Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/23/19

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 23, 2019

Still Walking (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008)

Cast: Hiroshi Abe, Yui Natsukawa, You, Kazuya Takahashi, Shohei Tanaka, Kirin Kiki, Yoshio Harada. Screenplay: Hirokazu Koreeda. Cinematography: Yutaka Yamazaki. Art direction: Toshihiro Isomi, Keiko Mitsumatsu. Film editing: Hirokazu Koreeda. Music: Gontiti.

A family gathers for an annual ritual: mourning the eldest son, who drowned 12 years earlier while saving the life of another boy. Hirokazu Koreeda's film earned the expected but appropriate comparison to Yasujiro Ozu's films that explored family tensions, as the surviving son, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), struggles with his resentment of the parents' devotion to their dead son and their disappointment with and disapproval of the course his life has taken.