Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/04/22

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

Sunday, September 4, 2022

Uncharted (Ruben Fleischer, 2022)

Cast: Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, Antonio Banderas, Sophia Ali, Tati Gabrielle, Steven Waddington, Pingi Moli. Screenplay: Rafe Judkins, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway. Cinematography: Chung-hoon Chung. Production design: Shepherd Franklin. Film editing: Chris Lebenzon, Richard Pearson. Music: Ramin Djawadi.

Tom Holland is such a likable actor, with true screen presence, that I wish him well in his attempts to venture beyond the Spider-Man franchise. But Uncharted won’t do. It’s action for action’s sake, scrapping all laws of physics and probability for the sake of its thrills. I mean, it opens with a sequence that features Holland’s Nathan Drake on a string of cargo bales that are dangling from the back of an airplane. Drake jumps forward from bale to bale, defying gravity and wind speed, even though the same wind keeps sweeping his pursuers off to their doom. I knew from that moment that the only thing to do was relax and treat the movie like the live action equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon, the ones in which Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and remains suspended in air before he notices what he’s done. I’ve suspended disbelief for many scenes in an Indiana Jones or James Bond film, but Uncharted tested my limits – and failed. Still, Holland does what he can with the material, and he’s fun to watch doing dumb stunts. Mark Wahlberg is there for the buddy movie aspect, and Antonio Banderas is wasted in the role of the villain. Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle play treacherous women, and even though Ali’s and Holland’s characters share a room and a bed in one scene, there’s scarcely a hint of sex and romance. It’s all based on a series of video games that I haven’t played, and I guess there was some resistance to the film from those who have, but mainly about the casting choices.