Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 05/04/19

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, May 4, 2019

The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)

Cast: James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, Michael Paré, Scott Glenn, Danny DeVito, A.J. Cook, Hanna Hall, Leslie Hayman, Chelse Swain, Anthony DeSimone, Lee Kagan, Robert Schwartzman, Noah Shebib, Jonathan Tucker. Screenplay: Sofia Coppola, based on a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Jasna Stefanovic. Film editing: Melissa Kent, James Lyons. Music: Air.

Sofia Coppola's first feature is a well-crafted and reasonably faithful adaptation of a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides that takes a retrospective view of the suicides of five teenage girls in an affluent American suburb. Kirsten Dunst is, as so often, a standout as the sister who rebels against her overprotective parents and eventually promotes the suicide pact.