Crash

[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 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.

[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.