I thought he was a little awkward, but had some very strong moments, particularly when he focused on political humor. The bit about escapism was funny, and the bit about journalistic ethics and period pieces was funnier. The faux-political ads were also good. My wife was in tears at the Dames for Truth ad.
On fashion:
Whoever advises women to wear gowns that are the same hue as their skin needs to stop. Alba and Watts both took the advice, and their appearances suffered. Garner's dress was one shade lighter than her skin, but she almost fell victim to the same bad advice. Jessica Alba still has a killer smile, and with Watts, i just closed my eyes and listened to her very endearing accent (what can I say? I'm a sucker for accents). Michelle Williams looked great, as did Rachel Weisz. Weisz better tip her stylist well, because she really looked amazing for being 7 months along the pregnancy trail. The academy saved us from a true male fashion faux-pas by awarding Wallace & Gromit the animation prize - Tim Burton looked wild. I can deal with McMurtry's jeans and cowboy boots. It's his thing.
On some of the winners:
Picture - "Crash" won for two reasons: 1) it provided a more complicated view of race than hollywood usually provides; and 2) it was about L.A., where a lot of the voters live and work. I disagree with the folks who think it was trite, particularly by Hollywood standards. When was the last time you saw a film where a black man had to witness his wife being groped by racist cops during a routine DWB stop? Even the racist character, Matt Dillon, was not uniformly detestable - he was caring for his liberal-minded father in failing health (admirable) and he rescued the gorgeous Thandie Newton at the end. Complicated, real-sounding characters in a spinning narrative about a city that the academy lives in and loves goes over well with their voters overall. I thought that Brokeback Mountain was a better film, but I liked "Crash". As for "Good Night and Good Luck", it was a good and important film, but it dragged in spots. I think Clooney is not that great a director, but he's learning.
Director - Ang Lee is a very talented director whose understated style married perfectly with the narrative of Brokeback. I'm not sure what the beef is here with his language skills - his English is fine. Not as good as his Mandarin (if it is Mandarin that is his native tongue), but he doesn't appear to have trouble communicating. The debate about whether the look of a film is more appropriately credited to the director, the cinematographer, or even the art director, is one that has been raging for decades and will likely never be fully or finally resolved. In my opinion, it breaks down like this: the director has a vision for what she wants the film to look like, but without talented cinematographers and art directors, the vision will never be realized.
Actor - I'm pleased that Phillip Seymour Hoffman won this award, although I also thought Heath Ledger's performance was off the charts. Hoffman's win is a welcome rebuff to my theory that the Academy is loathe to reward leading actors whose appearance in real life is less than glamourous, even when their performances are outstanding (see, e.g., Paul Giamatti last year).
Actress - Reese Witherspoon was the best thing about the Cash movie, and I love Johnny Cash. To me, the screenplay fell flat whenever she was absent from the scene. Maybe that was by design, or maybe she just made the movie worth watching for me.
On the show overall:
This year's show was well below average, in my opinion. Some of the montages were great (gay cowboys, socially significant pictures), but others of them fell flat. And there were too many of them. Even the usually enjoyable memorial reel got boring, I think because they had music playing instead of letting a few snaps of dialogue in.
And speaking of music, having music playing underneath the entirety of the acceptance speech is horribly distracting. Terrible idea. And cutting off the acceptance speeches of the winners of Best Original Screenplay and BEST MOTION PICTURE OF THE YEAR is very poor form.
The showpieces were limited to the original songs, and whoever choreographed them should be blacklisted permanently. The slow-mo thing really did not translate at all. Also, the sound guy did a very bad job mixing the Three-Six Mafia number. He avoided the usual live rap pitfall, where you can't hear the rapper, but he overcorrected so you could not hear the music, and barely even the beat. It's a good song, but it sounded like crap. That's on the sound guy. Oh, and please tell Dolly Parton to STOP GETTING WORK DONE TO HER FACE. She used to be pretty, now she looks kinda ill. Let's hope she stopped by Dame Judi Dench's table and got some advice on how to age gracefully.
On presenters:
Ben Stiller in the green screen suit was completely over the top, and I found it pretty funny. He took it all the way, which is the only way to pull something like that off. Will Farrell and Steve Carell didn't take the bits out of their mouths, which was too bad. "Pineapple bliss" - not that funny. I liked the Tomlin-Streep dialogue routine. I found the break from the usual, you talk-I talk presentation refreshing, and it was clear that they were enjoying themselves, which was also nice to see. Good thing that Jennifer Garner didn't trip and fall - her engorged breasts would certainly have leaked, if not exploded.
That's my take on the Oscars 2006. Tune in next year for the Don Knotts Memorial Academy Award redux, when the Apple Dumpling Gang will ride through heaven's gate.
well put Jroot, but I don't buy relative arguments. If you fed me 4 bowls of dirt and a bowl of mayoniase, I would still be upset.
missbassie(?) posted this review from Cinaste friday. I didn't read it then, but I read it this AM and IMO sums up the problems with Crash perfectly.
Crash
by Michael Sicinski
Paul Haggis's debut feature Crash is one of the best-reviewed films to be released so far this year, and it isn't going away. Judging from those reviews, its makers have successfully generated an air of Importance around it, and this is dangerous, because this pensive ambiance may well mean that the film's slipshod, contrivance-laden ???analysis' of race relations could be mistaken for genuine insight.
Naturally, Haggis's choice of subject matter goes a long way toward establishing both its own relevance and a hard-nosed creative fearlessness bordering on the pugilistic. Crash tackles race relations in the U.S., using present-day Los Angeles as its roiling laboratory. Haggis must surely be aware that any such film project will be accorded a degree of respect simply by dint of addressing this topic. Since Hollywood generally avoids the unpleasant truths of American racism, any film that dives into this particular wreck must be brave, bracing, and controversial. Selecting L.A. is a kind of no-brainer here, for a few basic reasons. Not only does it give the impression that the Hollywood machine is taking a hard look at itself, digging up the bones in its own backyard, but it also provides instant historical cachet. (???What, if anything,' Haggis implicitly asks, ???has changed since the Rodney King verdict and the L.A. uprisings?') And it leads a nominally informed viewer to expect at least a cursory engagement with the artistic and political reckoning with those events. (???Where do we go from here?') In short, Crash is presold as a piece of liberal artistic intervention, and in this way the entertainment industry is paradoxically rewarded for its timidity. By avoiding controversy most of the time, a risk-averse Hollywood can sell its own periodic ???daring' as a product unto itself, and Crash fits the bill beautifully. It has an air of truth, without ever saying anything truthful.
The plotline of Crash could be described as a riff on Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, with racial hatred replacing the sexual coupling. There are two major events around which most other occurrences in the film circulate???the murder of Peter (Larenz Tate), a young African-American criminal, and the titular car crash in which Christine (Thandie Newton) overturns in her SUV. Sgt. Ryan (Matt Dillon), the racist cop who sexually molested her during a traffic stop the previous night, is the officer on the scene who pulls her from the burning car. Throughout the film, characters encounter and reencounter one another in highly convenient ways. For example, Peter's brother Graham (Don Cheadle), an LAPD detective, discovers Peter's dead body in the desert. Prior to learning of his brother's death, Graham is strong-armed by the D.A.'s office into suppressing evidence that may partially exonerate a white police officer charged with killing a black cop. The D.A. (Brendan Fraser) is looking for a conviction that would help endear him to the black community, since he is trying to manage a potential media scandal. He and his wife (Sandra Bullock) were carjacked in Sherman Oaks by two young black men???none other than Peter and his friend Anthony (rapper Chris ???Ludacris??? Smith).
In a distinct but intersecting circle of coincidence, each of the two cops responsible for pulling over Christine and her husband Cameron (Terrence Howard) is later shown performing a good deed. Sgt. Ryan rescues Christine from her SUV, and Officer Hanson (Ryan Phillippe) intercedes on Cameron's behalf during a police standoff. Presumably this is intended to complicate the heinous behavior we witness elsewhere in the film. (Officer Hanson, in fact, is Peter's killer.) The film tells us that no one is all good or all bad. This is a facile, obvious notion, and ironically, one Crash propounds only by showing human behavior at its polar extremes.
As the above should make clear, implausible coincidence and leaden script contrivance are the heart and soul of Crash. Characters land up in situations that beggar belief, and, once within those situations, they rather conveniently behave in wholly artificial ways in order to foreground this or that thesis on racism. This pawns-on-a-chessboard approach to human relations is the single most frustrating element of the film. And one of the most baffling aspects of its mostly-positive cultural reception is the fact that this compendium of the implausible has been lauded as the grittiest of realism. Something about Haggis's construction and arrangement of pat falsehoods has rendered them largely impervious to reality-testing. How does Crash accord itself this air of realism? In addition to the dominant cultural assumptions already mentioned (almost by definition, a movie addressing racism equals ???gritty reality'), I think there are some basic ways in which a film like Crash coincides???both formally and politically???with certain desirable images liberal America has of itself.
Crash departs only slightly from the standard Hollywood visual style, and despite its nominally unconventional chronology, there is nothing remarkable about its editing scheme. Crash does incorporate handheld camerawork, however, along with a slightly grainy film stock, and its most distinctive visual feature???an overall bluish tint to the exteriors, with a slightly overwarm orange suffusing many of the interiors. This scheme, adapted from the hand-tinting of early silent cinema, has experienced a revival of late. It has been popularized by American ???Indiewood' cinema, as in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), but anyone familiar with popular TV of recent years will recognize this style immediately???the CSI programs use it, as do many police dramas on HBO and F/X. Like any other esthetic device (e.g., the Dogme 95 style), it ceases to draw attention to itself when its iterations reach a saturation point. And in the contexts typically deployed by the cop shows, what should be an obtrusive stylistic flourish (departing from traditional color) has evolved into a kind of shorthand. Apparently this is how one now depicts ripped-from-the-headlines urban reality, and Haggis uses this slick, processed sheen to imbue Crash with the appropriate veneer of harsh street truth.
And this is all the better for helping ideology to go down smoothly. Part of Haggis's political misfire pertains to the blinkered assumptions of American liberalism, a well-intentioned worldview that serves to occlude the structural roots of inequality. One of the effects of Crash's format is to foreground a collection of individual encounters in a highly structured manner. Unlike a work of Brechtian counter-cinema like Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003), which attempts to show that all individual choice as constrained by the demands of structural inequality, Crash uses the roundelay format to treat individual decision-taking as the dominant structure. One comes away from Crash with a very liberal, localized understanding of how racism works. You see, everybody's a little bit racist, and you never know when you'll find yourself in a situation when and where your racist nature will emerge. Or, as Sgt. Ryan says to Officer Hanson upon the dissolution of their partnership, ???You think you know who you are. You have no idea.??? It's worth noting that this is a slight variation of the tagline for MTV's ???Diary??? program, a reality show that allows Jennifer Lopez's or Usher's publicists to sculpt an off-screen persona for their stars, which is then presented as the unfiltered real-deal.)
The dominant illusion that Crash's form attempts to convey about its own narrative is that each character does something virtuous in one situation, and something unconscionably racist in anoth
er. But this isn't true. Some characters are exemplars of pure good. Latino locksmith Daniel (Michael Pena) exists solely to incur racist threats and insults from other characters, then to belie their opinions through his role as the most upstanding of family men. Other characters display no redeeming traits whatsoever. Bullock's Jean Cabot is depicted as a self-involved rich bitch who is there to speak the unspeakable ???truth' when justifying her fear of black men. She stops just short of calling Daniel a wetback, and eventually undergoes a laughable faux-transformation predicated on her inability to understand that her housekeeper Maria (Yomi Perry) is nice to her because she's paid to be.
Crash's form also gives the impression that everyone gets equal time in a sort of round-robin of racism, but again, this isn't true. Haggis devotes negligible screen time to most of his female characters (Christine is something of an exception), subtly sending the message that the racism we need to worry about is a man's affair. Graham's partner / lover Ria (Jennifer Esposito) is afforded no fully-developed characterization, but is subject to one of the film's cruelest racial slur / laugh lines. HMO bureaucrat Shaniqua Johnson (Loretta Devine) is similarly placed???a cipher and a target for bigoted macho taunts. Likewise, not all races are given equal time in Crash. While Daniel is the main focus of the third, smaller circle of interactions, paired with an angry Iranian shopkeeper (Shaun Toub) who blames him for the vandalism of his store, Latinos and Persians are generally relegated to afterthought status in this narrative thread. Or worse, their less-than-integrated narrative function bespeaks a racial-quota, show-of-hands presence that falls prey to the worst bean-counting tendencies of identity politics. The simplistic rendering of these characters (Daniel as the vato with the heart of gold, Farhad the shop-owner as misplaced, impotent rage) only underscores this impression.
Asians fare even worse in Haggis's L.A., as venal background characters and occasions for the deployment of those ever-popular R's-for-L's mispronunciation jabs. Throughout Crash, slurs are bandied about with a tittering, faux-transgressive naughtiness, marking the characters who speak them as insensitive jerks while allowing the audience the luxury of laughing at racial stereotypes with impunity. Basically it's the Howard Stern theory of disavowal??????I know I shouldn't say this, but come on, we all know it's true.' To point to the fact that stereotypes are seldom true is, in this scheme, to mark oneself out as a deluded left-wing prig.
The falsehoods mount as Crash proceeds. Christine accuses Cameron of ???shucking and jiving??? for the cops, instead of defending her honor like a man. A mother responds to the death of one son by taking the opportunity to upbraid her other son in the meanest, most premeditated fashion. The burning-SUV rescue, with its body contortions and spilled fluids, operates as a kind of vicarious miscegenation, essentially allowing Sgt. Ryan (and, presumably, the audience) the desired and dreaded coupling that his earlier roadside finger-fuck only hinted at. But the lie that serves as Crash's esthetic and political dominant is the one that ensures its success with liberal audiences: the individualist ideology that pretends all races are created equal, and that as individuals we can simply opt out of racism, as though it were a set of ideas and not a set of historically aggregated material structures and institutional practices.
If the characters in Crash were real people, in the real world instead of Haggis's cordoned-off fantasy L.A., we'd see that they are not equal. Especially in the present atmosphere of backlash against so-called ???political correctness'???an atmosphere Crash exploits to the fullest???people often get huffy when a person of color points out the difference between racism and prejudice, like it's mere sophistry or special pleading. But it's true???only white people in America are able to systematically reproduce the world in accordance with their own racial biases. To actually address this would entail systemic change, well beyond the ken of liberals and their voluntarist cult of the individual. In the middle of the film, Daniel assuages his daughter's fear of gunshots by offering her an ???invisible cloak??? of protection, given to him by a benevolent fairy. Later, in an apparent act of God, father and child are shot at close range and yet they are not harmed. The little girl exclaims to a stunned Daniel, ???It's a really good cloak.??? The same could be said for the privileged liberalism represented by Haggis and Crash . As long as the system is only shooting blanks, you're A-OK.
well put Jroot, but I don't buy relative arguments. If you fed me 4 bowls of dirt and a bowl of mayoniase, I would still be upset.
Thanks, but I don't accept a world without relative arguments. To the extent we all strive towards perfection, it does not make sense to deride improvements because they remain flawed. Change only happens incrementally, and I see the improvements in Crash as a step in the right direction.
As for the Cineaste review, it expects too much from cinema. I do not expect a movie to change the world, nor do I expect it to be able to present the overwhelming complexities of structural inequality in a narrative that would remain engaging. While it would be nice for film to accomplish this once in a while (and once in a very long while, maybe it does), it is certainly not where I set my expectations. Nor do I think it's fair to impose Brechtian standards of revolutionary drama on cinema that does not approach or attempt to utilize that frame.
It has an air of truth, without ever saying anything truthful.
This is a nice turn of phrase but it badly overstates the case. Does the film bring characters together in an implausible way? Sure. Would such a sequence of events happen in real life? Probably not. But the film's success is that it does not draw attention to the improbability of the events such that an educated moviegoer (which I'd like to consider myself to be) is not struck with the absurdity of the narrative. This is a credit to the screenwriting.
Haggis devotes negligible screen time to most of his female characters
This is a fair criticism, and one that too often is unstated. However, the reviewer then butchers some of his own well-earned credibility by overlooking some narrative power that the female characters are provided. For example:
HMO bureaucrat Shaniqua Johnson (Loretta Devine) is similarly placed???a cipher and a target for bigoted macho taunts.
To my recollection of the film (and it's been several months), Devine's character is positioned in a place of authority over Matt Dillon's character. She suffers bigoted macho taunts, but she is in a position to deny the author of the taunts what he seeks. This may be a commentary on the fundamental insecurity that often lurks beneath bigotry. Or it just may be the way that the narrative was constructed to prevent Dillon's character's bigotry from being rewarded. Either way, it is a significant aspect of the relationship between them that the reviewer elides in service of his overstated point.
The falsehoods mount as Crash proceeds. Christine accuses Cameron of ???shucking and jiving??? for the cops, instead of defending her honor like a man. A mother responds to the death of one son by taking the opportunity to upbraid her other son in the meanest, most premeditated fashion.
Neither of these scenes rang falsely to me. Both the Newton character and Cheadle's mother's character were dealing with intense emotions - Newton's of violation and the mother's of grief and loss. In response, many people (if not most) will lash out in ways that seem extreme and irrational.
But the lie that serves as Crash's esthetic and political dominant is the one that ensures its success with liberal audiences: the individualist ideology that pretends all races are created equal, and that as individuals we can simply opt out of racism, as though it were a set of ideas and not a set of historically aggregated material structures and institutional practices.
I don't see the film espousing this individualist idelogy, nor do I see it pretending that all races are created equal. It does not depict the "historically aggregated material structures and institutional practices", but those things are extremely complicated to depict within the construct of a documentary motion picture, much less a mainstream narrative drama.
I accept the film for what it is, and what it is, to me, is a more nuanced presentation of race than we usually receive from mainstream hollywood cinema. At the end of the movie, which I had heard next to nothing about when I watched it on Netflix, I said to my wife, "That was a really good film."
well put Jroot, but I don't buy relative arguments. If you fed me 4 bowls of dirt and a bowl of mayoniase, I would still be upset.
Thanks, but I don't accept a world without relative arguments. To the extent we all strive towards perfection, it does not make sense to deride improvements because they remain flawed. Change only happens incrementally, and I see the improvements in Crash as a step in the right direction.
As for the Cineaste review, it expects too much from cinema. I do not expect a movie to change the world, nor do I expect it to be able to present the overwhelming complexities of structural inequality in a narrative that would remain engaging. While it would be nice for film to accomplish this once in a while (and once in a very long while, maybe it does), it is certainly not where I set my expectations. Nor do I think it's fair to impose Brechtian standards of revolutionary drama on cinema that does not approach or attempt to utilize that frame.
It has an air of truth, without ever saying anything truthful.
This is a nice turn of phrase but it badly overstates the case. Does the film bring characters together in an implausible way? Sure. Would such a sequence of events happen in real life? Probably not. But the film's success is that it does not draw attention to the improbability of the events such that an educated moviegoer (which I'd like to consider myself to be) is not struck with the absurdity of the narrative. This is a credit to the screenwriting.
Haggis devotes negligible screen time to most of his female characters
This is a fair criticism, and one that too often is unstated. However, the reviewer then butchers some of his own well-earned credibility by overlooking some narrative power that the female characters are provided. For example:
HMO bureaucrat Shaniqua Johnson (Loretta Devine) is similarly placed???a cipher and a target for bigoted macho taunts.
To my recollection of the film (and it's been several months), Devine's character is positioned in a place of authority over Matt Dillon's character. She suffers bigoted macho taunts, but she is in a position to deny the author of the taunts what he seeks. This may be a commentary on the fundamental insecurity that often lurks beneath bigotry. Or it just may be the way that the narrative was constructed to prevent Dillon's character's bigotry from being rewarded. Either way, it is a significant aspect of the relationship between them that the reviewer elides in service of his overstated point.
The falsehoods mount as Crash proceeds. Christine accuses Cameron of ???shucking and jiving??? for the cops, instead of defending her honor like a man. A mother responds to the death of one son by taking the opportunity to upbraid her other son in the meanest, most premeditated fashion.
Neither of these scenes rang falsely to me. Both the Newton character and Cheadle's mother's character were dealing with intense emotions - Newton's of violation and the mother's of grief and loss. In response, many people (if not most) will lash out in ways that seem extreme and irrational.
But the lie that serves as Crash's esthetic and political dominant is the one that ensures its success with liberal audiences: the individualist ideology that pretends all races are created equal, and that as individuals we can simply opt out of racism, as though it were a set of ideas and not a set of historically aggregated material structures and institutional practices.
I don't see the film espousing this individualist idelogy, nor do I see it pretending that all races are created equal. It does not depict the "historically aggregated material structures and institutional practices", but those things are extremely complicated to depict within the construct of a documentary motion picture, much less a mainstream narrative drama.
I accept the film for what it is, and what it is, to me, is a more nuanced presentation of race than we usually receive from mainstream hollywood cinema. At the end of the movie, which I had heard next to nothing about when I watched it on Netflix, I said to my wife, "That was a really good film."
And I still think that.
JRoot
Well said JRoot. I'm just as anal as any other movie snob and for my money that I spent this year in the theatre... the Crash experience was most worthwhile. I don't understand the hate, but I've yet to truly hear why this movie was trite and the other colorful words used. I've yet to see any counter-examples either. When was such a movie done better, outside of examples done over 10 years ago like Do The Right Thing? My only thing I would pick on about Crash was the screenwriting style. That interwoven, highly implausible plotline is starting to get played out. At the same time, it was still well done, so... I digress.
Speaking of not being able to understand performers or winners. Those 3 6 dudes were indecipherable during the after party interviews. It sounded like they all had speech impediments. Then I relized they were all wearing grillz. Those shits are funny, spit and shhssing like Sylvester. Add to that mess that they were a bunch of southern boys and you get the old SNL mCLouglin group parody. "It's all buzzes and clicks to me".
The scientology bit after the commercial was hot buisness, wish they had cut to Travolta.
Overall, I thought Jon did a good job, he's a low key dude, he's not going to have the same stage prescence as Robin Williams. He kept it topical, mildly political, made fun of the spectacle, but didn't go overboard.
Both Do the Right Thing and Bamboozled are good movies, and when it comes to "race movies" they are among the best. Bamboozled in particular is the best narrative-style film commentary on race in American entertainment that I have seen to date. It harkens to the European style of filmmaking, which has been all but abandoned in the U.S., that places intellectual engagement with the audience above entertaining the audience on the scale of the film's goals. Consequently, Bamboozled was a popular flop in the U.S.
Crash is certainly not trying to provide a meta-commentary on race or society in the same way that Bamboozled was. Do the Right Thing is probably a better comparison, as it, like Crash, tries to depict a day in the life of an American city riven by race. Crash doesn't occupy the "day" conceit, but you get my meaning.
Do the Right Thing is probably a better race film than Crash is, but I think it is intentionally so. That said, if highlighting film's shortcomings is your thing, the depiction of the Korean grocer in Do the Right Thing is hardly advancing racial politics in this country.
I'd like to hear more than a jpeg on this topic, but if a jpeg is all you've got, make it a good one.
Both Do the Right Thing and Bamboozled are good movies, and when it comes to "race movies" they are among the best. Bamboozled in particular is the best narrative-style film commentary on race in American entertainment that I have seen to date. It harkens to the European style of filmmaking, which has been all but abandoned in the U.S., that places intellectual engagement with the audience above entertaining the audience on the scale of the film's goals. Consequently, Bamboozled was a popular flop in the U.S.
Cosign. I liked it because it dared to accept it's contradictions and openly engaged the audience with complexity, not just the usual crap.
As for Crash, honestly I haven't read everything in this thread, but I thought it was Ok for what it was. I didn't find it to be more than average however, and I usually hate films that try to manipulate the audience as melodramatically as 'Crash' did. I mean, I know many many films are contrived, but 'Crash' was VERY contrived in spots, and frequently you could predict exactly where the thing was going, which IMO is not great filmmaking.
On the other hand, there were some nice performances (I thought Matt Dillon was excellent, for example) and some subtle moments to offset what for the most part could have been a very average film if not for the name performers like Dillon and Cheadle turning in some good stuff.
Any motherfucker who thinks that film was this "great piece that disects and adressess racism in America" or some shit is either a fucking racist or "minority" who's completely detatched from reality. Actually that whole thing was mad condescending to race and racism in America. Shit didn't address anything or reveal anything new than any "minority" doesn't go through even damn day of his/her life.
Brokeback Mountain=Damn good movie. I went to see that film as a favor to my homegirl but after seeing it I was glad I went and felt foolish not seeing it on the fact that people where talking about how good of a move it is. Brokeback is a million times better than all those other Meg Ryan type of romance-terd movies that Hollywood tries to spin off of as " love story".
Three 6 Mafia was on the OScars? The fuck? What for?
Three 6 Mafia was on the OScars? The fuck? What for?
soundtrack to hustle and flow (aka the pimp with a heart movie)
that shit was trash as well. well maybe not trash because I had to keep taking a shit every 20 minutes (the kid is lactoose intollerant and I had a milkshake earlier that evening)
(the kid is lactoose intollerant and I had a milkshake earlier that evening)
for one of the greatest illusionist of the last century you aint too smart
yeah i agree movie was trash
in my mind garden there were no good movies this year, but i have yet to see capote or brokeback, i would rather watch hostel or some dumb shit rather than the crap that won awards
Bamboozled, like practically everything else Spike Lee has attempted in the last 10 years, is a total fucking mess. The finale is probably the most campy, wrong headed piece of filmaking that I have ever seen. That said, I like his premise. Calling out the media for its portrayal of race is long overdue. But like Crash just pointing the car in the that direction does not make for good art. I just wish that Glover could act and that Spike would spend the time to finish an actual script like he used to. There is one great scene in the movie between Jada and Mos Def that was both funny and heart wrenching in the vein of SPike's truly important work.
Spike should have taken a page from Network which is another great campy (Dunaway's orgasm scene for real) send up of mass media that works because Peter Finch taps into something very real. Network is a great but flawed movie. I can live with that. Bamboozled is sad and pathetic. If you want to see a good but flawed recent spike lee joint, rent Girl 6 which starts off well enough but looses its mind in the end.
Spike's problem with narrative is a much discussed problem amongst even those work with him. Many hope that he can find someone to ride herd on him to tighten his approach. Woody Allen has suffered from much the same problem. He too has lost most of his partners who helped him refine his already thoughtful craft (Brickman=Annie Hall, McGrath=Bullets over Broadway). It is difficult when you have final cut and very little to prove to reign yourself in and make something beautiful and complete.
(the kid is lactoose intollerant and I had a milkshake earlier that evening)
for one of the greatest illusionist of the last century you aint too smart
yeah i agree movie was trash
in my mind garden there were no good movies this year, but i have yet to see capote or brokeback, i would rather watch hostel or some dumb shit rather than the crap that won awards
I couldn't agree more. I am hoping that COnstant Gardener is good. I loved Mireilles' City of God.
(the kid is lactoose intollerant and I had a milkshake earlier that evening)
for one of the greatest illusionist of the last century you aint too smart
I was working on my next trick. Dude see Brokeback, even though it doesn't fall in place with the reich right , it's still a good one.
dude, i was for the war, thats it, iam not a homophobe or a bigot, iam not on the right, iam not afraid of gays, you are confusing me with 85% of this board
(the kid is lactoose intollerant and I had a milkshake earlier that evening)
for one of the greatest illusionist of the last century you aint too smart
I was working on my next trick. Dude see Brokeback, even though it doesn't fall in place with the reich right , it's still a good one.
dude, i was for the war, thats it, iam not a homophobe or a bigot, iam not on the right, iam not afraid of gays, you are confusing me with 85% of this board
whatever...just send me all your broken beat records.
When I was watching, I was gripped, caught up and pissed off. I left the movie thinking and feeling there were insoulble problems or problems that could only be solved with violence. BUT, I saw this movie on hottest day of summer. One of those 105+ days. And when I left the theatre, I had a smoke in Union sq. I looked around and saw 1000 people and probably a hundred different races. All freely interacting with a peacefullness that was never hinted at anywhere in that movie. It was just a bunch of people enjoying a hot summer night. Absolutely peaceful and a picture of human harmony. And so I was like, FUCK that movie. And fuck La.
Any motherfucker who thinks that film was this "great piece that disects and adressess racism in America" or some shit is either a fucking racist or "minority" who's completely detatched from reality. Actually that whole thing was mad condescending to race and racism in America. Shit didn't address anything or reveal anything new than any "minority" doesn't go through even damn day of his/her life.[/b]
So a person can't make a movie because you are up on it? That's some straight elitist crap. I'm sure this movie opened the eyes of many middle Americans and probably some of your more worldly ones. I am a "minority" and I hip to the world around me, but I'm not so pompous to think that everyone is hip to something so taboo as the underlying racism going on in this country. I argue with bitches every day about what's racist and what isn't. It's amazing to think this movie doesn't offer anything worthwhile to anyone. There are many small-minded folks roaming this country.
Man, I'm sure you have some deeper insight than this, because I can't believe this is the reasoning you don't like this movie. How does it not address racism? The movie is basically about racism! The idea if it was dissected is relative. How it's condescending is relative, but damn... that makes the movie trash?
Comments
I like Altman's speach.
I thought he was a little awkward, but had some very strong moments, particularly when he focused on political humor. The bit about escapism was funny, and the bit about journalistic ethics and period pieces was funnier. The faux-political ads were also good. My wife was in tears at the Dames for Truth ad.
On fashion:
Whoever advises women to wear gowns that are the same hue as their skin needs to stop. Alba and Watts both took the advice, and their appearances suffered. Garner's dress was one shade lighter than her skin, but she almost fell victim to the same bad advice. Jessica Alba still has a killer smile, and with Watts, i just closed my eyes and listened to her very endearing accent (what can I say? I'm a sucker for accents). Michelle Williams looked great, as did Rachel Weisz. Weisz better tip her stylist well, because she really looked amazing for being 7 months along the pregnancy trail. The academy saved us from a true male fashion faux-pas by awarding Wallace & Gromit the animation prize - Tim Burton looked wild. I can deal with McMurtry's jeans and cowboy boots. It's his thing.
On some of the winners:
Picture - "Crash" won for two reasons: 1) it provided a more complicated view of race than hollywood usually provides; and 2) it was about L.A., where a lot of the voters live and work. I disagree with the folks who think it was trite, particularly by Hollywood standards. When was the last time you saw a film where a black man had to witness his wife being groped by racist cops during a routine DWB stop? Even the racist character, Matt Dillon, was not uniformly detestable - he was caring for his liberal-minded father in failing health (admirable) and he rescued the gorgeous Thandie Newton at the end. Complicated, real-sounding characters in a spinning narrative about a city that the academy lives in and loves goes over well with their voters overall. I thought that Brokeback Mountain was a better film, but I liked "Crash". As for "Good Night and Good Luck", it was a good and important film, but it dragged in spots. I think Clooney is not that great a director, but he's learning.
Director - Ang Lee is a very talented director whose understated style married perfectly with the narrative of Brokeback. I'm not sure what the beef is here with his language skills - his English is fine. Not as good as his Mandarin (if it is Mandarin that is his native tongue), but he doesn't appear to have trouble communicating. The debate about whether the look of a film is more appropriately credited to the director, the cinematographer, or even the art director, is one that has been raging for decades and will likely never be fully or finally resolved. In my opinion, it breaks down like this: the director has a vision for what she wants the film to look like, but without talented cinematographers and art directors, the vision will never be realized.
Actor - I'm pleased that Phillip Seymour Hoffman won this award, although I also thought Heath Ledger's performance was off the charts. Hoffman's win is a welcome rebuff to my theory that the Academy is loathe to reward leading actors whose appearance in real life is less than glamourous, even when their performances are outstanding (see, e.g., Paul Giamatti last year).
Actress - Reese Witherspoon was the best thing about the Cash movie, and I love Johnny Cash. To me, the screenplay fell flat whenever she was absent from the scene. Maybe that was by design, or maybe she just made the movie worth watching for me.
On the show overall:
This year's show was well below average, in my opinion. Some of the montages were great (gay cowboys, socially significant pictures), but others of them fell flat. And there were too many of them. Even the usually enjoyable memorial reel got boring, I think because they had music playing instead of letting a few snaps of dialogue in.
And speaking of music, having music playing underneath the entirety of the acceptance speech is horribly distracting. Terrible idea. And cutting off the acceptance speeches of the winners of Best Original Screenplay and BEST MOTION PICTURE OF THE YEAR is very poor form.
The showpieces were limited to the original songs, and whoever choreographed them should be blacklisted permanently. The slow-mo thing really did not translate at all. Also, the sound guy did a very bad job mixing the Three-Six Mafia number. He avoided the usual live rap pitfall, where you can't hear the rapper, but he overcorrected so you could not hear the music, and barely even the beat. It's a good song, but it sounded like crap. That's on the sound guy. Oh, and please tell Dolly Parton to STOP GETTING WORK DONE TO HER FACE. She used to be pretty, now she looks kinda ill. Let's hope she stopped by Dame Judi Dench's table and got some advice on how to age gracefully.
On presenters:
Ben Stiller in the green screen suit was completely over the top, and I found it pretty funny. He took it all the way, which is the only way to pull something like that off. Will Farrell and Steve Carell didn't take the bits out of their mouths, which was too bad. "Pineapple bliss" - not that funny. I liked the Tomlin-Streep dialogue routine. I found the break from the usual, you talk-I talk presentation refreshing, and it was clear that they were enjoying themselves, which was also nice to see. Good thing that Jennifer Garner didn't trip and fall - her engorged breasts would certainly have leaked, if not exploded.
That's my take on the Oscars 2006. Tune in next year for the Don Knotts Memorial Academy Award redux, when the Apple Dumpling Gang will ride through heaven's gate.
JRoot
missbassie(?) posted this review from Cinaste friday. I didn't read it then, but I read it this AM and IMO sums up the problems with Crash perfectly.
Crash
by Michael Sicinski
Paul Haggis's debut feature Crash is one of the best-reviewed films to be released so far this year, and it isn't going away. Judging from those reviews, its makers have successfully generated an air of Importance around it, and this is dangerous, because this pensive ambiance may well mean that the film's slipshod, contrivance-laden ???analysis' of race relations could be mistaken for genuine insight.
Naturally, Haggis's choice of subject matter goes a long way toward establishing both its own relevance and a hard-nosed creative fearlessness bordering on the pugilistic. Crash tackles race relations in the U.S., using present-day Los Angeles as its roiling laboratory. Haggis must surely be aware that any such film project will be accorded a degree of respect simply by dint of addressing this topic. Since Hollywood generally avoids the unpleasant truths of American racism, any film that dives into this particular wreck must be brave, bracing, and controversial. Selecting L.A. is a kind of no-brainer here, for a few basic reasons. Not only does it give the impression that the Hollywood machine is taking a hard look at itself, digging up the bones in its own backyard, but it also provides instant historical cachet. (???What, if anything,' Haggis implicitly asks, ???has changed since the Rodney King verdict and the L.A. uprisings?') And it leads a nominally informed viewer to expect at least a cursory engagement with the artistic and political reckoning with those events. (???Where do we go from here?') In short, Crash is presold as a piece of liberal artistic intervention, and in this way the entertainment industry is paradoxically rewarded for its timidity. By avoiding controversy most of the time, a risk-averse Hollywood can sell its own periodic ???daring' as a product unto itself, and Crash fits the bill beautifully. It has an air of truth, without ever saying anything truthful.
The plotline of Crash could be described as a riff on Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, with racial hatred replacing the sexual coupling. There are two major events around which most other occurrences in the film circulate???the murder of Peter (Larenz Tate), a young African-American criminal, and the titular car crash in which Christine (Thandie Newton) overturns in her SUV. Sgt. Ryan (Matt Dillon), the racist cop who sexually molested her during a traffic stop the previous night, is the officer on the scene who pulls her from the burning car. Throughout the film, characters encounter and reencounter one another in highly convenient ways. For example, Peter's brother Graham (Don Cheadle), an LAPD detective, discovers Peter's dead body in the desert. Prior to learning of his brother's death, Graham is strong-armed by the D.A.'s office into suppressing evidence that may partially exonerate a white police officer charged with killing a black cop. The D.A. (Brendan Fraser) is looking for a conviction that would help endear him to the black community, since he is trying to manage a potential media scandal. He and his wife (Sandra Bullock) were carjacked in Sherman Oaks by two young black men???none other than Peter and his friend Anthony (rapper Chris ???Ludacris??? Smith).
In a distinct but intersecting circle of coincidence, each of the two cops responsible for pulling over Christine and her husband Cameron (Terrence Howard) is later shown performing a good deed. Sgt. Ryan rescues Christine from her SUV, and Officer Hanson (Ryan Phillippe) intercedes on Cameron's behalf during a police standoff. Presumably this is intended to complicate the heinous behavior we witness elsewhere in the film. (Officer Hanson, in fact, is Peter's killer.) The film tells us that no one is all good or all bad. This is a facile, obvious notion, and ironically, one Crash propounds only by showing human behavior at its polar extremes.
As the above should make clear, implausible coincidence and leaden script contrivance are the heart and soul of Crash. Characters land up in situations that beggar belief, and, once within those situations, they rather conveniently behave in wholly artificial ways in order to foreground this or that thesis on racism. This pawns-on-a-chessboard approach to human relations is the single most frustrating element of the film. And one of the most baffling aspects of its mostly-positive cultural reception is the fact that this compendium of the implausible has been lauded as the grittiest of realism. Something about Haggis's construction and arrangement of pat falsehoods has rendered them largely impervious to reality-testing. How does Crash accord itself this air of realism? In addition to the dominant cultural assumptions already mentioned (almost by definition, a movie addressing racism equals ???gritty reality'), I think there are some basic ways in which a film like Crash coincides???both formally and politically???with certain desirable images liberal America has of itself.
Crash departs only slightly from the standard Hollywood visual style, and despite its nominally unconventional chronology, there is nothing remarkable about its editing scheme. Crash does incorporate handheld camerawork, however, along with a slightly grainy film stock, and its most distinctive visual feature???an overall bluish tint to the exteriors, with a slightly overwarm orange suffusing many of the interiors. This scheme, adapted from the hand-tinting of early silent cinema, has experienced a revival of late. It has been popularized by American ???Indiewood' cinema, as in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), but anyone familiar with popular TV of recent years will recognize this style immediately???the CSI programs use it, as do many police dramas on HBO and F/X. Like any other esthetic device (e.g., the Dogme 95 style), it ceases to draw attention to itself when its iterations reach a saturation point. And in the contexts typically deployed by the cop shows, what should be an obtrusive stylistic flourish (departing from traditional color) has evolved into a kind of shorthand. Apparently this is how one now depicts ripped-from-the-headlines urban reality, and Haggis uses this slick, processed sheen to imbue Crash with the appropriate veneer of harsh street truth.
And this is all the better for helping ideology to go down smoothly. Part of Haggis's political misfire pertains to the blinkered assumptions of American liberalism, a well-intentioned worldview that serves to occlude the structural roots of inequality. One of the effects of Crash's format is to foreground a collection of individual encounters in a highly structured manner. Unlike a work of Brechtian counter-cinema like Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003), which attempts to show that all individual choice as constrained by the demands of structural inequality, Crash uses the roundelay format to treat individual decision-taking as the dominant structure. One comes away from Crash with a very liberal, localized understanding of how racism works. You see, everybody's a little bit racist, and you never know when you'll find yourself in a situation when and where your racist nature will emerge. Or, as Sgt. Ryan says to Officer Hanson upon the dissolution of their partnership, ???You think you know who you are. You have no idea.??? It's worth noting that this is a slight variation of the tagline for MTV's ???Diary??? program, a reality show that allows Jennifer Lopez's or Usher's publicists to sculpt an off-screen persona for their stars, which is then presented as the unfiltered real-deal.)
The dominant illusion that Crash's form attempts to convey about its own narrative is that each character does something virtuous in one situation, and something unconscionably racist in anoth er. But this isn't true. Some characters are exemplars of pure good. Latino locksmith Daniel (Michael Pena) exists solely to incur racist threats and insults from other characters, then to belie their opinions through his role as the most upstanding of family men. Other characters display no redeeming traits whatsoever. Bullock's Jean Cabot is depicted as a self-involved rich bitch who is there to speak the unspeakable ???truth' when justifying her fear of black men. She stops just short of calling Daniel a wetback, and eventually undergoes a laughable faux-transformation predicated on her inability to understand that her housekeeper Maria (Yomi Perry) is nice to her because she's paid to be.
Crash's form also gives the impression that everyone gets equal time in a sort of round-robin of racism, but again, this isn't true. Haggis devotes negligible screen time to most of his female characters (Christine is something of an exception), subtly sending the message that the racism we need to worry about is a man's affair. Graham's partner / lover Ria (Jennifer Esposito) is afforded no fully-developed characterization, but is subject to one of the film's cruelest racial slur / laugh lines. HMO bureaucrat Shaniqua Johnson (Loretta Devine) is similarly placed???a cipher and a target for bigoted macho taunts. Likewise, not all races are given equal time in Crash. While Daniel is the main focus of the third, smaller circle of interactions, paired with an angry Iranian shopkeeper (Shaun Toub) who blames him for the vandalism of his store, Latinos and Persians are generally relegated to afterthought status in this narrative thread. Or worse, their less-than-integrated narrative function bespeaks a racial-quota, show-of-hands presence that falls prey to the worst bean-counting tendencies of identity politics. The simplistic rendering of these characters (Daniel as the vato with the heart of gold, Farhad the shop-owner as misplaced, impotent rage) only underscores this impression.
Asians fare even worse in Haggis's L.A., as venal background characters and occasions for the deployment of those ever-popular R's-for-L's mispronunciation jabs. Throughout Crash, slurs are bandied about with a tittering, faux-transgressive naughtiness, marking the characters who speak them as insensitive jerks while allowing the audience the luxury of laughing at racial stereotypes with impunity. Basically it's the Howard Stern theory of disavowal??????I know I shouldn't say this, but come on, we all know it's true.' To point to the fact that stereotypes are seldom true is, in this scheme, to mark oneself out as a deluded left-wing prig.
The falsehoods mount as Crash proceeds. Christine accuses Cameron of ???shucking and jiving??? for the cops, instead of defending her honor like a man. A mother responds to the death of one son by taking the opportunity to upbraid her other son in the meanest, most premeditated fashion. The burning-SUV rescue, with its body contortions and spilled fluids, operates as a kind of vicarious miscegenation, essentially allowing Sgt. Ryan (and, presumably, the audience) the desired and dreaded coupling that his earlier roadside finger-fuck only hinted at. But the lie that serves as Crash's esthetic and political dominant is the one that ensures its success with liberal audiences: the individualist ideology that pretends all races are created equal, and that as individuals we can simply opt out of racism, as though it were a set of ideas and not a set of historically aggregated material structures and institutional practices.
If the characters in Crash were real people, in the real world instead of Haggis's cordoned-off fantasy L.A., we'd see that they are not equal. Especially in the present atmosphere of backlash against so-called ???political correctness'???an atmosphere Crash exploits to the fullest???people often get huffy when a person of color points out the difference between racism and prejudice, like it's mere sophistry or special pleading. But it's true???only white people in America are able to systematically reproduce the world in accordance with their own racial biases. To actually address this would entail systemic change, well beyond the ken of liberals and their voluntarist cult of the individual. In the middle of the film, Daniel assuages his daughter's fear of gunshots by offering her an ???invisible cloak??? of protection, given to him by a benevolent fairy. Later, in an apparent act of God, father and child are shot at close range and yet they are not harmed. The little girl exclaims to a stunned Daniel, ???It's a really good cloak.??? The same could be said for the privileged liberalism represented by Haggis and Crash . As long as the system is only shooting blanks, you're A-OK.
He wuz robbed of Best Director on Popeye!!
Thanks, but I don't accept a world without relative arguments. To the extent we all strive towards perfection, it does not make sense to deride improvements because they remain flawed. Change only happens incrementally, and I see the improvements in Crash as a step in the right direction.
As for the Cineaste review, it expects too much from cinema. I do not expect a movie to change the world, nor do I expect it to be able to present the overwhelming complexities of structural inequality in a narrative that would remain engaging. While it would be nice for film to accomplish this once in a while (and once in a very long while, maybe it does), it is certainly not where I set my expectations. Nor do I think it's fair to impose Brechtian standards of revolutionary drama on cinema that does not approach or attempt to utilize that frame.
This is a nice turn of phrase but it badly overstates the case. Does the film bring characters together in an implausible way? Sure. Would such a sequence of events happen in real life? Probably not. But the film's success is that it does not draw attention to the improbability of the events such that an educated moviegoer (which I'd like to consider myself to be) is not struck with the absurdity of the narrative. This is a credit to the screenwriting.
This is a fair criticism, and one that too often is unstated. However, the reviewer then butchers some of his own well-earned credibility by overlooking some narrative power that the female characters are provided. For example:
To my recollection of the film (and it's been several months), Devine's character is positioned in a place of authority over Matt Dillon's character. She suffers bigoted macho taunts, but she is in a position to deny the author of the taunts what he seeks. This may be a commentary on the fundamental insecurity that often lurks beneath bigotry. Or it just may be the way that the narrative was constructed to prevent Dillon's character's bigotry from being rewarded. Either way, it is a significant aspect of the relationship between them that the reviewer elides in service of his overstated point.
Neither of these scenes rang falsely to me. Both the Newton character and Cheadle's mother's character were dealing with intense emotions - Newton's of violation and the mother's of grief and loss. In response, many people (if not most) will lash out in ways that seem extreme and irrational.
I don't see the film espousing this individualist idelogy, nor do I see it pretending that all races are created equal. It does not depict the "historically aggregated material structures and institutional practices", but those things are extremely complicated to depict within the construct of a documentary motion picture, much less a mainstream narrative drama.
I accept the film for what it is, and what it is, to me, is a more nuanced presentation of race than we usually receive from mainstream hollywood cinema. At the end of the movie, which I had heard next to nothing about when I watched it on Netflix, I said to my wife, "That was a really good film."
And I still think that.
JRoot
Dude that Popeye film is so fucking tripped out. I forgot Altman did that.
My only thing I would pick on about Crash was the screenwriting style. That interwoven, highly implausible plotline is starting to get played out. At the same time, it was still well done, so... I digress.
Overall, I thought Jon did a good job, he's a low key dude, he's not going to have the same stage prescence as Robin Williams. He kept it topical, mildly political, made fun of the spectacle, but didn't go overboard.
Could be one of the worst movies ever made.
Disagree.
Crash is certainly not trying to provide a meta-commentary on race or society in the same way that Bamboozled was. Do the Right Thing is probably a better comparison, as it, like Crash, tries to depict a day in the life of an American city riven by race. Crash doesn't occupy the "day" conceit, but you get my meaning.
Do the Right Thing is probably a better race film than Crash is, but I think it is intentionally so. That said, if highlighting film's shortcomings is your thing, the depiction of the Korean grocer in Do the Right Thing is hardly advancing racial politics in this country.
I'd like to hear more than a jpeg on this topic, but if a jpeg is all you've got, make it a good one.
JRoot
Cosign. I liked it because it dared to accept it's contradictions and openly engaged the audience with complexity, not just the usual crap.
As for Crash, honestly I haven't read everything in this thread, but I thought it was Ok for what it was. I didn't find it to be more than average however, and I usually hate films that try to manipulate the audience as melodramatically as 'Crash' did. I mean, I know many many films are contrived, but 'Crash' was VERY contrived in spots, and frequently you could predict exactly where the thing was going, which IMO is not great filmmaking.
On the other hand, there were some nice performances (I thought Matt Dillon was excellent, for example) and some subtle moments to offset what for the most part could have been a very average film if not for the name performers like Dillon and Cheadle turning in some good stuff.
yeah crash is a lot like america. everyone has race on their mind.
too bad it was a garbage movie with only one idea that they flog you to death with
Please elaborate.
Any motherfucker who thinks that film was this "great piece that disects and adressess racism in America" or some shit is either a fucking racist or "minority" who's completely detatched from reality. Actually that whole thing was mad condescending to race and racism in America. Shit didn't address anything or reveal anything new than any "minority" doesn't go through even damn day of his/her life.
Brokeback Mountain=Damn good movie. I went to see that film as a favor to my homegirl but after seeing it I was glad I went and felt foolish not seeing it on the fact that people where talking about how good of a move it is. Brokeback is a million times better than all those other Meg Ryan type of romance-terd movies that Hollywood tries to spin off of as " love story".
Three 6 Mafia was on the OScars? The fuck? What for?
soundtrack to hustle and flow (aka the pimp with a heart movie)
that shit was trash as well. well maybe not trash because I had to keep taking a shit every 20 minutes (the kid is lactoose intollerant and I had a milkshake earlier that evening)
for one of the greatest illusionist of the last century you aint too smart
yeah i agree movie was trash
in my mind garden there were no good movies this year, but i have yet to see capote or brokeback, i would rather watch hostel or some dumb shit rather than the crap that won awards
Spike should have taken a page from Network which is another great campy (Dunaway's orgasm scene for real) send up of mass media that works because Peter Finch taps into something very real. Network is a great but flawed movie. I can live with that. Bamboozled is sad and pathetic. If you want to see a good but flawed recent spike lee joint, rent Girl 6 which starts off well enough but looses its mind in the end.
Spike's problem with narrative is a much discussed problem amongst even those work with him. Many hope that he can find someone to ride herd on him to tighten his approach. Woody Allen has suffered from much the same problem. He too has lost most of his partners who helped him refine his already thoughtful craft (Brickman=Annie Hall, McGrath=Bullets over Broadway). It is difficult when you have final cut and very little to prove to reign yourself in and make something beautiful and complete.
I was working on my next trick. Dude see Brokeback, even though it doesn't fall in place with the
reichright , it's still a good one.I couldn't agree more. I am hoping that COnstant Gardener is good. I loved Mireilles' City of God.
dude, i was for the war, thats it, iam not a homophobe or a bigot, iam not on the right, iam not afraid of gays, you are confusing me with 85% of this board
whatever...just send me all your broken beat records.
Bamboozled = sucked...and i really don't remember much more about it
Hustle and Flow = sucked...worst story ever...best moment:"whoop that trick"
When I was watching, I was gripped, caught up and pissed off. I left the movie thinking and feeling there were insoulble problems or problems that could only be solved with violence. BUT, I saw this movie on hottest day of summer. One of those 105+ days. And when I left the theatre, I had a smoke in Union sq. I looked around and saw 1000 people and probably a hundred different races. All freely interacting with a peacefullness that was never hinted at anywhere in that movie. It was just a bunch of people enjoying a hot summer night. Absolutely peaceful and a picture of human harmony. And so I was like, FUCK that movie. And fuck La.
Man, I'm sure you have some deeper insight than this, because I can't believe this is the reasoning you don't like this movie. How does it not address racism? The movie is basically about racism! The idea if it was dissected is relative. How it's condescending is relative, but damn... that makes the movie trash?
The East Coast/West Coast Soulstrut battles begin. [/b]