Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/22/24

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

Monday, July 22, 2024

Blood and Wine (Bob Rafelson, 1996)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Michael Caine, Stephen Dorff, Judy Davis, Jennifer Lopez, Harold Perrineau, Robyn Peterson, Mike Starr. Screenplay: Nick Villiers, Bob Rafelson, Alison Cross. Cinematography: Newton Thomas Sigel. Production design: Richard Sylbert. Film editing: Steven Cohen. Music: Michal Lorenc.

It takes great acting to steal a movie from Jack Nicholson. In short, it takes Michael Caine. In Blood and Wine, Caine plays Victor, a sleazy ex-con with a hair trigger and a death-bed cough. It's a more physically violent role than we usually see Caine in, and it's startling to see him erupt, slamming into a hapless victim like Henry (Harold Perrineau), who just happens to get caught up in the movie's plot mechanism. Otherwise, Blood and Wine is mostly a forgettable throwback, informed by movies of the 1940s and 1970s, a neo-noir directed by Bob Rafelson, whose directing career was launched with movies starring Nicholson, like Five Easy Pieces (1970) and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). It's a bleakly cynical movie with no good guys, except that everyone in it looks a little better in comparison with Caine's Victor.