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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Friday, November 7, 2025

Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell in Bones and All
Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, André Holland, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Harper, Chloë Sevigny, Anna Cobb, David Gordon Green. Screenplay: David Kajganich, based on a novel by Camille DeAngelis. Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan. Production design: Elliott Hostetter. Film editing: Marco Costa. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross. 

A horror movie from the point of view of the monsters, Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All features three remarkable performances. Taylor Russell is revelatory as Maren, the young woman who discovers that her compulsion to eat human flesh is not just an idiosyncrasy; Timothée Chalamet once again proves that he's not just a pretty face as Lee, a fellow "eater"; and Mark Rylance skillfully disappears into another role as Sully, Maren's mentor and nemesis. There's enough gore to satisfy sanguinary horror devotees, but the film focuses mainly on the psychology of people whose desires put them on the fringes of society, doing so without becoming heavily allegorical. Released during the ravages of the covid pandemic, Bones and All underperformed at the box office, but although it transcends the horror genre, its subject matter meant was probably never going to achieve a higher status than cult film.    
 

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