Crash

[myrrh]

I rented and watched Crash last night. And loved it.

These kinds of movies are my favorites. That is the kind where the character's are positively changed throughout the movie, by the events that happen within the movie.

If you haven't seen this yet, I highly recommend that you do so.

[adam]

Yeah, I saw it twice in the theatre. My favorite scene is when the TV producer loses it in front of the cops.

[Animal Boything]

There was a thread about this a while ago... but yeah, best film I've seen in years.

[patrick]

damn right... it was really amazing. it reminds me a lot of a movie i have seen before but i can't remember what it is right now... just one of those things where lots of little plot lines work together and meet in cool ways, but not huge/obvious ways at the end... the writer was brilliant!

[b.miller]

the movie sort of resembles another ensemble piece made a few years ago called Playing by Heart that dealt more with relationships in different forms rather than race but... yeah this is the one where Ryan Phillipe spends the whole movie wanting to NOT sleep with Angelina Jolie...

but you know... best movie in years? I mean... not gonna like, try and talk you out of liking the movie or anything but... how many movies do you see per year? :P

Magnolia, Short Cuts, and Me, You, and Everyone We Know all sort of follow this character-tapestry pattern... it's sort of almost a sub-genre.

[Animal Boything]

Magnolia, Short Cuts, and Me, You, and Everyone We Know all sort of follow this character-tapestry pattern... it's sort of almost a sub-genre. I'm not saying it's good because it's so fresh and new, I don't actually care about that, and I agree that it isn't. There are other movies like this. Usually I'm not that into them. It's just a simple matter of a great script, a great cast, great cinematography, great editing... it's a flawlessly constructed film. It's that all these plotlines are happening and it WORKS. That's the great thing. By way of contrast, I hated Magnolia. We've had that thread before, though, so I don't wanna get into it.

[b.miller]

yeah sorry to mash my info together in such a bad way... i was listing off the other titles for the sake of patrick to maybe jar the movie he was thinking of back into his head...

...and a completely separate point (in my mind anyway, although it ended up melded with the above when i wrote it out): I thought Crash was good but not the best movie I've seen in years... all the characters felt like they had arbitrary changes that they needed to make and some started off very much a walking stereotype so I felt the movie moved from bad to decent as I watched it rather than from decent to good... but I still felt that there had to be some "message" behind everyone's actions... i really would have liked it more if one character didn't have some massive change of heart by the end... like one guy's an asshole at the beginning and still an asshole at the end... with so many equally weighted characters they could've easily gotten away with this... and people also don't change like... every two days. racists tend to stay racist for a while...

so that's my point proper... not addled with the encyclopedic nah-nah...

[Animal Boything]

I think you misunderstood what was going on in the movie. It wasn't about changes of heart, and there really weren't a lot of those. It was more about the complexity of people's personalities, and the reasons behind their prejudices, and the truth that lies beneath their outward appearances. Most characters are presented such that we, the audience, see them one way at the beginning and another way at the end... it has little to do with internal changes, just mixed feelings.

That's why they seemed like walking sterotypes at the beginning. That was totally intentional. There are people we meet in everyday life that seem like walking stereotypes, and the point of the movie is that there's more to people than that. It wasn't about everybody learning a valuable lesson, it was about everyone revealing their true nature.

[b.miller]

but by everyone having that true nature, we as an audience learn a valuable lesson. I just found it way too predictable because every character underwent the same change/reveal... it's like a complete given in the beginning of the movie that if you don't like someone now he will do something redeemable by the end and if you don't not like someone now he will do something unsympathetic. I'm saying that it would have been nice to throw a surprise or two in for good measure and not have to make the same point 6 or 7 times.

[patrick]

i completely understand your point b.miller, but i like A.B. think that the movie was not as much about people, and their same point. Yes, most of the characters were quite effected by the race element of the movie, but it was pure character development in respect that the person didn't necessarily change during the movie, you just see all sides of the person. Take the cop for example, at the end (spoileR?) he is shown with his pa, but he probably did that all the time before the events... he hasn't changed necessarily... his character was shown by assulting the woman and then saving her later... he didn't necessarily have a revelation.

[b.miller]

right. yeah, half my point has been successfully countered by you and AB, none of them really became different people or had major revelatory epiphanies... but i was also using "change" in a character arc-y context where, in the simple mechanics of the story, the audience's view of each character shift up and down the sympathic scale as each character is revealed/changed during the movie.

SPOILERS IN NEXT PARAGRAPH

matt dillon: you don't like him because he molests the woman -> you like him because he saves her. ryan phillipe: you like him because he helps out terrence howard when he gets pulled over with ludacris in his car -> you don't like him because he succumbs to racism and kills a semi-innocent kid. Don Cheadlie: we like because he's Don Cheadle -> we don't like quite as much before because of the way he treats his partner in bed. Sandra Bullock: we hate for being suspicious of all minorites -> we like because she hurts herself and figures out that she's a bitch. Really the only people who don't change like this are the latino locksmith, who has to have something really bad happen to him because he's a nice guy and the middle eastern shop owner who has to be redeemed by not having the really bad thing happen because he's been an asshole for the whole movie.

END SPOILERS

none of the characters avoid this type of shift and it just made it seem arbitrary and boring to me. Let me emphasize that i didn't hate this movie or anything... i liked it (here (http://mymovie.medialife.org/?action=movieDetails&movieID=377) are my notes written directly after seeing it, where i don't even mention any of this), i'm just saying that this aspect of it made it definitely not the best movie i've seen in years.

[nat]

i saw this in the theatres when it first came out. it was an interesting film but didn't impress me as much as I thought it would. :cool:

[cured]

I'm sure a movie nazi will track me down and beat me with old scriptbooks but it's hard to have a movie about life and racial feelings in Los Angeles without having some of those stereotyped caricatures presented in full Broadway spectacle. Some of the most ridiculous elements about the movie are exactly what makes living in the LA area so ridiculous in the first place, but while the movie started to lose some of its steam towards the end, it was enjoyable to see some of the situations these characters would find themselves in.

Die-hard movie buffs I know absolutely hated the film but I thought it had its own charm, in a strangely nostalgic way.