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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Sunday, August 30, 2026

The Hours and Times (Christopher Munch, 1991)

Ian Hart and David Angus in The Hours and Times

Cast: David Angus, Ian Hart, Stephanie Pack, Robin McDonald, Sergio Moreno, Unity Grimwood. Screenplay: Christopher Munch. Cinematography: Christopher Munch. Film editing: Christopher Munch.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times is that it feels right. Nothing we know about what happened to John Lennon and Brian Epstein afterward feels inconsistent with what's shown in the film: a brief visit to Barcelona by the self-assured Beatle and his repressed manager in which they test the limits of their intimacy with each other. Munch at one point considered making the film's two central characters "just two guys," but it gains immeasurably from our awareness of the sad history that followed in the two men's lives and deaths. The film is just under 60 minutes of sexual tension, as Lennon (Ian Hart) teases and taunts Epstein (David Angus) about his experiences as a gay man. They share a bathtub and a bed in the film, but without apparent consummation, and the ending leaves us to ponder the nature of sexual attraction. Is Lennon sadistically inflicting cruelty on Epstein? Why does Epstein want to go on a trip with a man he knows he can't have? The Hours and Times is a film that ramifies in the mind the more you ponder it, each incident shown -- Lennon's flirtation with the flight attendant and Epstein's with a hotel worker, the meeting with the man in the bar, the phone conversations of Lennon with Cynthia and Epstein with his mother -- casting light on another.  


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