A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, December 3, 2007

Monday Night on the Tube

The hemi-season finale of Heroes -- or the full-season finale if the writers' strike doesn't get settled -- reminded me oddly of why I don't go to the movies anymore. For the movies have become so dominated by digital special effects that such niceties as plot and characterization get lost. Heroes keeps us hooked with its characters, even though most of them don't make a lot of real-world sense. And because, unlike most movies, it doesn't have to worry about telling a complete story in two hours, it can afford genuine suspense and surprise: Sylar's got his mojo back! Nathan's dead! Adam's buried alive!

The second night of Tin Man was for me rather more engaging than the first, largely because we didn't have to spend so much time spotting parallels with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (Though there was a nicely witty spin on the MGM version's "lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" and the Toto-shapeshifter character was a clever idea.) Alan Cumming is, as usual, terrific, and Neal McDonough is quite moving as the tormented "tin man." Still, the miniseries seems a little padded out, and I still don't understand what the point of translating one fantasy into another is.
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