The godfather

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Megalopolis and the strange art of negative marketing

After a fairly barren summer movies-wise (I’m just waiting for the Alien: Romulus backlash to begin, and will be only too pleased to join in with it), there are more promising movies coming our way this fall. Yet the one that’s attracted more attention and interest than possibly anything else this year, maybe even this decade, is the grand return of Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolis, a self-funded, wildly ambitious folie de grandeur that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to predictably mixed reactions and an overall consensus that, alas, the one-time visionary genius of theater is no longer a force to be reckoned with, however loopily wild his latest (and, one reluctantly assumes, last) movie is.

megalopolis

Sunday

Jim Buckley

Las Vegas’s Mob Museum revels in the city’s gritty past

A generation or two is usually enough time for a family whose fortune may have been built upon a crime to bury its heritage. Not Las Vegas. It’s proud of its inglorious past. Housed in a four-story former federal courthouse and US post office in downtown Las Vegas, the Mob Museum revels in Sin City’s storied, unconventional and very criminal past. The building’s basement, for example, has been converted into an immersive exhibit redolent of the Prohibition era, complete with a fully operational speakeasy featuring a menu of 1920s-style cocktails. Gin-based Bee’s Knees and other drinks are served, and a traditional whiskey Old-Fashioned will be delivered hidden in a book. You’ll be invited to tour an onsite distillery where 100-proof corn moonshine is made.

mob

Friday

Alexander Larman

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a grand and glorious folly

Thirty years after it was first released in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is returning to theaters, appropriately enough for a Halloween re-release. (It also serves as a soft preview for Coppola’s newly announced passion project, Megalopolis, an epic drama starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza.) It is hard to overstate what a difference the past three decades have made in Dracula's popular reception. Although it was a significant commercial hit upon release, thanks in part to Annie Lennox’s enormously popular theme tune "Love Song For a Vampire," it was critically derided as poorly acted, overblown, excessively bloody without being frightening and a travesty of the original novel.

Thursday

Roger Kimball

Eliminating Qasem Soleimani was Donald Trump’s Middle East farewell letter

In July 55 BC, in the midst of his campaigns to civilize Gaul, Julius Caesar was troubled by the Germans. They would cross the Rhine, wreak havoc, and then disappear back across the mighty river, whose depth and swift currents made the Germans regard it as an impregnable barrier. To teach them that it wasn’t, Caesar had his engineers construct a bridge across the Rhine. As Caesar recounts in Book IV of his commentaries on the Gallic War, they did this in an astonishing 10 days. Caesar and his troops crossed over, stayed for a few days in German territory, 'burned all their villages and other buildings, and cut down the grain in their fields'. They then crossed back over and destroyed the bridge.

qasem

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

The embarrassment of Fredo Cuomo

First of all, it is not true — at least, I can find no evidence — that the Don kissed Chris 'Fredo' Cuomo on both cheeks and handed him a one-way ticket to a fishing jaunt on Lake Tahoe. I wish people would stop spreading these vicious rumors. As I write, thousands of Chinese troops are massing on the border of Hong Kong, but this week the world is mesmerized by the spectacle of CNN anchor Fredo Cuomo screaming threats and obscenities at some hapless chap who called him 'Fredo.' What Donald Trump accurately described as Fredo Cuomo’s 'lunatic ranting, raving, & cursing,' did not, as far as I know, include the painful objection that 'I can handle things. I’m smart. Not like everybody says — like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!

fredo cuomo