Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/25/20

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

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley, James Le Gros, John Philbin, Bojesse Christopher, Julian Reyes, Daniel Beer, Chris Pedersen, Vincent Klyn, Anthony Kiedis, Dave Olson, Lee Tergesen. Screenplay: Rich King, W. Peter Iliff. Cinematography: Donald Peterman. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: Mark Isham.

Point Break is so kinetic a movie, so crammed with stunts and fights and chases, that it almost seems like a parody of an action flick. Just when you wonder how the movie can top its surfing sequences, it throws in a skydiving episode. When you're expecting another car chase, you get an exhilarating, not to say exhausting, foot chase. I have to wonder if what makes Kathryn Bigelow such a successful action director is that, as a woman, she has a special point of view on what testosterone-driven action looks like. The dialogue is loaded with machismo: "Young, dumb, and full of cum." "It's basic dog psychology: If you scare them and get them peeing down their leg, they submit." Skydiving is "Sex with gods. You can't beat that!... One hundred percent pure adrenaline." "Why be a servant to the law when you can be its master?" "You gonna jump or jerk off?" After a fight: "This is stimulating, but we're out of here." It's the one female character of any consequence in the movie, Lori Petty's Tyler, who sardonically quits a scene by commenting, "Okay, too much testosterone around here for me." Bigelow's objectification of male display is what gives the movie its subversive quality.