Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/31/24

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 31, 2024

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

Gina Carano in Haywire

Cast: Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Michael Angarano, Mathieu Kassovitz. Screenplay: Lem Dobbs. Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh. Production design: Howard Cummings. Film editing: Steven Soderbergh. Music: David Holmes.

Haywire could have been a solid entry in the male-dominated action genre when Steven Soderbergh cast MMA champion Gina Carano as a sexy undercover agent named Mallory Kane. But Soderbergh may have had his doubts, because he surrounded her with a solid and experienced supporting cast, letting her beat up characters played by Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender and outwit the ones played by Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor. And even before the film was released it was clear that Carano's weakness as an actress might be a problem, so some of her dialogue was dubbed by Laura San Giacomo and some of it was digitally altered to lower it in tone. And when the film was released the critics were not impressed with her debut: In the New Yorker, David Denby said she was "strong, fast, relentless [but] not much of an actress," while Time's Richard Corliss called her "all kick and no charisma." Still, the film got mostly good reviews for what it is: a solid action film. Carano seemed on track to success, winning a role in Fast and Furios 6 (Justin Lin, 2013) and in the first two seasons of Lucasfilm's Star Wars spinoff series The Mandalorian. But then she got political, criticizing the use of face masks during the Covid crisis and supporting Donald Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, thus finding her mainstream career blocked. So a star wasn't born and a genre wasn't revitalized.