On MEGALOPOLIS, TWIN DRAGON ENCOUNTER, and The Virtue of Ignorance
if your name is francis ford coppola, don't read this one
Today, I’m taking a short pivot from the next WORD SOUP AND SALAD session. While the next session is focused on beginning your writing post-resource gathering, think of this as a .5 session, a short philosophical musing on motivation and why you should starting making whatever it is you want to make, but presented to you as reviews of three movies I watched in a very strange order, and what I found there.
Allow me to explain: This past weekend, in an attempt to stay inside with my fellow Angelenos, I made a layer cake for one of my best friends. I would call myself a hobbyist baker in the truest sense - I bake to figure out how to make things that taste good. It was ultimately not as beautiful as the extremely Instagrammable cake it was made to taste like, but the flavors were there, I was proud enough of it to give it as a gift to my friend, and it felt good to make something that felt like a real challenge.
So, about that. Making things, and it being a challenge.
The eating of the layer cake accompanied an activity - a game that my friend and filmmaker Mike famously calls Cinema Subjugation. For it to be fun, you have to enjoy watching movies, and it’s common to pick something that people might not ordinarily pick. It is, after all, a subjugation - forcing your friends to watch films with you. Everyone picks one movie.
For our Saturday, myself,
, and our friend Ryan watched three: Michael McNamara’s TWIN DRAGON ENCOUNTER, Francis Ford Coppola’s most recent film, MEGALOPOLIS, and McNamara’s 1990 follow-up film, DRAGON HUNT. You’re reading this correctly: Dragon Hunt is the sequel to Twin Dragon Encounter, and we watched Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 cinematic release MEGALOPOLIS in between. And while we watched them this way for our own stupid reasons, it ended up teaching me a pretty valuable lesson about creativity, one that I would like to share with you today.
As some of you know, I live in Los Angeles. I’m a transplant who came here with Blake because he and I realized that as adults, you can pick anywhere in the world to live. We picked L.A., and we’ve never regretted it.
Thankfully, our home and neighborhood is safe, and our fingers are crossed they will stay that way. Over on Instagram, I’m sharing resources and info about volunteering, and also for receiving assistance if you or a loved one lost their homes or had to evacuate. You’ve heard it a thousand times already but I want to add my voice - the community has turned the fuck out. I’ve never felt better about my neighbors in my life. I’ve lived in other places during a disaster, and it didn’t look quite like that.
If you are looking to help with relief efforts, a great thing you can do is set a reminder for a week from now to look into relief efforts then. A lot of groups are overwhelmed right now trying to process donations and direct funds, but the city’s recovery will be a marathon, not a sprint. Check in with us, we will need the help.
If you’re interested in reading the previous installments, you can do so here.
The following contains spoilers for all of the mentioned movies.
PART I: TWIN DRAGON ENCOUNTER
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” - Stephen Hawking
One man. Or in this case two, that are twins. They’re the baddest karate teachers in their dingy concrete town, and there’s a girl, and some uncomplicatedly bad guys, and one really bad guy at the top. Its the same formula for just about any of these incredibly popular, straight-to-VHS, self-funded action film vanity projects. The cinema historians and elderly Midwesterners at Red Letter Media coined the term black tank top movie for this kind of film; referring to the ubiquitous garment that seems to be the costume of choice for these eighties films lacking a costume-department.
Twin Dragon Encounter is a nearly perfect example of a black tank top movie. If you're not familiar with the genre, think all of the misguided passion of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room meets like 20% of what Jean Claude Van Damme can do on a bad day. Twin Dragon Encounter’s writer, director, producer, and star Michael McNamara has an obvious chip on his shoulder from the jump - the film starts with on-screen text over himself and his twin brother Martin (who just fights, that’s all you need to know about him,) railing against Hollywood action “stars” and espousing instead that the twins are “real men.”
It colors the whole experience, like when someone has one too many signs on their lawn. The twins beat up the occasional cartoonish baddie, but they also start fights where there would otherwise be none, bad fights, where they jump people from behind with barely any provocation. While most genuine martial arts movies can be packed full of entertaining fights even if the plot is thin, one of the hallmarks of a black tank top movie is the slightly embarrassing badness of the whole thing.
The McNamara twins start off looking competent enough. In the controlled environments of their Canadian dojo, they can perform impressive sets of repetitive sparring kicks. But making a fight look good on screen isn't the same thing as sparring at a dojo. It also, crucially, is not an actual fight. Black tank top movies almost always seem to forget this in favor of the main attractions just uncomfortably wailing on extras, presumably in exchange for free pizza and a worthless acting credit.
It makes for a pretty awkward watch. Instead of an Enter the Dragon vibe, where a fighter demands all eyes on him in the name of his immense skill, Mike and Marty spend the whole film sucker punching people and hitting them with sticks. This is how real men look and act, they all but yell at the screen, catching handfuls of fish and aggressively showing off some real Canuck bushcraft.
The movie even ends (surprise - they win) with another reminder of Michael’s throbbing chip on his muscled shoulder. Forgive the small photo:
“This film was in no way assisted by-
The Canadian Film Development Corporation
or
The Ontario Film Development Corporation.”
Now, I’m no filmmaker, but I understand it’s not common to credit those who didn’t help you. It’s what you do if you’re really bitter.
It’s a bad movie, but it’s Mike’s stank attitude reeking from the screen that makes it hardly even fun to watch. It’s a slog, like the McNamara twins are standing there making you watch their hunting and fishing home videos with a gun to the back of your head. But ultimately…all that said…it’s his first movie.
There’s no getting around that part of it. My movie curious friends and I, who watch bad things together, are all creative people, we’re writers, and it always comes out after we’re done ripping the thing to shreds.
“Hey, at least he made a movie. None of us have done that.”
And it’s true, ughhh, we hate ourselves for it but it’s true. We’ve certainly got access to more than these guys did in the mid-80s, and they successfully made feature length film. They got it there with some egregious slow motion, but they did it forty years ago. I carry a camera that’s exponentially more powerful in my pocket, and all I ever film with it are my cats. I don’t even post the videos.
If I want to make a cool film, (and God help me, I think I do,) I’ve probably got to make a bad one first. In that, the McNamaras are way ahead of me.
It’s been said that spite is a powerful motivator - ol’ Mike seems like he’s got a lot more of it than me. But I’ve got a sixth sense for it, spite. I think when you make something from spite, it shows. You wear your heart on your sleeve, and it’s bleeding so bad we can’t forget the creator and get lost in the work. I once spoke with someone who was working on a memoir, and when they asked for my feedback, I hated to give it: I said I thought they weren’t ready.
Not out of skill - the skill was there and absolutely so was the passion - but it became clear that the work carried a sense of revenge, not toward an idea or a relatable enemy, but toward highly specific people. Rather than a story I could relate to, it felt like being asked to pick sides in a fight - one where we know very little about either side and are just trying to listen to the story.
Speaking of which—
PART II: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S MEGALOPOLIS
“What do you think about this boner I've got?” - Hamilton Crassus III
According to Wikipedia's “Plot” section1, Megalopolis is the story of Cesar Catalina, a brilliant architect who developed an ideal building material called Megalon out of his dead wife's hair. Megalon can do everything - from constructing seemingly impossible buildings, to making invisibility dresses, to healing a gunshot wound to the brainpan. One would think this is really more of an organic chemistry thing, but nobody puts Cesar in a corner.
The plot itself focuses loosely on Cesar's character arc. He begins the film as a brilliant, celebrated, wealthy Nobel prize winner and societal elite. Tragically, Cesar seems to have only convinced half of the city of New Rome of his greatness. Many of them don’t like him or his vision of the future, and that simply won’t do. Through the strange and seemingly unrelated events of Megalopolis, he manages to somehow convince the rest of the city that he’s right and should get to…pick how the future looks, or something. Really relatable stuff.2 Much like Twin Dragon Encounter, Megalopolis begins with an incredibly flawed protagonist who doesn’t seem to see his flaws - potentially interesting - but as it becomes clear that he’s a sort of flimsy stand-in for the filmmaker himself, fails to accurately interrogate his flaws or develop a personality in any way. With Michael McNamara he gets the excuse of newness - these guys aren't seasoned storytellers. They're martial artists and twins, and consider that to be an interesting enough conceit for multiple movies. Which, I guess it is, because they made multiple movies about it.
So what's Frankie's excuse? We can't even blame the ten years of development hell or revolving door of a cast on this movie. This is Coppola, the man who famously pulled the masterpiece that is Apocalypse Now out of a filming experience that was so infamously hellish that became its own movie.3 So what gives? What changed?
Megalopolis is Coppola’s twenty-third feature film. The Godfather was his fifth, Apocalypse Now his eighth. This isn't a retrospective on Coppola’s career, so we won't dwell on it, but there's something to be said about a “sweet spot” between untethered and overworked. That doesn’t, however, mean he’ll never make a good one again. We'll come back to this. (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by the way, a movie I adore that is considered by many to be as hokey and over the top as this one, was his nineteenth.)
But this isn’t about Coppola, it isn't a review or a where did things go wrong retrospective, it’s about us - you and me and everyone else who wants to make a thing, be it a movie, a comic, a book, a painting, a song, or something else without boundaries. And we want to make it well, because it’s scary and a lot of fucking work. It’s different work from someone at Coppola’s level, as well. For as long as most of us have known who the guy was, he’s been a legend. Much like Cesar, who starts the story far beyond where anyone else in that miserable city will ever reach - and only grows in power. It isn’t enough to have every possible thing going for you - he wants the future, too - though his ideas about it are not particularly compelling, and he never really makes a case for why.
Much like the Twin Dragon Encounter, Francis seems too close to these ideas, too myopic to accurately interrogate them, so there’s sort of a Randian the boy who was good at everything vibe. There’s probably a draft where this exists, but in the movie’s finished form, it fails to pass the most basic story tests, for example: do not write your outlines in terms of ‘and then,’ rather, ‘because of.’ Rather than ‘Cesar’s wife dies and then he invents Megalon out of her hair,’ give us the connecting tissue to understand that path. For example, and this is not the case in the film: Cesar’s wife dies and because of her dying words/strange decay/a formula in her will he discovers Megalon. In the movie, he discovers Megalon after her death because he sees she was pregnant with twins at the time of her death - two concepts that are unrelated to anyone but Francis.
There is a pretty weak love story in the plot. In one memorable scene, Cesar gushes to Julia that she is more fascinating than anything he’s ever studied, her mind is incredible - but their interactions before that all consist of him being rude to her, or her monologuing about him while staring at him. The filmmaker is present in all things, of course, but in this, he’s so loud. He’s Cesar, the main character, he’s Julia, commenting from afar on how misunderstood his brilliance is; he’s their literally magical child who will inherit the future - named Sunny Hope after Cesar’s dead wife, and if he’s a boy, will be named - wait for it - FRANCIS.4
Coppola, instead, feels more like Jon Voight’s character Hamilton Crassus, diminishing ruler of the Crassus Bank, wealthy enough to finance anything he wants and answer to no one else ever. We respect the work he’s done and so we’ll do anything he asks, even laying our eyes on one last, impressive, and deceptively hostile boner.
As the movie ends on schmaltz and speeches and a victory I still don’t fully understand (why did the Mayor prosecute him in the first place, why was he disliked, how DID his wife die, why would he give Cesar the blackmail ‘proof’…) the closing image is that of a new Pledge of Allegiance…for some reason. What Francis supposes it ought to be is as follows:
I…sure. I guess. Whatever.
Look, I don't regret watching Megalopolis. There are far worse things than watching a less-than-great movie, especially when its a look inside the untethered urges of one of the most skilled filmmakers of all time. The cast is crowded with fantastic people who seem less like fully realized characters and more like really awesome actors in the middle of the kind of improv games they make you play at theatre camp - one scene reads remarkably like a game of Questions and another features cooperative movement games.
That’s the feeling I’m left with - that it’s wildly incomplete in a way that the creator can’t have been perfectly happy with, right? And god damn I can relate to that. I’ve made a lot of single issues of comics, a good deal of series, and I’m not typically 100% pleased with what I’m made. Even on the best of days, I see something I wish I’d done differently, or had time to fix. But the longer you fiddle, the more things can fall apart - this is part of the value in learning when things are truly finished. Megalopolis had dozens of cast members in and out as the film’s commitment asked more and more time.
I remind myself that Mr. Coppola isn’t under the same constraints as many of us. Where you or I might frantically rush to finish, say, a comic script in 20 pages, because we cannot afford to pay the artist for more - he can simply hire new actors when his last multi-million-dollar deal falls apart.
The limitations can be a real gift.
PART III: DRAGON HUNT AND THE POWER OF TENACITY
“I am aware of only one thing: my ignorance.” - Socrates
After the slog that was Megalopolis, we still had one more movie to watch to complete our self-imposed subjugation. Undecided, we named some ideas while we ordered restorative Taco Bell. After the audiovisual assault that was Megalopolis (Blake accurately and unfavorably compared it to Attack of the Clones), everything seemed… exhausting. We had one more movie to watch and we needed it to suck in the exact opposite way our Megalopolis experience sucked. So we did a 180 and went back the way we came.
DRAGON HUNT is the McNamara's 1991 sequel to Twin Dragon Encounter, and the plot is already an improvement. The surviving villains from the first film kidnap and drug the Twin Dragons. The twins get loose, but they’re on an island full of specialty assassins with names like Beastmaster and Fat Man. The story's reason for this is clearly communicated - the Twin Dragons are the only thing between them and world domination. The director's reason for this seems a bit more straightforward - he's got to put some people on the screen a little more fun to watch than the self-serious twins.
When the twins wake up, they of course get revenge. They fight each assassin until the fighting is done. Then they fight Mad Man Jake, who was the villain and best part of the first film, and is honestly a tour de force in this one. He plays intensely with toy army men, he sings a full playlist of classic tunes, he chomps on that cigar like it's the God damn scenery. Watching him was the most fun I had all day.
It wasn’t quite good, but it was…so refreshing. Not only did it lack the pretentious (and this is me talking) vibes of Megalopolis, it also demonstrated actual skill. It wasn’t bad like Twin Dragon Hunt at all - by God, these men took their notes. It had a clear plot, genuinely serviceable camera work, and a working director at the helm. Mad Man Jake, by far the best performance of the first movie, has almost as much, if not more screen time than the twins.
The cinematography, the sound, it’s all better. Apparently for this one Michael hired a co-director, and the presence of someone who understands how movies are made makes a pretty big difference. It also seems to serve as something of a diffuser for Mr. McNamara’s aforementioned shoulder-chip.
Dragon Hunt seemed absent of the bitterness in both Twin Dragon Encounter and Megalopolis. Maybe it’s the presence of another director in the room, or maybe…Mikey learned. The shots show film literacy and competency, the actors are funny, the sound is vastly improved. The various new assassin characters are fun to watch, despite having exactly one personality trait each, which is more than the twins have between them. There’s action, that’s shot like action, with real pacing, instead of long unbroken shots of boats paddling slowly after one another.
Meanwhile, in my living room, you would think we were watching the Olympics. We were standing and cheering like watching a baby take its first steps, they were doing it, my god! They made a first shitty film, and they made another one that was better! This was the lesson in making things! TO MAKE BETTER ONES!
It might not be your first thing you make that’s worth a god damn, but you’ll never know unless you do it - it might be your second! Maybe your sixth, seventh, and eighth tries at making things will be held among the greatest films of all time, but your twenty-third, despite having every resource at your hands, is a real mess! Or maybe they’ll be like Francis’ nineteenth, a highly polarizing horror classic, beloved by some and reviled by others. That, personally, is where I've always found the sweet spot.
If you ask me, (because I haven’t talked enough,) it’s passion that drives you to be creative, the rules that tell you how everyone did it before you, and the magic is somewhere in the middle. The right distance between ‘listening, learning, studying the masters’ and ‘fuck you, I want to make Megalopolis.’ Or ‘Twin Dragon Encounter.’ Same thing.
Back to Dragon Hunt. Just before the credits rolled, we were full of good will toward these men. All we want in the world is to have the strength to make a Twin Dragon Encounter and then come back from that to make Dragon Hunt.
And so, the McNamaras (or maybe just Mike, we can’t know) lead us in our own prayer. Where Megalopolis ended with a Pledge of Allegiance, Dragon Hunt reminds us of the McNamara Pledge of Defiance -“This film was made without the help of the Canadian Film Board.”
I think Megalopolis could have used a little more of that energy.
Thanks for reading, let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Stay weird, talk soon -
-TH 1.15.25 18.48
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I’m not referring to the Wikipedia plot summary because I didn’t watch the film; I’m referring to it because I had to go look at it after watching the movie because the plot was so obscured in everything else.
Unless you’re one of the most celebrated film makers of all time. Maybe then the fact that some people don’t like you keeps you up at night.
And then another, fictional movie, if you count Tropic Thunder.
Yes, Julia’s father is a character named Francis. Which the director chose to do. And also chose to have a character say about this amazing baby who should inherit the future, “And if it’s a boy we’ll name him Francis.” It’s like if Catwoman and Batman had a baby named Tini and then did a monologue about how she’s right all the time. You’d hate that and you’d be right to!!!
"Really? Worst film you ever saw?
...
Well, my next one will be better!"
- Ed Wood (1994)
Terrific post, Tini.
I really loved your perspective here.
And you did a terrific job of writing it for people who have not seen these movies (maybe it's not great for people who HAVE seen them... but I think you found the sweet spot and it's probably great for both). Truly, one of my favorite posts you've ever done.