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, January 4, 2020

Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985)


Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985)

Cast: Eileen Brennan, Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, Colleen Camp, Lee Ving, Bill Henderson, Jane Wiedlin, Jeffrey Kramer, Kellye Nakahara, Howard Hesseman. Screenplay: John Landis, Jonathan Lynn. Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper. Production design: John Robert Lloyd. Film editing: David Bretherton, Richard Haines. Music: John Morris.

Clue was something of a dud with critics and audiences when it premiered, but it has developed a following over the years. The idea was a daffy one: Make a movie based on a board game. But the game's roots are themselves cinematic: the murder mystery that takes place in a mysterious mansion, with an array of suspects and murder weapons. So all the movie version needs to do is provide backstories for the various characters -- Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, et al. -- and some way of staging the murder so that the killer's identity remains unknown until the final reveal. Of course, the charm of the game is that the players are the detectives and the killer, weapon, and location of the crime vary every time it's played. Unfortunately, the screenwriters -- and there were many other hands in the script beyond the credited ones -- decided to go crazy and provide a multitude of victims, as well as three potential endings. The gimmick of showing a different ending each time was one reason the film flopped in theaters, and only really made sense when it was released on video and all three solutions to the mystery could be sampled. What the film has going for it is mainly a cast of comic actors familiar from Mel Brooks movies, Saturday Night Live, and other TV shows. There are a few bright lines but also a lot of unfunny running around, and any comedy that opens with a gag about stepping in dog shit has to work awfully hard to overcome that.  

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