conversation wanders, the hosts keep coming back to the basic idea that Megalopolis has things worth talking about, and that the harder part may be finding a culture willing to stay with those things instead of running away from them. That is the shape of it. What starts as a talk about Coppola ends as a small argument for patient, self-directed moviegoing, with enough banter and irritation in the mix to keep it from feeling sealed off from real life.

As heard by us

A Megalopolis discussion that turns into a sharper look at how audiences decide what a movie is.

Adam McGee and Andrew Schneider spend the episode on Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, and the discussion keeps returning to how a movie this large and strange lands with the people around it.

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Why you'd press play

If you just saw Megalopolis, this gives you a place to keep arguing with it.

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