Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/11/24

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

Friday, October 11, 2024

The Fog (John Carpenter, 1980)

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, John Houseman, Tom Atkins, James Canning, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, Ty Mitchell, Hal Holbrook. Screenplay: John Carpenter, Debra Hill. Cinematography: Dean Cundey. Production design: Tommy Lee Wallace. Film editing: Charles Bornstein, Tommy Lee Wallace. Music: John Carpenter.

John Carpenter's The Fog gets off to a great start with John Houseman playing an old salt with a plummy voice, telling a fireside ghost story to a bunch of wide-eyed kids. It sets up the plot gimmick and announces exactly what the movie is supposed to be: the kind of story you tell around a campfire. Unfortunately, Carpenter can't seem to play it straight on from there, but keeps introducing irrelevant elements, starting with Elizabeth, the character played by Jamie Lee Curtis. What is Elizabeth doing, hitchhiking on a lonely California back road in the middle of the night? We never exactly find out because it's just a way of getting Curtis, who had just made Carpenter's 1978 Halloween into a smash hit, into the movie. Anyway, she gets picked up by Nick (Tom Atkins) just before the spooky stuff really starts, and winds up in his bed. And from then on, Elizabeth doesn't really contribute much to the story: She just rides around Port Antonio with Nick and gets in jeopardy as things happen. The real star of the movie is Adrienne Barbeau, making her transition from TV into movies, particularly movies by Carpenter, whom she married. She plays Stevie Wayne, a late night disc jockey who broadcasts out of a lighthouse she owns. When the creepy stuff begins to happen in the isolated little town of Port Antonio, she interrupts her easy-listening playlist to provide news and warnings, and eventually to become a target of the phantoms lurking in the titular mist. There are too many narrative threads that need to be followed, and the denouement has trouble unknotting them. But The Fog still generates a good bit of tension, and it's handsomely filmed, with a good use of the location: Port Antonio is actually Point Reyes and Inverness, north of San Francisco.