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

Thursday, September 1, 2022

What About Me (Rachel Amodeo, 1993)





 Cast: Rachel Amodeo, Richard Edson, Richard Hell, Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny Thunders, Nick Zedd, Rockets Redglare, Judy Carne. Screenplay: Rachel Amodeo. Cinematography: Mark Brady. Film editing: Esther Regelson. 

The uncompromising What About Me is one of the landmarks of low-budget independent filmmaking. It inspired writer-directors such as Jim Jarmusch, who have taken its gritty idiosyncrasy to heart and gone on to commercial success. Basically, it’s the off-beat story of Lisa, a young woman who dies in the opening of the movie and is reincarnated as a resident of New York’s Lower East Side. After the aunt with whom she shares an apartment dies, she is evicted – but not before being raped by the landlord – and forced to wander the streets, penniless and homeless, forming relationships with various men (and a couple of women). There’s no plot to speak of, only Lisa’s sporadic attempts to make contact with her brother, who lives in New Orleans, and her somewhat inept effort to stay alive. Rachel Amodeo, who wrote and directed, plays Lisa almost as a reincarnation of the kind of waifs that Lillian Gish played for D.W. Griffith. Much of the cast is made up of musicians from the punk rock scene, with Judy Carne, who had become famous on Laugh-In, in her last screen appearance as “Woman of the Streets.”

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