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, December 24, 2024

Girlfight (Karyn Kusama, 2000)

Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight

Cast: Michelle Rodriguez, Jamie Tirelli, Paul Calderon, Douglas Santiago, Ray Santiago, Victor Sierra, Elisa Bocanegra, Shannon Walker Williams. Screenplay: Karyn Kusama. Cinematography: Patrick Cady. Production design: Stephen Beatrice. Film editing: Plummy Tucker. Music: Gene McDaniels, Theodore Shapiro. 

An attractive cast and intelligent camerawork and editing help make Girlfight watchable even for someone who dislikes boxing and finds sport movies boringly predictable. And yes, Girlfight is predictable. The protagonist is Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez), who lives in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood with her father, Sandro (Paul Calderon), and brother, Tiny (Ray Santiago). Sandro is a macho bully whom Diana suspects of abusing her mother, who committed suicide. He takes little interest in her, putting his hopes on Tiny, whom he forces to train as a boxer, even though Tiny really wants to be an artist. After getting in trouble for fighting at school, Diana thinks that she might want to try to learn to box, too, so she persuades her brother's coach, Hector (Jamie Tirelli), to coach her. When she turns out to be good at it, Hector sets her up with a sparring partner, a guy named Adrian (Douglas Santiago), who wants to be a professional boxer. And of course Diana and Adrian fall in love, which presents a problem when through a series of plot contrivances they find themselves fighting each other in an important amateur competition. With the help of solid performances, writer-director Karyn Kusama makes all of this more interesting than it sounds in summary. That she named a character Adrian and has someone comment that it's usually a girl's name shows that she knows her sports movies and doesn't mind the comparisons. 


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