Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/26/25

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

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Jeffrey Lau, 2002)

Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Wei Zhao in Chinese Odyssey 2002

Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Fay Wong, Wei Zhao, Chang Chen, Roy Cheung, Athena Chu, Rebecca Pan, Jan Lamb (voice). Screenplay: Jeffrey Lamb. Cinematography: Peter Ngor. Production design: Tony Au. Film editing: Wing-Ming Wong. Music: Frankie Chan, Roel A. García.

You have to know Hong Kong cinema better than I do to fully appreciate the spoofery involved in Chinese Odyssey 2002, but it's still a giddy lark, with some handsome actors poking fun at their serious roles and a lot of amusing sight gags. The version I saw on the Criterion Channel seems to have been shorn of some of its musical sequences.