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, November 19, 2025

Materialists (Celine Song, 2025)

Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in Materialists 

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Winters, Marin Ireland, Dasha Nekrasova, Emmy Wheeler, Louisa Jacobson, Eddie Cahill, Sawyer Spielberg, Joseph Lee, John Magaro. Screenplay: Celine Song. Cinematography: Shabier Kirchner. Production design: Anthony Gasparro. Film editing: Keith Fraase. Music: Daniel Pemberton. 

Celine Song's Materialists is a rom-com with a satiric edge, though not a terribly sharp one. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, who works for a high-end matchmaking service that celebrates its workers when their clients end up getting married. Lucy is very good at her job, with nine weddings to her credit, but she hasn't been very successful in finding her own soulmate. She split with her old boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), largely because they're too poor -- he's a struggling actor -- to think about an upwardly mobile life together. Then, in the course of her job, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), handsome and rich. They hit it off, but something's not right just yet. When one of her clients is raped by a man Lucy matched with her, she begins to question what she does for a living, and to realize that the potential for love can't be measured by algorithms, the "checked-off boxes" she uses to match her clients. The premise of Materialists -- a bright young woman overcoming her own delusions -- is pure Jane Austen, but the movie feels weighed down by its stars. Johnson doesn't have enough chemistry with either Evans or Pascal to give her choice between the two any real urgency or credibility, and the hits at yuppie materialism are more didactic than funny. 


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