Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/05/24

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

Thursday, September 5, 2024

Working Girls (Dorothy Arzner, 1931)

Judith Wood and Paul Lukas in Working Girls

Cast: Judith Wood, Dorothy Hall, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Paul Lukas, Stuart Erwin, Frances Dee, Mary Forbes, Frances Moffett, Claire Dodd, Dorothy Stickney. Screenplay: Zoe Akins, based on a play by Vera Caspary and Winfred Lenihan. Cinematography: Harry Fishbeck. Film editing: Jane Loring. Music: Ralph Rainger.

Kinds of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024)

Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Willem Dafoe in Kinds of Kindness

Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, Mamadou Athie, Yorgos Stefanos, Hunter Schafer. Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou. Cinematography: Robbie Ryan. Production design: Anthony Gasparro. Film editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis. Music: Jerskin Fendrix.