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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Wednesday, October 15, 2025

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999)

James Earl Jones in The Annihilation of Fish

Cast: James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder. Screenplay: Anthony C. Winkler. Cinematography: John L. Dempsey Jr., Rick Robinson. Production design: Nina Ruscio. Film editing: Nancy Richardson. Music: Laura Karpman. 

I was surprised that The Annihilation of Fish was written for the screen and not adapted from a play. Anthony C. Winkler's script is mostly talk, the action is largely confined to one setting, and it makes use of only three characters. James Earl Jones plays Fish, a man who believes he is being harassed by a demon; Lynn Redgrave is Poinsettia, who believes that her lover is Giacomo Puccini; and Margot Kidder is their landlady, Mrs. Mudroone, and God forbid if you ever spell her name without the final E. The plot, such as it is, comes from bringing the three together in Mrs. Muldroone's Los Angeles rooming house, where the two misfits, Fish and Poinsettia, fall in love (and into bed) while dealing with Fish's invisible demon, whom he literally wrestles and she finally kills, precipitating a crisis that threatens to end their affair. All three performers are wonderful, and some people find the film charming and funny, but I began to be more annoyed than intrigued by their eccentricities. 

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