Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/14/20

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

Monday, September 14, 2020

Bigger (George Gallo, 2018)

Tyler Hoechlin, Calum Von Moger, and Aneurin Barnard in Bigger

Cast: Tyler Hoechlin, Julianne Hough, Kevin Durand, Aneurin Barnard, Robert Forster, DJ Qualls, Victoria Justice, Steve Guttenberg, Calum Von Moger, Max Martini, Colton Haynes, Tom Arnold. Screenplay: Andy Weiss, George Gallo, Brad Furman, Ellen Furman. Cinematography: Michael Negrin. Production design: Stephen J. Lineweaver. Film editing: Sophie Corra. Music: Jeff Beal.

There is probably a good movie to be made about bodybuilding and fitness, but Bigger isn't it. A good one would deal with the ongoing questions about supplement use and abuse, the influence of steroids and other performance enhancers and practices, and the role of LGBT people in popularizing the bodybuilder image. Bigger ignores the role of supplements and enhancers almost entirely, and reduces the effect of gays on bodybuilding to just one of the stigmas Joe Weider (Tyler Hoechlin) encounters on his way to success as a promoter. What we get instead is a cliché rags to riches story, in which Weider battles antisemitism and a ruthless publisher-promoter called Bill Hauk (Kevin Durand) in the film, but based on fitness entrepreneur Bob Hoffman, to become a leading magazine publisher, fitness equipment and supplement manufacturer, and promoter of professional bodybuilding competitors, most notably Arnold Schwarzenegger (Calum Von Moger). Unfortunately, the film generates no real tension in tracking Weider's rise: The ugliness of the antisemitism he encounters feels incidental, rather than pervasive, and the tension with his apparently mentally disturbed mother (Nadine Lewington) feels like hack psychology. Hoechlin is a good, attractive actor, but he's forced to deliver his lines in a strange, tight accent that is, I suppose, meant to be Montreal-Canadian, but just manages to be distracting, especially since it doesn't match the one used by Robert Forster in the scenes in which he plays the older Joe Weider. Durand goes way over the top as the movie's villain, but there's some fun to be had in Von Moger's imitation of Schwarzenegger. It's a little hard to see who the film is for: People into bodybuilding won't learn anything they didn't already know -- and will probably take issue with what the film tells them about the actual people involved -- and people who aren't will take issue with the uncritical approach to the subject.