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 11, 2025

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)

Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem in Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Chris Messina, Patricia Clarkson, Kevin Dunn, Christopher Evan Welch (voice). Screenplay: Woody Allen. Cinematography: Javier Aguiressarobe. Production design: Alain Bainée. Film editing: Alisa Lepselter. 

There are no surprises in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It's the oft-told tale of Americans abroad, experiencing culture shock when their preconceptions about life don't mesh with those in other parts of the world. In this case, it's two young women, Rebecca Hall's somewhat uptight Vicky and Scarlett Johansson's more free-spirited Cristina, who get caught up in the relationship between a sexy Spanish painter, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), and his volatile ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz). Triangles and even quadrangles form among them. Allen supplies a narrator (Christopher Evan Welch) who sounds very much like Woody Allen, but he's not really necessary unless you've never seen one of his movies before. It's late-career Allen, and one of the few to be both critically and commercially successful, winning an Oscar for Cruz's vivid performance. 

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