Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/06/22

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, September 6, 2022

Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022)

Cast: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp, Michelle Thrush, Julian Black Antelope, Stefany Mathias, Bennett Taylor, Mike Paterson. Screenplay: Patrick Aison, Dan Trachtenberg. Cinematography: Jeff Cutter. Production design: Amelia Brooke, Kara Lindstrom. Film editing: Claudia Costello, Angela M. Catanzaro. Music: Sarah Shachner.

I haven’t seen a Predator movie since the original back in 1987, so I’m not up on the lore and the cross-references embedded in Prey, which serves as a kind of prequel to the series. But it stands alone for those of us not in the know, thanks to solid adventure movie-making. Amber Midthunder is a worthy successor to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from the Alien movies and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in the Terminator series – the determined woman up against an implacable foe. If that sounds like you’ve seen it all before, you have. Prey holds no surprises as a member of the supernatural action movie genre. It’s not a film I’m likely to cue up for a rewatch anytime soon, but I liked it for a first watch, especially because it gave us some fresh faces in its cast and does justice to its Native American setting.