Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/24/22

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

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

Raya and the Last Dragon (Don Hall, Carlos López Estrada, Paul Briggs, John Ripa, 2021)

Voice cast: Kelly Marie Tran, Awkwafina, Izaac Wang, Gemma Chan, Daniel Dae Kim, Benedict Wong, Jona Xiao, Sandra Oh, Thalia Tran, Lucille Soong, Alan Tudyk. Screenplay: Qui Nguyen, Adele Lim. Cinematography: Rob Dressel. Production design: Helen Mingjue Chen, Paul A. Felix, Cory Loftis. Film editing: Fabienne Rawley, Shannon Stein. Music: James Newton Howard.

Raya and the Last Dragon is an engagingly fantastic journey into a world that might be called “Asian-ish.” With its blend of elements from various Southeast Asian cultures it risks falling into the trap of Orientalism, but it’s too beautifully busy to be stamped with such a label. It succeeds because of its varied and often elegant visuals and also because of a gifted voice cast, with Awkwafina as the standout as the voice of the sometimes giddy, sometimes wise dragon Sisu. Where it doesn’t quite work is as a fable about trust, an always dicey virtue, the mention of which carries the echo of Ronald Reagan's “Trust but verify.”