Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/07/19

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

Friday, June 7, 2019

Viva (Anna Biller, 2007)

Anna Biller in Viva

Cast: Anna Biller, Jared Sanford, Bridget Brno, Chad England, John Klemantaski, Barry Morse. Screenplay: Anna Biller. Cinematography: C. Thomas Lewis. Production design: Anna Biller. Costume design: Anna Biller. Music: Anna Biller.

The 1970s are generally regarded as the souring of the 1960s, as the Peace and Love of Woodstock turned into the empty hedonism of the golden age of disco. And that's pretty much the way that inimitable auteur Anna Biller sees it in Viva, a parody of the softcore erotic movies of the time. It's all a bit too overheatedly obvious in its satire, but that makes it worth seeing once.