Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/12/22

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, October 12, 2022

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)

Cast: Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien, Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell, Jonathan Adams, Peter Hinwood, Meat Loaf, Charles Gray. Screenplay: Jim Sharman, Richard O'Brien, based on a musical play by O'Brien. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Brian Thomson. Film editing: Graeme Clifford.

The ultimate cult movie, one that survived critical hostility and initial poor box office to become one of the longest-running movies in film history and to take its place in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. It has raked in more than $113 million dollars worldwide since its release, thanks to audiences that made it a midnight movie phenomenon involving audience participation that included sing-alongs and lipsynching of its songs and dialogue by fans wearing the movie’s costumes. Pretty good for a film that celebrates queerness and thumbs its nose at the straight world. It’s too bad that it really isn’t very good, with amateurish performances by most of its cast, notably excepting Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a name that pretty much sums up the level of wit in the script. It also flubs its ostensible purpose: to parody the sci-fi movies of the 1950s that it namechecks in the lyrics to “Science Fiction/Double Feature.” But none of this really matters in a movie that thrives on its own raw energy and an audience’s willingness to be swept up by it.