Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/11/19

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

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, Don Cheadle, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán, Joanna Gleason, Ricky Jay, Philip Baker Hall, Alfred Molina, Thomas Jane, Michael Penn. Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson. Cinematography: Robert Elswit. Production design: Bob Ziembicki. Film editing: Dylan Tichenor. Music: Michael Penn.

Paul Thomas Anderson's breakthrough film is a reworking at feature length of a short film he made in 1988, and it has the earmarks of what was to come from him as writer-director: complex narratives with large casts, featuring some of the same actors from film to film. It also launched Mark Wahlberg out of his career as a rapper and underwear model into success as a film actor and producer. Wahlberg plays a naïve layabout who gets into the porn business under the screen name Dirk Diggler. He is mentored by the filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) and by the actress Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), who acts as a kind of den mother for the various porn stars under Horner's aegis. The camaraderie of this little company is tested by the passage of time, as the feel-good 1970s turn into the anxious 1980s.