Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/18/19

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

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1994)

Cast: Tim Robbins, Paul Newman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Charles Durning, Jim True-Frost, John Mahoney, Bill Cobbs, Bruce Campbell. Screenplay: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Sam Raimi. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Dennis Gassner. Film editing: Thom Noble. Music: Carter Burwell.

Maybe the most divisive of the Coen brothers' movies. It's certified rotten on Rotten Tomatoes at 57%, but even there you'll find reviewers who think it "criminally overlooked and sinfully wonderful" and "A wickedly funny and incisive lampoon of big business." I had avoided it for years, but when I gave in and finally watched it I was occasionally amused and sometimes surprised. What doesn't work for me, however, is its hommage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s. That sort of thing is rarely worth doing, unless you do it with unabashed affection, as Peter Bogdanovich did in What's Up, Doc? (1972). Bogdanovich wisely took the tropes of classic screwball and updated them. The Coens and co-writer Sam Raimi, however, make the mistake of retaining for their film the period in which screwball flourished, and the contrast of their ersatz screwball with the real thing becomes apparent.