Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/13/19

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, December 13, 2019

Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, 1955)

Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, 1955)

Cast: Jamie Smith, Irene Kane, Frank Silvera, Jerry Jarrett, Mike Dana, Felice Orlandi, Shaun O'Brien, Barbara Brand, David Vaughan, Alec Rubin, Ruth Sobotka. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Howard Sackler. Cinematography: Stanley Kubrick. Film editing: Stanley Kubrick. Music: Gerald Fried.

If only Stanley Kubrick hadn't had to worry about such incidentals as plot and characters, Killer's Kiss might have been a classic film noir. It has a gritty urban atmosphere, striking visuals of well-chosen locations, and a perhaps slightly overdone jazz score. But it doesn't have much of a story to tell: Boxer on the skids meets attractive blond and rescues her from her brutal boss. It's not enough to carry a film for even the bit over an hour that the film runs. (It only seems longer.) What holds our attention are some skillful photography -- a reminder that Kubrick began his career as a staff photographer for Look magazine -- evoking a now mostly lost New York City, including Penn Station before its demolition, and a few set pieces: the prize fight; the larking, drunk conventioneers who steal the protagonist's scarf; the chase across the rooftops; and the fight in a warehouse full of mannequins, in which Kubrick comes up with some striking setups such as a shot of the protagonist with plaster hands dangling over his head. There are some attempts to give the characters a backstory: his family in Seattle, her gloomy tale about her father and sister. But these don't give enough depth to the characters. They remain excuses for camera setups rather than actual human beings.

First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Patrick Fugit, Christopher Abbott, Ciarán Hinds, Olivia Hamilton, Pablo Schreiber, Shea Whigham, Lukas Haas, Ethan Embry, Brian D'Arcy James. Screenplay: Josh Singer, based on a book by James R. Hansen. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.

Sometime in the middle of First Man, I found myself wishing that Buzz Aldrin had been the first person to set foot on the moon. Not that Neil Armstrong didn't deserve the honor -- Damien Chazelle's movie makes us certain that he had the right stuff -- but because Armstrong, as conceived by screenwriter Josh Singer and played by Ryan Gosling, is so remote, chilly, and uptight. Aldrin at least had a sense of humor and was a bit of a maverick, but all we get of Armstrong is a grim determination, a sense of duty that the job was paramount and had to be suffered through at the expense of human tenderness. Gosling's Armstrong is death-haunted, emotionally frozen by the deaths of his young daughter and of his fellow pilots and astronauts. We don't connect with him except through his wife, Janet, played by Claire Foy, who endures her husband's remoteness but is powerless to get him to snap out of it. The result is a somewhat depressing treatment of heroism as a kind of dead end, which seems to fit the facts of Armstrong's rather colorless and uneventful later life, and also suggests why he and Janet separated in 1990 and divorced four years later. It's a well-made movie but a curiously unsettling one.