Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/31/19

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

Saturday, August 31, 2019

BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018)

Adam Driver and John David Washington in BlacKkKlansman

Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Robert John Burke, Laura Harrier, Jasper Pääkönen, Ryan Eggold, Paul Walter Hauser, Ken Garito, Frederick Weller, Michael Buscemi, Ashleigh Atkinson, Corey Hawkins, Harry Belafonte, Alec Baldwin. Screenplay: Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee, based on a book by Ron Stallworth. Cinematography: Chayse Irvin. Production design: Curt Beech. Film editing: Barry Alexander Brown, Music: Terence Blanchard.

Spike Lee finally received the Oscar nomination for directing that he had deserved for Do the Right Thing (1989) and Malcolm X (1992), and he won his first competitive Academy Award -- in 2016 he was given the honorary award that the Academy usually gives to people they've shamefully ignored over the years -- for screenwriting. BlacKkKlansman is based on the experiences of Ron Stallworth, who joined the Colorado Springs police force as its first black officer in the late 1970s, and found himself impersonating a Ku Klux Klansman over the telephone. Eventually, his conversations led to requests for a face-to-face meeting, so a white officer was recruited to directly infiltrate Klan meetings. The film version relies heavily on the chemistry between John David Washington as Stallworth and Adam Driver as the fictitious Flip Zimmerman (the identity of the actual white infiltrator was never revealed), as well as the sinister but often comic performances of the actors playing the Klansmen: Ryan Eggold as Walter Breachway, Jasper Pääkönen as Felix Kendrickson, Ashlie Atkinson as Kendrickson's wife, Paul Walter Hauser as the self-named Ivanhoe, and especially Topher Grace as the blow-dried Grand Wizard, David Duke. There's a somewhat unnecessary romantic subplot involving the activist Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier) and Stallworth, but the film generates plenty of suspense and readily makes its point about racism in the Trump era without turning into agitprop.