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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Tuesday, July 15, 2025

China Moon (John Bailey, 1994)

Ed Harris and Madeleine Stowe in China Moon

Cast: Ed Harris, Madeleine Stowe, Benicio Del Toro, Charles Dance, Patricia Healey, Tim Powell, Pruitt Taylor Vince. Screenplay: Roy Carlson. Cinematography: Willy Kurant. Production design: Conrad E. Angone. Film editing: Carol Littleton, Jill Savitt. Music: George Fenton.

John Bailey's China Moon is a  neo-noir with perhaps a few too many plot twists for its own good. It asks us to believe that a police detective (Ed Harris) who is shown to be keenly observant in the opening scenes of the movie should be so easily hoodwinked into a dangerous situation by a femme fatale (Madeleine Stowe). It also asks us to put up with an awful Southern accent assumed by Charles Dance in the role of the femme fatale's nasty husband. But if you can suspend disbelief for those things, it's a tolerable if forgettable movie.  

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