Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/26/24

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

Saturday, October 26, 2024

Empire Records (Allan Moyle, 1995)

Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger in Empire Records

Cast: Anthony LaPaglia, Maxwell Caulfield, Debi Mazar, Rory Cochrane, Johnny Whitworth, Robin Tunney, Renée Zellweger, Ethan Embry, Coyote Shivers, Brendan Sexton III, Liv Tyler. Screenplay: Carol Heikkinen. Cinematography: Walt Lloyd. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Michael Chandler.

It's not much of a compliment to call a movie "harmless," but that's the only word I can think of to describe Empire Records, which was a flop when released but has an enthusiastic following today among Gen-Xers. The best I can say, as a member of a generation not even contiguous with Generation X, except that my daughter was a member, is that it provided a nice diversion from pre-election anxiety. And that it has some performers -- Rory Cochrane and Renée Zellweger in particular -- that it's fun to watch. The story is negligible and predictable: a small record store is threatened with being taken over r by a large corporation, and the madcap young employees, who never seem to do any work, manage to save it. That's just enough to hang a lot of songs from the '90s on. There is a place for movies that disarm criticism like this one, so I respect it for being just that.