Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/01/22

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

Saturday, January 1, 2022

Slacking Off

Movie: Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1990) (Criterion Collection).

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.

TV: Only Murders in the Building: Who Is Tim Kono?; How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?; The Sting; Twist (Hulu).

New Year's Eve in the age of Covid: What better time to stay in and watch stuff that's not too depressing but has a little edge? Slacker fits those criteria as well as any movie. It's a comic portrait of the Austin counterculture of its day, edged with a little violence. I'm a big Richard Linklater fan, and I'm surprised I've never seen his debut film before. It's a walk-and-talker like the Jesse-and-Céline trilogy, and a group portrait like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!, with some of the experimental élan of Boyhood. The tag-you're-it structure -- one character crosses paths with another, launching that person into their own episode -- is beautifully done: Austin becomes something like the Dublin of Ulysses, an inspiration that becomes obvious in the scene in which two guys toss a tent and a typewriter off a bridge as a third reads a passage from Joyce's book. The unknown performers mostly remained unknown, except for Linklater himself, the guy in the opening scene, listed in the credits as "Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station," and future director Athina Rachel Tsangari, the "Cousin From Greece" listed in the cast as Rachael Reinhardt.

Richard Linklater and Rudy Basquez in Slacker (1990)

Only Murders in the Building was also a fortuitous choice for a low-key New Year's Eve. I can't binge-watch much more than the four episodes I saw last night, but the plot is ensnaring and I like wondering which guest star is going to turn up next after Nathan Lane, Sting, and Tina Fey.