Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/09/19

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, July 9, 2019

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Toni Cantó and Cecilia Roth in All About My Mother

Cast: Cecilia Roth, Marisa Paredes, Candela Peña, Antonia San Juan, Penélope Cruz, Rosa Maria Sardà, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Toni Cantó, Eloy Azorín. Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar. Cinematography: Affonso Beato. Production design: Antxón Gómez. Film editing: José Salcedo. Music: Alberto Iglesias.

Fascinatingly complex melodrama that's part hommage to movies like Douglas Sirk's and part exploration of contemporary views on gender and sexuality, but mostly one of Pedro Almodóvar's most searching and honest films. It won the Oscar for best foreign language film.