Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/23/23

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

Saturday, September 23, 2023

I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997)

Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe in I Know What You Did Last Summer

Cast; Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr., Muse Watson, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Anne Heche, Johnny Galecki, Stuart Greer. Screenplay: Kevin Williamson, based on a novel by Lois Duncan. Cinematography: Dennis Crossan. Production design: Gary Wissner. Film editing: Steve Mirkovich. Music: John Debney.

I Know What You Did Last Summer has enough going for it to be watchable: an attractive cast, a handsome setting in a North Carolina fishing town (sweetened by coastal shots from California), and a solid horror story premise. Four teens, just graduated from high school and looking forward to life as young adults, accidentally hit a pedestrian on a lonely back road and decide to cover up the death and swear to secrecy. (It's not a novel setup: See Paul Lynch's 1980 Prom Night for an analogous one.) But they are haunted by guilt. Top student Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) almost flunks out of college. Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the beauty queen who dreams of stardom, fails to make it in New York and comes home to work in the family department store. The jock, Barry (Ryan Phillippe), doesn't make it big in college athletics. The poor boy, Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), is stuck in the family fishing business. And then, on the anniversary of the accident, which just happens to be the Fourth of July, each of them starts getting warnings that someone knows their guilty secret. So far, so good, as suspense setups go. Unfortunately, the screenplay starts getting ragged as soon as the implied threat manifests itself, and the rest, as the body count rises, is a tangle of improbabilities and loose ends. By the ending, which is a clear setup for a sequel, I wasn't entirely certain who the killer was or even why they did it. It's a movie full of things you're not supposed to think about, like how Barry covered up the damage to his car after the accident, or how the killer can make bodies disappear so quickly after they're first discovered. Unfortunately, the screenplay doesn't give you enough to get your attention away from these questions.