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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Thursday, July 17, 2025

Miami Blues (George Armitage, 1990)

Alec Baldwin in Miami Blues

Cast: Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Fred Ward, Charles Napier, Nora Dunn, José Pérez, Obba Babatundé, Shirley Stoler. Screenplay: George Armitage, based on a novel by Charles Willeford. Cinematography: Tak Fujimoto. Production design: Maher Ahmad. Film editing: Craig McKay. Music: Gary Chang. 

Miami Blues is one of those movies that just miss. Alec Baldwin's ex-con comes to Miami because it seems like a good place to start over, which he does with some deft larceny (and some incidental manslaughter) at the airport. He checks into a hotel and asks the bellhop to procure him a woman, who turns out to be Jennifer Jason Leigh's sunny, naïve hooker. Meanwhile, he captures the attention of Fred Ward's scruffy cop, and the three of them begin a playful but sometimes brutal interaction. The movie has all the elements: a cast working at top form, a story with some amusing reversals of expectation, a gallery of quirky supporting characters, and a colorful milieu. The three leads are all cheerful caricatures drawn from crime fiction, but reality overlaps the caricature and the tone of the movie goes sour, turning it  darker and heavier than it really wants to be.


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