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

Saturday, December 12, 2009

What I'm Watching

Star Trek

Now that's a movie. A smartly made movie, with an excellent cast of young actors who evoke the originals without undue mimicry or excessive tongue-in-cheek. J.J. Abrams knows that the original is camp, and he doesn't try to de-camp it -- he puts all the women crew members in those ridiculous minidress uniforms, for example. But he freshens it, too, with special effects that don't look too easy, that have rough edges, unlike a lot of the CGI stuff today. Compare the three most recent Star Wars movies, for example, in which everything has the lifelessness that comes from computerized effects. The extra on the making of the movie on the DVD shows the effort that went into using real locations and real sets, instead of green-screening everything.


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