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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Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jarrold, 2008)

Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode in Brideshead Revisited

Cast: Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw, Hayley Atwell, Emma Thompson, Patrick Malahide, Michael Gambon, Greta Scacchi, Ed Stoppard, Felicity Jones, Jonathan Cake. Screenplay: Andrew Davies, Jeremy Brock, based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Cinematography: Jess Hall. Production design: Alice Normington. Film editing: Chris Gill. Music: Adrian Johnston. 

Julian Jarrold's version of Brideshead Revisited pales in comparison to the classic 1981 miniseries. Despite a greater emphasis on the queerness of the relationship of Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) and Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw), Jarrold's film comes across as tepid and talky. Goode and Whishaw are well-cast, and they get impressive support from Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, Michael Gambon as her estranged husband, and Patrick Malahide as Charles's remotely vague father. But the film feels rushed as it tries to encompass the events of Evelyn Waugh's novel while trying to illuminate the book's complex manipulations of faith and family that span decades. 

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