Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/18/23

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, September 18, 2023

The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996)

Cast: Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Rachel True, Skeet Ulrich, Cliff DeYoung, Christine Taylor, Breckin Meyer, Nathaniel Marston, Helen Shaver, Assumpta Serna. Screenplay: Peter Filardi, Andrew Fleming. Cinematography: Alexander Gruszynski. Production design: Marek Dobrowolski. Film editing: Jeff Freeman. Music: Graeme Revell.

If the makers of The Craft had had the courage and the skill to parody or transcend the teen-movie clichés and characters -- the mean girl, the horny jock, the embarrassing or absent parents, and so on -- it might have been a genre classic like Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) or Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989). That the filmmakers even come close enough to elicit the comparison owes much to the performances of the four young actresses who play the film's mischief-working coven. Robin Tunney is Sarah, the new girl in town with untested magic powers; Fairuza Balk is Nancy, the punk-gothic misfit; Neve Campbell is Bonnie, who bears disfiguring burn scars; and Rachel True is Rochelle, the biracial girl in an apparently all-white Catholic high school. Balk got most of the attention for her amusingly over-the-top performance, but Tunney deserves credit for underplaying her role, creating an outwardly normal but deeply troubled teenage girl. Sarah once tried to kill herself -- "the right way," says Nancy approvingly, noting that the scars on Sarah's wrists are vertical, along the vein, rather than horizontal. Falling in with the other three, Sarah not only discovers her own latent powers but also helps the other girls develop their own. Bonnie erases her scars, Rochelle gets even with the racist blonde (Christine Taylor) who referred to her as "Negroid," and Sarah causes the scornful jock (Skeet Ulrich) to fall in love with her. Nancy, however, goes to the dark side, and mayhem ensues. Unfortunately, the plot gets predictable at this turn, and the ending is anticlimactic.