Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/13/19

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

Friday, September 13, 2019

My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989)

Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Benda Fricker, Ray McAnally, Fiona Shaw, Ruth McCabe, Hugh O'Conor, Cyril Cusack. Screenplay: Shane Connaughton, Jim Sheridan, based on a book by Christy Brown. Cinematography: Jack Conroy. Production design: Austen Spriggs. Film editing: J. Patrick Duffner. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Daniel Day-Lewis won his first Oscar for My Left Foot, with a tour-de-force performance that almost guaranteed him the award. As Christy Brown, limited by cerebral palsy to the creative and expressive use of only his left foot, he struggles for the kind of acceptance by the outer world that he finds in his large working-class Irish family, finding it finally through painting and writing. It's the kind of film that's usually called "inspiring," but Day-Lewis makes it clear that Brown was something of a handful to deal with -- a human figure, not an object of sentimental concern or pity. It's easy to overlook, in all the attention given to Day-Lewis, the performance of Hugh O'Conor as the young Christy.