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, April 16, 2024

5 Centimeters per Second (Makoto Shinkai, 2007)

Cast: Voices of Kenji Mizuhashi, Yoshimi Kondou, Satomi Hanamura, Ayaka Onoue. Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai. Cinematography: Makoto Shinkai. Art direction: Makoto Shinkai, Film editing: Makoto Shinkai. Music: Tenmon. 

Makoto Shinkai's eye-dazzling, tearjerking anime has many admirers, but I tend to side with the detractors that think the spectacular images overwhelm an insubstantial story of young love frustrated by time and space. Shinkai crafts magnificent settings, creating vivid skies while also paying meticulous attention to mundane details like railway cars and shop interiors, but his human characters are sketchy, even at times kitschy: his little girls have huge eyes like the children in Margaret Keane's paintings. 

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