Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/01/19

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, June 1, 2019

Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjærg, 1997)

Stellan Skarsgård in Insomnia

Cast: Stellan Skarsgård, Maria Mathiesen, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Gisken Armand, Bjørn Floberg, Marianne O. Ulrichsen. Screenplay: Nikolaj Frobenius, Erik Skjoldbjærg. Cinematography: Erling Thurmann-Andersen. Production design: Eli Bø. Film editing: Håkon Øverås. Music: Geir Jenssen.

The original Norwegian version of a film remade by Christopher Nolan in 2002, Insomnia had some Nolanesque twists from the beginning. Stellan Skarsgård plays Jonas Engström, a cop who used to be with the Swedish police and still carries the gun he was issued then, a fact that will play a key role in the plot as Engström becomes involved in helping his fellow policemen in the Norwegian force investigate the murder of a young woman. Suffice it to say that the insomnia Engström suffers comes from a guilty conscience that only gets guiltier as the investigation proceeds.

Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952)

Gene Evans in Park Row

Cast: Gene Evans, Mary Welch, Bela Kovacs, Herbert Heyes, Tina Pine, George O'Hanlon, J.M. Kerrigan, Forrest Taylor. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: John L. Russell. Production design: Theobold Holsopple. Film editing: Philip Cahn. Music: Paul Dunlap.

Samuel Fuller's favorite film came out of his own experiences as a newspaper reporter in New York City, though Park Row is set in the 1880s, a bit before Fuller's journalism career. It's a thoroughly entertaining melodrama about a man with ink in his blood, Phineas Mitchell (Gene Evans), who starts his own newspaper, The Globe, with a bunch of cronies after they're fired from another paper, The Star, after criticizing its timid approach to the news and fawning attitude toward the powerful. Scrappy underdog takes on the big guys, as you've guessed. One of the big guys is actually a woman, Charity Hackett (Mary Welch), the publisher of The Star. In the midst of their newspaper war, Phineas and Charity manage to fall a bit in love, but he puts business before romance and refuses her offer to merge the two papers. A little heavy on the clichés, but full of energy.