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12 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
A Likable Love Letter to 1960s Eurocinema with Marvy Mellow Music, 16 March 2004

Author: Dorian Tenore-Bartilucci (dtb) from Whitehall, PA

Paul Ballard (Jeremy Davies), a young film editor living in Paris in 1969, gets his big directorial break when DRAGONFLY, the sexy futuristic (it's set in 2001!) spy flick he's editing, loses not one but two directors. It should be noted that Paul's been filching black-and-white film from the DRAGONFLY production company to make his own rather self-indulgent cinema verite film at home. Once he's at the helm of the big-budget SF schlockfest, Paul has a hard time distinguishing between real life and reel life as he falls in love with the bewitching Valentine (Angela Lindvall), an activist-turned-actress making her film debut as "Agent Code Name: Dragonfly." Think of this comedy-drama as a sort of 8½ or DAY FOR NIGHT for the baby boomer generation. It's clear that writer/director Coppola (Francis Ford Coppola's son, big shock :-) has great affection for the art of filmmaking in general and for kooky, cheesy 1960s Eurocinema romps such as BARBARELLA and DANGER: DIABOLIK in particular (neat in-joke: the leading man of those films, John Philip Law, appears in CQ as Dragonfly's spymaster). The score by the appropriately-named Mellow captures the mod mood music of the era delightfully. At times Paul's self-absorption became as grating to me as it did to his long-suffering girlfriend Marlene (Elodie Bouchez), but the spoofery of filmmaking and the 1960s won me over. The excellent cast helps a lot, particularly Dean Stockwell's touching turn as Paul's father, the ever-smooth Billy Zane as Dragonfly's revolutionary adversary/lover "Mr. E," and the hilarious performances of Giancarlo Giannini as a Dino deLaurentiis/Carlo Ponti-esque producer and Jason Schwartzman as the wild 'n' crazy replacement director who gets replaced himself after he breaks his leg in a sports car accident. Don't blink or you'll miss Roman and Jason's Oscar-winning kin Sofia Coppola cameoing as Giannini's mistress. I was also utterly charmed by model Angela Lindvall in her movie debut (art imitating life -- ain't it grand? :-). It's great fun to watch Lindvall switch from throaty-voiced siren Dragonfly onscreen to sweet, endearing animal lover Valentine offscreen, plus she's got the most expressive eyebrows since Eunice Gayson in DR. NO and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. (My hubby would like me to point out that Leonard Nimoy and The Rock are tops in Expressive Eyebrows, Male Division! :-) Do rent the DVD version of CQ so you can also watch the entire film-within-the-film DRAGONFLY, which is to the CQ DVD what MANT! is to the MATINEE laserdisc (is MANT! on the MATINEE DVD, too? If not, it oughta be!) -- with enjoyable commentary by Lindvall, yet!

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9 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
The Third Way, 11 October 2003
Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Spoilers herein.

There are three ways to make a film. You can find a mood, embed it in a style and just carry the audience into the taste. You can engage in the fluids of life, the humanity of events and desires. Or you can concern yourself with the art of what it means to make a film and essentially produce an imaginative essay on creation.

Coppola senior is the second type of filmmaker. Sofia Coppola is the first.

In all three, the story plays a role, but never the central role any more than what you eat has to do with why you are alive. Each of us as watchers have a similar choice to make, a choice that determines our lives in film.

Our man Roman has decided to take the third way. If he was starting when his father did, the `third way' filmmakers would be the French New Wave guys, plus the early Fellini. Except for the genius Kubrick, who in 1968 made a film set in and called `2001' that was itself a third way film, and which concerned the battle among the three ways.

Kubrick's three `ways` are three completely independent cosmologies who tussle for control over the film: the humans, the machines, and some undefined supernatural consciousnesses. It is a masterpiece of self-reference.

Now along comes Roman and makes a film in 2001, set in 1968 about a science fiction film. It deals with the same three agents, this time as discrete films: the human diary of Paul, the scifi film and the wrapper film.

That scifi film stands for the style piece. It starts life as a New Wave film, with a French director who is obsessed with the revolution. It features a Cronenberg-inspired `gun' (reference eXistenZ about the same three levels) that represents the camera: it freezes things. That director (played by the most recognizable French film icon alive) ensures that the camera is returned to the revolutionary.

The film is then turned over to the `mood' director, here a parody of Roger Corman. And then Paul, who takes the third way under the nose of the Italian boss, his dad.

It is an amazingly clever construction, much deeper and richer than `Adaptation' for instance because it actually wears what it sews, and integrates the three layers. It absolutely sets him apart from Sophia and Francis. I'll take one of these over one of those any day, even if the product is as dreary as `the Auteur Theory.'

Others have rattled off many of the references to other films, mostly new wave, but I didn't see this one: the bit at about the stolen film references the chase in `Give my Regards to Broad Street,' which had very similar aspirations. Instead of relying on Kubrick, who had worked out some of the outstanding problems of the construction, it more ambitiously leveraged Alfred Jarry. But alas, it was tedious. This isn't.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

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9 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
AUTEUR! AUTEUR!, 28 May 2002
Author: george.schmidt (george.schmidt@hbo.com) from fairview, nj

CQ (2002) *** Jeremy Davies, Angela Lindvall, Elodie Bouchez, Gerard Depardieu, Giancarlo Giannini, Massimo Ghini, John Phillip Law, Jason Schwartzman, Dean Stockwell, Billy Zane. Filmmaker Roman Coppola proves to be a chip off the old block (his dad is Francis Ford, duh!) with this sweetly dark comic valentine to foreign films of France and Italy focusing on a struggling film editor/auteur wannabe (Davies in all his squirmy, milquetoasty glory) assigned to a disastrous sci-fi B flick where he winds up being a replacement director and falls deeply in love with his gorgeous starlet (Lindvall, the epitome of sex echoing the leonine good looks of Catherine Deneuve at her start) in the process. Coppola has a keen technical sense incorporating set and production design, costumes, camerawork, editing and low-key acting to make a picture perfect ode to the hurly-burly world of filmmaking then and now. If there is a criticism it is that it is a bit slight in its theme (filmmaker's navel gazing fails to see the big picture: love is all around) yet there's a nice homage to Coppola's relationship with his famous father in the interplay between Davies and his onscreen father Stockwell, an absent-minded businessman, echoing nicely. The title is a play on Seek You = CQ.

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Modest debut for Francis Ford Coppola's son Roman, 17 March 2006

Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

There are two films within a film in this campy debut from Roman Coppola. There is the introspective black and white, experimental, "student" sort of film that the young director Paul (Jeremy Davies) is making in his Paris apartment, and there is "Dragonfly," a kind of Barbarella (1968) sci-fi space shoot 'em up that he ends up directing. These might be seen as the twin realities of the young film maker: on the one hand there are those short films you made at USC or UCLA film school to get your degree; on the other, there are those mindless commercial entertainments that Hollywood needs to crank out for the masses. These represent the bookends of the young director's reality.

The third film, the film that exists over and above these two, is the film that Roman/Paul would like to make, a film about what it is like to be a young film maker amid the crass commercialism of the producers, the seductive lure of the glamor that is the film maker's world, and the daily often tedious work of the actual film making. In other words, Roman Coppola is self-exploring in public. He is the novelist as a film maker.

"Dragonfly" itself is indeed Barbarella without the benefit of Terry Southern's contributions to the script or the services of Jane Fonda. It is unconsciously campy and a satire on such films. Model Angela Lindvall, five feet ten and three-quarters inches tall, anorexically thin, and sporting some very serious hair, plays Dragonfly with a kind of Barbie doll intensity. It is immediately obvious that she has the muscle tone of the languid and the athletic ability of a preteen. Yet her character is a "for hire" secret agent skilled in the martial arts and the use of weapons. Playing opposite her is Billy Zane as "Mr. E" a kind of Che Guevara revolutionary who is absurdly stationed on the far side of the moon where he is training revolutionaries.

In the introspective black and white film, Paul sits on the commode and talks to the camera much to the disdain of his live-in girlfriend Marlene (French actress Elodie Bouchez, best known for her work in the outstanding The Dreamlife of Angels (1998)) who would like him to pay more attention to her.

This might be compared (distantly) with Francois Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night) from 1973 in which the great French director plays himself making a film--in other words a film within a film. Jeremy Davies reminds me somewhat of the sensitive, boyish actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, who played in that film after gaining prominence in Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coup (1959). It is easy to see Truffaut's influence on Roman Coppola, as indeed Truffaut has influenced many directors.

I don't think CQ ("Seek You") was entirely successful mainly because I don't think Roman made the transition from the self-indulgence and showiness characteristic of the very films he is satirizing to the mature project that addresses itself more directly to the needs of the audience. There is some fancy camera work with mirrors and characters seen from interesting angles, and some beautifully constructed sets, and some witty dialogue amid some telling satire of filmland people and their world (especially producer Enzo played by Giancarlo Giannini and Dragonfly's idiot second director), but we are never made to care about what happens to any of the characters, this despite the fact that Davies is a very sympathetic actor.

Some of the jokes in the film include the three-day five o'clock shadows on the faces of the young actors. (That style is almost contemporary--not sixties-ish.) The hairstyles of the women with the beehives and such hinted of 1969, the year of the main film, but the eye makeup again was more contemporary than sixties-ish since it lacked the very heavy black eyelashes and eye liner that one recalls. To get it right, Roman should have reviewed, e.g., Blow-Up (1966) or Elvira Madigan (1967), films I am sure he has seen. Another is the view of Paris in the year 2001 as seen from 1970. It is futuristic in a silly way, and recalls some science fiction that exaggerated the technological changes that would take place. Orwell's 1984 (from 1948) has not yet arrived, nor has the overpopulated, polluted world from Blade Runner (1982).

Appearing in small roles are Dean Stockwell as Paul's father, and veteran French film star Gerard Depardieu as Dragonfly's original director.

Bottom line: worth seeing if only because it is the first film of the son of Francis Ford Coppola who may yet do something to rival the great works of his father. By the way, this might also be compared to The Virgin Suicides (2000), his sister Sofia Coppola's first film, just to see who is more likely to best please Dad. I'm taking no bets.

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10 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
good student film, 7 July 2004

Author: tritisan from Mill Valley, CA

Folks, I really, really wanted to like this film. Alas, I found myself looking at the DVD's timer, wondering when the thing would end. So many elements are likable: groovy sixties design, groovy music, groovy chicks, groovy references to (truly) groovy sixties flicks with chicks. But it doesn't hold together. It doesn't flow. It doesn't involve you.

The self-referential dialog and editing had the cloying and self-conscious feel of a student film. (And I had to sit through plenty of those in college, including my own ;-)

Overall, I think Roman has promise, but he has a lot of catching up to do with his sister.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
Lost in Distribution, 17 July 2007

Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

Sofia Coppola may have got all the kudos with The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, but, from a 60s movie buff's point of view, the other Coppola kid, Roman, turned out an even more enjoyable feature, CQ. Shame that no-one saw it. Barely released in the US (and not released at all in most countries), it's an engaging little number that pits underground cinema against Eurotrash movie-making at a time when people still thought even pulp cinema could be the stuff of revolution (1969-70 to be precise).

A riff on Sullivan's Travels and 8½, it sees Jeremy Davies' editor of Franco-Italian co-pro 'Codename: Dragonfly' struggling to come up with a new ending while making his own personal film with borrowed equipment. Oh, and falling in love with the fictional main character, confusing film and reality (not only is he too busy documenting 'the truth' of his life to see it around him but he even enters the film to sort out a plot hole) and possibly being targeted for retribution by Gerard Depardieu's fired firebrand director. (The door panel that Depardieu breaks that is later framed and given to the editors is actually one that Francis Ford Coppola smashed on one of his films!) Filled with sly 60s cinema references from Fellini to Warhol (even the trailer he cuts for the film is inspired by the one for Dr Strangelove) and with some character touches straight out of James Joyce, the visual influence is much more Danger: Diabolik than Barbarella (John Phillip Law even appears in the film within the film), and Dean Tavoularis' spot-on production design and Robert Yeoman's superb photography are both pitch-perfect. Davies, so irritating in Soderbergh's disastrous Solaris, is quietly fine here, Jason Schwartzman has fun as a bizarre hybrid of a young papa Coppola mixed with Roger Corman via Austin Powers, Giancarlo Giannini does Dino De Laurentiis to a tee (with Sofia Coppola cameoing as his mistress), and there's good work from Dean Stockwell and Massimo Ghini as well. At the end of the day there's not much there, but Coppola's love of movie-making makes it surprisingly joyful to watch if you're in a receptive mood.

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
I Liked It!, 22 May 2003

Author: kld068 from US

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I rented this movie knowing almost nothing about it. I found the movie very enjoyable, particularly the kitsch 60's style of the movie within the movie (actually there are two of those). Some of the previous reviewers indicated that they didn't like the "film student" look to the film. I believe that that was intentional direction and editing which added nicely to the film. Without giving anything away, I felt that the ending tied the two movies together as well as the reluctant director's life much like a good Tom Robbins novel comes together. I would whole heartedly recommend this movie to anyone looking for something a little offbeat and certainly not "Hollywood". 9 out of 10 here.

Spoiler Mode: for the folks that don't know Morse Code the bit at the end of the movie says "[D]edicated to my father".

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Brilliant Multi-layered Cinema, 15 January 2003
Author: Edgar L. Davis (luludavis@aol.com) from Hardwick, Vermont

This film is entertaining, thoughtful and beautifully photographed, It cleverly mixes documentary with the real lives of it's characters giving a new twist to the "story within a story" genre. Every actor gives an honest performance in a story that could have easily slipped into the same old tortured artist crap that seems so popular in film today. The soundtrack is very much a part of the story in that it represents the era in which the film is set and the style in which the film within the film is set. Roman Coppola may be Francis' son but he is not a copycat.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Interesting but forgettable, 18 October 2004

Author: rps-2 from Bracebridge Ont

Okay, the film festival crowd probably loved it. But your average, popcorn munching movie goer who has scraped to-gether the ten or fifteen bucks it costs to see a movie these days will probably wonder why he or she made this choice. If it's stamped "Copolla" it's automatically great stuff, right? Wrong! It's a neat spoof of filmdom's pretensions. But it's terribly "in." I worry when film makers are more concerned about entertaining themselves rather than the public. It's interesting as a cinematic curio and it does have a chuckle or two in it. But once it's run its course in the movies and on TV, the dust will grow thick on the film cans and tape boxes holding it. Hardly either epochal or an epic!

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Interesting premise butchered by an amateur, 10 February 2004
Author: TigerMann from Virginia

Watching the trailer for this movie, I couldn't help but feel excited.

Look at all the swank 60's spy movie references!

Well ... this wasn't the movie I'd hoped for. I believe that "CQ" is Roman Coppola's (son of famous Francis Ford Coppola) first feature-length movie. And I suppose that all first-time directors flail and hick-up in their first (hell, even second and third) films.

But Coppola very blatantly tries to conceal all his director and writer disabilities by shrouding the film with 60's pop-culture trivia ... something that I'm sure his "hipster" handbook directed him to do.

The premise involves an American attempting to edit a ridiculously avant-gard sci-fi/spy Modesty Blaise-esque movie in Paris ... while in his personal time he whines and moans about how he isn't adept enough to sustain a meaningful relationship ... all this through the eyes of a camera. And whilst he records his day-to-day life on film ... he neglects his stunning french girlfriend.

So ... our young American in Paris ends up taking the reigns of the spy movie and plenty of hijinx ensue.

It isn't hard to predict how the movie will end. And if you wait around long enough and can somehow see past Coppola's bloated, pretentious and pedestrian writing and direction ... then you'll have earned a shining ticket to complain about how great this movie COULD have been.

And people wonder why nobody remembers (or wants to remember) this movie. Chalk it all up to the futile attempts of a son of a great director to become more than his father.

Remember ... even old Francis Ford had to LEARN filmmaking. Anyone ever see "Dementia 13?" It wasn't a HORRIBLE movie ... but then again ... it wasn't "Apocalypse Now," either.

Roman's sister, Sophia Coppola has done so interesting work. If anyone inherited Francis Ford's filmmaking genes ... my guess is that it's her. "The Virgin Suicides" is a really excellent movie. "Lost in Translation" wasn't bad either.

So ... Roman ... keep on making those music videos. Your video for "The Strokes" was painfully dull ... but it was a little easier for me to switch channels.

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