"You hated this movie, but Stillman Fink loved it! You two are generally very similar in your opinions. Feel like discussing it?"Feel like discussing it? I wanna throw down, man! Zac, you are so totally off my friends list.
Who's with me? American Beauty sucked like Crash sucked, both being obvious sops to the arm chair liberal bent of film critics and Academy voters. Bah.
6 comments:
I have to agree with Paul here. American Beauty sucked and so did Crash. Crash was devoid of any nuance and played to the most base and obvious stereotypes. Nothing insightful here.
I think Crash is better than American Beauty, actually. It has this dopey magical-realist charm to it. Back in the day, I had a semi-prolonged discussion with a professor about the merits of AB; he thought it was one of the most challenging films to come out of Hollywood since the heyday of the first New Hollywood generation, I thought it was shallow and frankly misogynist -- pretty much everything wrong in Kevin Spacey's life can be attributed to his harridan, career-motivated wife and that Mena Suvari is one little prick tease, isn't she? No wonder the movie thought smoking pot and working in the drive through at a burger joint was a radical fuck you to society.
But my, hasn't Sam Mendes's star fallen? First Road to Perdition tanks, and then people shake their heads ruefully over Jarhead. Makes one wonder if Spacey wasn't alluding to something when he slipped and said Alan Ball was the director of the film, when accepting his best actor Oscar.
I hated both Crash and American Beauty and I can't tell you how happy I am that you brought them up in the same discussion because I can't think of two other films about which I have engaged in more heated disagreements/conversations.
American Beauty is just a poor man's Ice Storm and Crash should have had a disclaimer at the beginning that read "The movie you are about to see VERY IMPORTANT...if you think otherwise than you must be as racist as the people it depicts." Seriously, if you look up "movies that try really hard to hit you over the head with their point/lack of subtlety" in the dictionary, the movie poster for Crash is probably there.
My jury is still out on Paul Haggis...I do like Sam Mendes though, if only because he had the good sense to marry Kate Winslet.
I actually like Crash. I agree that it's probably listed in the dictionary entry on "films that try really hard to hit you over the head with a point"; but, then, the same entry would no doubt include every film by Eisenstein, Sembene, Rocha, and many many others.
The major critique of Crash I've heard is that it's too one-note, completely unrealistic, etc.. But I think that's its interest: the film creates an entirely artificial - might one say Brechtian? - environment in which race is the ONLY term of human relations. Not that the movie's a masterpiece; certainly, it has an insipid Magnolia-remade-as-movie-of-the-week quality. But it doesn't suck.
What's an arm-chair liberal versus a real liberal?
Arm chair liberals have bigger tv screens ... oops. I guess I've crossed over! Wanna fight?
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