Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/28/19

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

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Say Anything.... (Cameron Crowe, 1989)

John Cusack in Say Anything....

Cast: John Cusack, Ione Skye, John Mahoney, Lili Taylor, Amy Brooks, Pamela Adlon, Joan Cusack, Jason Gould, Loren Dean, Jeremy Piven, Bebe Neuwirth, Eric Stoltz, Philip Baker Hall. Screenplay: Cameron Crowe. Cinematography: Lásló Kovács. Production design: Mark W. Mansbridge. Film editing: Richard Marks. Music: Anne Dudley, Richard Gibbs.

No teen comedy is more full of memorable moments and lines than Cameron Crowe's Say Anything.... "I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen." "I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.'' And even today, John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler holding up a boom box playing Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" remains one of the definitive movie images, long after boom boxes became obsolete. Crowe managed to overcome the banality of the misfit romance trope -- slacker and high achiever fall in love -- with the help of an enormously talented cast.