Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/08/19

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, December 8, 2019

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Cast: Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robins, Heather O'Rourke, Michael McManus, Virginia Kiser, Martin Casella, Richard Lawson, Zelda Rubinstein, James Karen. Screenplay: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Production design: James H. Spencer. Film editing: Michael Kahn. Music: Jerry Goldsmith.

Poltergeist has Steven Spielberg written all over it -- literally, since he wrote the story and collaborated on the screenplay, but also thematically, since its setting is the suburbia in which he grew up and which he portrayed in so many of his films. So it's no surprise that the controversy over how much of the film is really Tobe Hooper's continues to this day. It's clear that Poltergeist is a lot closer in tone and technique to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) than it is to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1972). That in itself should put an end to any arguments over authorship. I am not a fan of horror movies, and I found Hooper's earlier film simply unpleasant -- shocks without substance. Not that there's much substance in Poltergeist, either. It's full of hokum about the afterlife and exploitation of some elementary terrors, but not much else that would ever make me want to think about it, let alone watch it again.