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, August 29, 2022

The Black Phone (Scott Derrickson, 2022)

 











Cast: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Davies, E. Roger Mitchell, Troy Rudeseal, James Ransone, Miguel Cazarez Mora. Screenplay: Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill, based on a story by Joe Hill. Cinematography: Brett Jutkiewicz. Production design: Patti Podesta. Film editing: Frédéric Thoraval. Music: Mark Korven.

Horror movies usually don’t scare me: I know their tricks and tells, and as an amateur film scholar I’m as absorbed in the techniques of camerawork and editing as I’m involved with the story. So The Black Phone, which blends two horror movie tropes, the serial killer and the ghost story, never made me jump out of my seat or threatened to come back at me in my dreams. Still, it’s a good one, with some involving performances, especially by the young actors Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw but also by the invaluable Ethan Hawke, even hidden behind some scary masks. It’s as much a story about the dark side of childhood – Finney (Thames) and Gwen (McGraw) are abused by their father, played by the usually creepy Jeremy Davies, and Finney is being bullied by some of classmates – as it is about predators and ghosts. But Scott Derrickson handles both sides of the story with finesse and without too many horror movie clichés.