Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/10/24

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, October 10, 2024

Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)

Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor in Challengers

Cast: Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor, Zendaya, Darnell Appling, Shane T Harris, Nada Despotovich, A.J. Lister, Naheem Garcia, Jake Jensen, Hailey Gates. Screenplay: Justin Kuritzkes. Cinematography: Saymombhu Mukdeeprom. Production design: Merissa Lombardo. Film editing: Marco Costa. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross.

Luca Guadagnino's sexy, entertaining, and very well made Challengers set me to wondering once again why "love" is the word for "zero" in tennis. Nobody is entirely sure, it seems, but the most plausible explanation is that at some point in history players insisted that they played for love of the game and not just to win. Maybe it made the losing player feel better. There's plenty of love of various kinds in Guadagnino's movie, which is another two-guys-and-a-girl story made fresh by stellar performances by Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor and by a smart screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes that uses tennis as a metaphor for sex -- or maybe sex as a metaphor for tennis. It also has a cleverly elusive ending that somehow satisfies the demand for closure by avoiding it.