Living in Cinema: Three Weirdest Movies of 2024

Living in Cinema celebrates the triumphs and failures of contemporary films. This week, let's talk about the three weirdest movies of 2024.

Dec 22, 2024

(This is famed actor Jon Voight wearing a little hat in *Megalopolis*. He doesn’t actually have a boner in this scene—he’s hiding a bow and arrow, which he uses to murder a character named Wow Platinum, after which he kills his son, Clodio Pulcher, who is played by Shia LaBeouf. This happens in this movie.)

If there’s any phrase you’ll hear beaten to death in this column, it’s making meaningful art is hard. Which means I have zero interest in disparaging anyone’s work when the work doesn’t work. Movies themselves are collaborations between hundreds of artists: writers, directors, actors, photographers, musicians, designers, warlocks. The likelihood of a movie being dog shit outstrips the likelihood of a movie being a triumph by about 10,000 miles. All it takes to sink the ship is one person. In the spirit of this fact, we’re not talking about the worst movies of 2024. We’re talking about the weirdest movies of 2024.

(A deep hole indeed, young man! Unfortunately no one told Robert Zemeckis how deep this deep hole could go)

What do I mean when I say weird? From the late Middle English, “wyrd” originally denoted destiny, or rather “having the ability to control one’s destiny.” Other connotations of the word describe a fatalism, a story you can’t escape. When I was thinking about the three weirdest movies of 2024, I was struck by the fact that all three were made by three of the greatest directors in cinema history, each working in a late period of his life, each operating under the belief that he was making a late-period epic, and each hunted down by the weird, inescapable fact that movies can go haywire at any second. Let’s meet this year’s honorees.

Megalopolis

(Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum. Shortly after this, she tells Adam Driver he’s “anal as hell,” after which she gets down on her knees to blow him and tells him she’s “oral as hell.” This happens in this movie)

A lot of hay has been made about the fact that Francis Ford Coppola spent roughly 40 years developing Megalopolis and roughly 120 million dollars of his own money dragging the film across the finish line. People were rooting for Francis, myself included. Because everyone loves the narrative: the embattled, weathered master is called down from the mountain for one last job, and may god have mercy on anyone who stands in his way or dares doubt him.

I take no pleasure in writing this, but the uselessness of this film is so profound it’s like a box of dust tried to have sex with a neon sign missing two letters. You could argue that a box of dust and a neon sign missing two letters have more raison d'être than this movie.

In addition to the above-mentioned Jon Voigt boner scene, there’s a scene in which a child executes Adam Driver with a handgun and Driver’s girlfriend engineers him back to life using something called a “megalon.” What’s a megalon, you ask? Well, it’s a gold, shitty-looking CGI McGuffin that can perform magic, cure death, and build cities. That’s it, that’s the plot. It’s somewhat devastating. The closest cultural touchstones I can think of for this film are watching 58-year-old Mike Tyson lose a boxing match against a reviled YouTuber and watching 81-year-old Joe Biden confuse Volodymyr Zelenskyy with Vladimir Putin on the world stage.

Gladiator 2

An essential question I ask myself when making art is why certain art exists instead of nothing. Why do Red Hot Chili Peppers songs exist instead of nothing, for example. Why do non-fungible tokens of apes wearing crop-tops and sunglasses exist instead of nothing? Earlier this year, 86-year-old English director Ridley Scott was barred from his Los Angeles home for several hours while police raided the neighboring dungeons of recording artist Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. Why does that exist instead of nothing?

Twenty-four years after the release of Gladiator (2000)—recipient of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture—Sir Ridley is back with a sequel that shamelessly plagiarizes the original film, only this time there’s two evil emperors being evil in white face. Because Gladiator two. This film also features no fewer than 500 shots of men fighting CGI baboons, men fighting CGI sharks, and men fighting a CGI rhinoceros. Why does that exist?

Denzel Washington, who will almost certainly get nominated for Best Supporting Actor, plays a wild n’ crazy flamboyant gladiator trader who likes jewelry and sack dresses and sex stuff, but he’s also doing the Training Day accent the whole film. Why?

Here

(Also reportedly what Lebron James said after he blocked Andre Igoudala in the 2016 NBA Finals)

Based on the 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, Here is director Robert Zemeckis’s follow-up to late-career efforts like Pinocchio (2022) and Welcome to Marwen (2018). It’s been noted that Zemeckis has a penchant for CGI’ing his wife into films and enhancing the size of her chest, which isn’t even the weirdest detail about him, because the guy also directed beloved films in which a kid goes back in time to have sex with his mom and an autistic guy from Alabama is a journeyman at the crossroads of the most important events of the 21st century.

Here is hard because the pitch is a home run: the camera is trained on a single plot of land and focuses on the lives of its inhabitants across centuries. Hard to deny that, but Zemeckis is gonna Zemeckis. This is why our film begins with a stampede of CGI dinosaurs getting obliterated by a rain of CGI asteroids. This is why Tom Hanks is digitally de-aged and plumbing the depths of the uncanny valley. This is why Robin Wright looks like she’s being held for ransom inside this movie. Zemeckis tries his hand at depicting slavery, funeral rites of the Lenni Lenape, Benjamin Franklin’s parenting strategies, dos and donts on how young black men can avoid police brutality, and the film fails almost purposefully at every turn. It might be the most insidious and cynical art I’ve encountered in years, and I’ve read The Corrections.

One final note: not everything needs to be a movie. I thought Here would’ve worked as a stage play, where there’s no dinosaurs, no CGI, no de-aging, and the stage itself is the plot of land and we are the trained camera. Call me any time, Robert Zemeckis.

(Actual footage of me watching movies in 2024)

Agitprop

• Honorable mentions for weirdest movies of the year include Road House (2024), Madame Web, and Scoop. Instead of watching any of these movies, I recommend you question the nature of your existence

• I’ll write soon about my ten favorite films of the year, about which I’ve heard people are rioting in the streets with anticipation

Until next time, I’ll see you in hell