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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Friday, September 11, 2026

Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Madonna and Harvey Keitel in Dangerous Game

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Madonna, James Russo, Nancy Ferrara, Reilly Murphy, Victor Argo, Leonard L. Thomas, Christina Fulton, Heather Bracken. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Alex Tavoularis. Film editing: Anthony Redman, Shivo Andrew Stewart. Music: Joe Delia. 

Oscar Wilde's dictum that life imitates art gets a workout in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game. At the beginning we see movie director Eddie Israel (Harvey Keitel) taking leave of his wife (Nancy Ferrara) and child (Reilly Murphy) to fly from New York to LA, where he is making a film. There's a little tension at the departure, but nothing extreme. The extremity begins when he starts shooting about a marriage violently on the rocks with method actor Francis Burns (Joe Russo) and rising star Sarah Jennings (Madonna), who seem to dislike each other as much as the characters they're playing do. And it intensifies when Eddie's wife and child suddenly arrive just as Sarah has left his bed. From then on, what Eddie is trying to put on film begins to echo what is happening off-screen, not only with Eddie and his wife but also between his two stars. Even though it contains one of her best performances in a movie, Madonna bad-mouthed Dangerous Game when it was released. Not without reason. Though the performances are solid, it's heavy-handed and one-note, with a narrative so poorly constructed that there's no satisfactory way to end either the film being made or the one about its making. 

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