Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/25/19

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, August 25, 2019

The Newton Boys (Richard Linklater, 1998)

Skeet Ulrich, Dwight Yoakam, and Matthew McConaughey in The Newton Boys

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dwight Yoakam, Julianna Margulies, Chloe Webb, Bo Hopkins, David Jensen, Luke Askew. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Claude Stanush, Clark Walker, based on a book by Claude Stanush. Cinematography: Peter James. Production design: Catherine Hardwicke. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Edward D. Barnes, Bad Livers.

With Richard Linklater directing actors like Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Julianna Margulies, The Newton Boys ought to be a lot better than it is. Not that it's bad, it's just a solid and unmemorable story of the bank-robbing brothers and their accomplices, including nitroglycerin expert Brentwood Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam), who plagued Texas and much of the central United States in the 1920s. The shadow of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) hangs long and heavy over this movie. A coda to the film shows the real, elderly Willis Newton, who was played by McConaughey, being interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. It may be more interesting than what precedes it, though it helps illuminate how well McConaughey caught the character.