Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/21/20

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

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020)

Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in Palm Springs

Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons, Peter Gallagher, Meredith Hagner, Camila Mindes, Tyler Hoechlin, Chris Pang, Jacqueline Obradors, June Squibb, Tongaya Chirisa, Dale Dickey, Conner O'Malley, Jena Friedman, Brian Duffy. Screenplay: Andy Siara. Cinematography: Quyen Tran. Production design: Jason Kisvarday. Film editing: Andrew Dickler, Matt Friedman. Music: Matthew Compton.

Maybe it was John Keats who invented the now-familiar trope of the "time loop." The figures on the Grecian urn celebrated in his ode seem to be stuck in one: The lovers "cannot fade," but will be "For ever panting, and for ever young." Of course, they don't know that; only the observer of the figures does, and the fact teases him "out of thought, / As doth eternity." And it was Shakespeare who noted that "our little life is rounded with a sleep," just as the day of the characters in Palm Springs is. The concept of the time loop, as established for most moviegoers by Harold Ramis's great 1993 movie Groundhog Day, is that it actually exists only for an observer who happens to be caught in it, as Bill Murray's character was in the film. The task of this observer is either to persuade others to recognize his plight or to find a way out of it. In the 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Cause and Effect," written by Brannon Braga, the crew of the Enterprise is caught in a time loop that ends with the destruction of the ship and the crew, but everyone on board begins to have feelings of déjà vu as the event repeats itself; they eventually figure out a way to end it. Andy Siara's screenplay for Palm Springs takes a direction more in line with Groundhog Day by having three people aware of the loop: the wedding guests Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) and the enraged Roy (J.K. Simmons), who blames Nyles for getting him caught in it. Eventually, Nyles and Roy give up and decide to seize the moment and endure an eternity of a single repeated day, but Sarah spends her time learning quantum physics to break the loop. Palm Springs doesn't break any new ground for the time loop trope, but it's engagingly conceived and entertainingly played, and it occasionally teases us out of thought about eternity, too.