Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/17/24

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, September 17, 2024

Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)

Michael Ironside in Scanners

Cast: Stephen Lack, Michael Ironside, Jennifer O'Neill, Patrick McGoohan, Lawrence Dane, Robert A. Silverman, Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore.

David Cronenberg's Scanners is remembered today for its exploding head and the literal face-off of its conclusion, and probably for making splatter into a genre. But so many heads have been exploded and so much gore has been spilled since then that today it looks a little tired and slow. It's not helped by the woodenness of much of its acting. A lot of the criticism has been leveled at its leading man, Stephen Lack, but nobody is up to par. In contrast to Lack, Michael Ironside goes full ham as the film's villain. It also has a dialogue track that lacks ambience -- I don't know if it was post-synched, but it has the deadness characteristic of films that were. Cronenberg's script was reportedly being written while the shooting proceeded, which may explain some of the flatness of the performances, the confusion about where the movie's headed between its action sequences, and why the ending seems so perfunctory. Still, it's worth a watch for its pioneer bloodletting and for being the film that launched an important director's career.