Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/23/24

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 23, 2024

An Autumn's Tale (Mabel Cheung, 1987)

Chow Yun-fat and Cherie Chung in An Autumn's Tale

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Cherie Chung, Danny Chan, Arthur Fulbright, Gigi Wong, Joyce Houseknecht. Screenplay: Alex Law, Low Chi-Yeuh. Cinematography: David Chung, James Hayman. Production design: Christy Addis. Film editing: Chu Sun-Kit. Music: Lowell Lo.

The chemistry between Chow Yun-fat and Cherie Chung animates the somewhat rough-edged romance of Samuel Pang (Chow) , a thirtysomething slacker, and Jennifer Lee (Chung), a twentysomething woman who arrives in New York expecting to meet her boyfriend, Vincent (Danny Chan), only to find he has a new girlfriend and is moving to Boston. Samuel, known as Figgy (short for Figurehead, a reference to his years as a sailor), takes her under his wing, though she's put off by his slacker ways -- he survives mainly by gambling and carousing with his pals. As in any good romance, she loosens up and he straightens up, though not without the usual backsliding. The film gives some fresh twists to the usual romcom tropes.