Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/23/22

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

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)

Cast: Edith Meeks, Millie White, Buck Smith, Anne Giotta, Larry Maxwell, Susan Norman, Scott Renderer, James Lyons, John R. Lombardi. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, based on novels by Jean Genet. Cinematography: Maryse Alberti. Production design: Sarah Stollman. Film editing: Todd Haynes, James Lyons. Music: James Bennett.

Parody is often the sincerest form of appreciation, especially in the sections of Poison labeled (in the end credits) “Hero” and “Horror.” The former takes on the true-crime documentary to tell the story of a boy who kills his father and then disappears; the latter smartly adopts the look and feel of old black-and-white horror movies in its account of a scientist’s experiment gone awry. The third segment, “Homo,” is less parodic in nature, although it draws elements from prison movies to tell its story of an inmate’s obsession with another man whom he had known in a previous incarceration. If you’re used to the finesse Todd Haynes brings to his later films with big budgets and major stars, such as Far From Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015), the roughness of Poison may be a shock. But it’s still a compelling and often disturbing movie.