Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/27/21

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, December 27, 2021

Memory Lapse

Movie: Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960) (TCM).

Book: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed Kenneth Palmer.

TV: The Witcher: Dear Friend ... ; Voleth Meir; Family (Netflix).

I don't usually binge-watch, but when you're down to the last three episodes of a season of a show as entertaining and complicated as The Witcher, it's hard not to sit through all of them at once. I still don't have the backstories of the characters as well sorted out as I might, but I don't have the kind of devotion to the series that its die-hard fans have. Suffice it to say that there's a whole lot about Ciri and Yennefer (and even Geralt) that I don't fully understand, but I'd rather go with the flow of the action than spend my life digging into source material. At least I'm glad that they and my boy Jaskier (who gets a shirtless scene in a season when Geralt mostly stays clad) survived for another season. Too bad about Roach, however.

Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut, 1960)

I watched Shoot the Piano Player almost five years ago, according to this blog, and I'm surprised how much of it I had forgotten. Usually I get an occasional déjà vu when I'm rewatching a movie after several years, but there were only a few moments when that happened this time. Is it a sign of age? I like to think instead that it's because this loosey-goosey tragicomedy never quite goes where you're expecting it to, so it's hard to keep its plot turns and unpredictable characters (other than Charles Aznavour's Charlie/Edouard) in mind.

I'm trying to give Troilus and Cressida its due attention, so I'm making my way through the play slowly, stopping to read the notes in the Arden edition when I feel the need. It's a better play than I remembered, with well-delineated secondary characters. I'm finding its bitter comedy rather bracing, and wonder why it isn't performed more often. The play's cynicism seems like it would have a lot of appeal to contemporary audiences.