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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Thursday, February 12, 2026

Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010)

Stephen Dorff in Somewhere

Cast: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fannin, Chris Pontius, Michelle Monaghan, Kristina Shannon, Karissa Shannon. Screenplay: Sofia Coppola. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Anne Ross. Film editing: Sarah Flack. Music: Phoenix. 

Sofia Coppola's Somewhere is about a hollow man, a movie star played by Stephen Dorff who has fame and fortune but not much else in his life other than a lively 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) from a failed marriage. When his ex-wife has a breakdown of some sort, he gets to see his daughter more often, and their relationship blossoms. But it's only a temporary alleviation of his deep ennui, a condition verging on anhedonia: He hires blonde twins to do pole dances in his hotel room but displays only polite enthusiasm for their performance. Once he even falls asleep during sex. Somewhere succeeds as a portrait of a man without a purpose in life, but it makes for challenging viewing -- it's hard to maintain interest in a character who isn't interested in anything. Coppola has clearly drawn on her own experience as the daughter of a celebrity, and that gives her film the grounding it needs. 

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