Reply With QuoteI personally liked it much better than Magnolia. It seemed more honest about the people, and was definitely addressing a theme of racial tension.
So many good lines and scenes in it. My favorite, I think, is "You're an embarrassment" scene.
Wow, no Crash love? The movie's been out for a while now. Saw it tonight.
30 second summary: It's Magnolia, with more race, but less contrived. Barely. Basically vignettes of all these people in LA who are loosely tied to one another through chance. There's a nice segment where a female singer (not Aimee Mann) sings a nice song while the camera cuts to everyone.
And instead of the freakishly improbable rain of frogs, you have a fuckin' snowstorm in LA, which is just a tad bit less probable.
It's certainly okay, but don't know what all the gushing was about.
I personally liked it much better than Magnolia. It seemed more honest about the people, and was definitely addressing a theme of racial tension.
So many good lines and scenes in it. My favorite, I think, is "You're an embarrassment" scene.
Yeah, I was wondering when someone was going to pipe in with this one. It feels like I saw this movie a month or more ago, and I definitely enjoyed it. Some pretty powerful scenes and great performances made this one memorable anyway.
And yeah, it didn't have too much completely improbably coincidences. The only one that stuck out to me was that van with the keys still in it, I thought that was weird.
I loved this movie, but I loved Magnolia and even Short Cuts (hey, Julianne Moore bottomless).
The van with the keys still in it was because the old Chinese guy got hit while about to get into his van. I guess he was checking on his cargo when the dufuses ran him over.
Actually I thought the most improbable was the cop dealing with the same woman twice in a 24 hour period-- once at night with her husband, and once at the crash.
No, the really improbable thing about the van is that the keys were dangling from the driver's side door FOR AN ENTIRE FUCKING DAY while it was parked on the street in a crap neighborhood of LA, and no one took it until carjacker #1 finally returned back by accident, via the bus.Originally Posted by Dean
Yeah.. thats what I meant. I mean, it didn't kill the movie for me, but it certainly seemed like a bit more of a stretch then the normal coincidences that filled the movie.No, the really improbable thing about the van is that the keys were dangling from the driver's side door FOR AN ENTIRE FUCKING DAY while it was parked on the street in a crap neighborhood of LA, and no one took it until carjacker #1 finally returned back by accident, via the bus.
Ah, okay. Didn't even think about that aspect of the keys.
It bugs me that shitty movies like Stealth can get a 2 page thread but actual films like Crash only get 7 post.
Now I believe us to be mostly intelligent and enlightened people, well as intelligent and enlightened and people who play computer games can be; instead of volunteering for foreign aid, being a routine organ donor, sitting meditatively under a waterfall. So why can't we comment intelligently on a film like crash.
I liked Crash. Its flaws are few and minor. Sandra Bullock's and Brendan Fraser's storyline seem like a hopeless aside that took up space from the more emotional charged and involved ones of Matt Dillon's and Thandie Newton's. That and the initial carjacking scene with Ludacris and the other guy seems lifted from a Tarantino idea.
But everything else seems to flow with some sort of magical vigour and momentum. I'm always amazed at how ensemble filmmaking can juggle thier various disparate storylines and still seem as if it has complete control of the direction it is going. Crash may seem a little freeform in how the events unfold, but it never threatens to jump the rails of its own narrative. I only wish the movie could have spent more time on certain characters, or let some of the stories more time to breathe and develope.
Overall though, I would say it's a film worth viewing and thinking about. Even if you don't like it after the fact. At least, it deserves more attention than Stealth. That way, debut director Paul Haggis might actually offer us something much better the next time round.
To be fair, most of the Stealth thread is spent ridiculing it, commenting on the lack of story originality (comparing it to other AI gone amock movies), on the mammoth marketing budget and on the ubiquity of its trailer.
Crash slipped between the cracks because it was neither great, nor worthy of scorn, or so it seems to me. Just one more of those movies that comes and goes without much fanfare.
I haven't seen it, I'll rent it when it hits DVD and I'll try to remember to come back and post in this thread when that happens.
If you really want to be outraged, wonder why "Murderball" didn't get much attention here, or by audiences in theatres. Critics loved it, but it's about physically disabled people bashing each other out of their wheelchairs, so it causes some serious cognitive dissonance upon viewing. So no one went.
I'll agree to this statement if there were more movies that came and went and had the same standard of crash. That way, I won't agonize over what to see at the theatre; Stealth or The Island.
Neither Murderball nor the Aristocrats have made it to my neck of the woods as yet, but those are two other movies i do want to catch.
I'm just hoping people give more attention to the movies where the creators actually seem to be trying and working hard rather than rehasing anime plots.
ah well
Arise!
So this is out on DVD. I thought it was good but not great. Definitely worth watching, for the acting if nothing else (and a generally great cast--also, check out Sandra Bullock playing against type, and Brendan Frasier doing an actual movie role. I think this came out before "The Quiet American," so that would be another first for this film). The story is full of pretty improbable coincidences, but I think you have to just accept that in this sort of movie. It's weird, because some of them serve no purpose (why make that guy's daughter the morgue doctor?), but I guess that's just the style of it.
And the racism stuff was sort of uneven, I thought. Sometimes the characters sound and act pretty believable, but many times the movie overreaches (like the white cop feeling up the black woman -- come ON) or the characters seem too "Attention Moviegoers: I Am A Racist" with their dialog.
One thing I couldn't help thinking all through the movie: "House of Sand and Fog was better than this." It dealt with a lot of the same themes -- racism, the intersection of very different lives, etc. -- but was a lot more subtle, a lot better written, and ultimately a lot LOT more powerful. Still, "Crash" is better than the average movie and certainly worth a rental.
At times, the movie is just a rehash of the same ideas as many others in the past dealing with racism. I've seen enough of those movies that there really was nothing shocking or different...in fact, it seems like a lot of it is old news, like the movie was made in the 80's or something. But, it was fairly well done and had a few interesting moments.
Just saw it and all in all it was a good flick. I thought it was a hell of a lot better then magnolia I know that much.
Actually it has snowed at least once in LA in my lifetime.And instead of the freakishly improbable rain of frogs, you have a fuckin' snowstorm in LA, which is just a tad bit less probable.
I thought it was great, definitely better than Magnolia.
I saw it, and couldn't bother to read the earlier posts, sorry.
My impression: big fat "meh?"
It was 3dgy a bit, and cute in the tie-together of everyone, but ultimately said nothing.
H.
Just watched it the other night... I thought it was great. My two cents, keep the change!
Saw it over the weekend. I echoed Rywill's comment from further up the thread about the cop feeling up the lady to my wife.
I said to my wife, "Oh, come on!" And she told me I was a boob (in a nice way, of course).
Then this morning I look on the front page of the Seattle PI and there is a story about a State Trooper who resigned because he got caught...
pulling women over and feeling them up!
Maybe I am a boob. :)
Saw it yesterday and enjoyed it. Nothing earth shattering but well performed and aptly thought provoking. Loved the scene with the little girl protecting her dad (and their previous scene) but MAN was this movie tense. After the numerous near-death experiences I thought the movie was going to stay soft all the way through until the hitch hiking part. (I forgot the begining reference to the corpse)
I thought it was a solid anti-racism message written like a Hallmark card.
This movie was awful and had no message that I could discern, except for maybe 'sometimes racists are mean, but sometimes not.'
Saying this is better than Magnolia shames you all.
Abysmal - easily one of the worst movies of the year. Racism for retards.
I finally made a point of seeing this after two successive weekends where it came up in conversation. Maybe I'm too sheltered, but the idea of such overt bigotry as presented in Crash repulsed me. It's so cliched and "Dude, what the fuck are you thinking to be so goddamned racist" that I just can't buy much of it. I was much more interested in Cheadle's film about the "sense of touch," than I am in Haggis's anti-racism screed.
And did Thandie Newton really bitch that Matt Dillion pulled her husband over because they were a mixed couple?
Exactly - A dumbed-down view of racism that makes it so overt it's absurd. It's ham-fisted and ridiculous, and pretty cynical filmmaking, since its creators apparently thought audiences were generally dullards unable to recognize racism unless they exaggerated it to preposterous extremes.
And the Screen Actors Guild just gave its Best Ensemble award to...Crash. :p
And thats the bumb ass thing about it - racism, as shown in the movie, exists in the world TODAY - not 10 or 25 years ago, but right now, Everywhere.
Bump. I finally just saw this movie. I went in expecting to loathe it based on what I'd read, but it just made me tired with the swollen score and the predictable coincidences. I thought "Munich" should have won Best Picture. Big points off from "Crash" for making Sandra Bullock so shrewish.
Obviously the message is compelling, but I wish they'd attacked the issue with a scalpel instead of a jackhammer. It could have been so much better. Those of you who liked "Crash" -- what do you think of "Do The Right Thing"? To me that's the gold standard among movies about race in America.
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