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

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Sunday, May 4, 2025

The Deep (Peter Yates, 1977)

Nick Nolte, Robert Shaw, and Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep

Cast: Nick Nolte, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Shaw, Louis Gossett Jr., Eli Wallach, Robert Tessler, Dick Anthony Williams, Earl Maynard, Bob Minor, Teddy Tucker, Lee McClain. Screenplay: Peter Benchley, Tracy Keenan Wynn, based on a novel by Benchley. Cinematography: Christopher Challis. Production design: Anthony Masters. Film editing: David Berlatsky. Music: John Barry. 

The Deep is a slackly put-together thriller about a search for sunken treasure. It was a big box office hit despite tepid reviews, partly because it was based on a best-seller by Peter Benchley, whose novel Jaws was turned into the paradigmatic summer blockbuster movie by Steven Spielberg in 1975. and partly because of shrewd marketing that featured Jacqueline Bisset in a wet T-shirt. But Bisset and Nick Nolte, the romantic leads, have little chemistry with each other, and although the underwater photography is sometimes spectacular it's also sometimes undecipherable during key action sequences. It's hard to find anyone today who remembers it with much enthusiasm. 


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