Crash is a piece of junk

Nobody watch this movie. What a misguided, frustrating, misanthropic junk factory. Here are some of the questions it left me with, which may contain spoilers but you don’t care because you’re never going to watch it:

Are we really supposed to think, “Even though Matt Dillon is a racist sexual assaulter, he has been redeemed because he is nice to his sick dad and good at rescuing people from cars”? Because that’s what it seems like you’re asking us to think. Why does the Persian guy get so angry at the Hispanic guy? Calm down. How do people in this movie even know so many different racial stereotypes? It’s like they all Wikipedia’d “racial stereotypes” and made flashcards to prepare for the car accident they will inevitably be getting in tomorrow with someone of a different race. Why is Sandra Bullock such a crazy b? Why are we supposed to care about her?
WHY?





In the world in which the person who made Crash lives, everyone is:
1. Awful
2. Offended by ridiculous things, and jumping to the conclusion that people are being racist all the time.
3. Being racist all the time
4. Acting free from the dictates of reason, temperament, or any of the things we usually think of as “causes”
5. Shooting people all the time (“I just encountered a hardship. Time to shoot someone.”)
6. A terrible driver. The 9 or 10 characters get in like 6 car accidents in the course of one day. Seriously, guys, eyes on the road.

Also, in this world, there is no such thing as humor or the ordinary, just extremes of violence and sentimentalism. (Screenwriter 1: “We should do a close-up on the daughter yelling ‘Daddy’s home!’ right as the dad is about to get shot.” Sreenwriter 2: “That gives it more pathos.” The script doctor for this movie was actually Christopher Walken going “More pathos!” after every scene.)

"Not quite enough pathos."

Some of you may be objecting, “But Liz, it’s not supposed to be realistic. There are all those nods to magical realism, like when the little girl survives the gunshot (before we find out, seamless reveal!, they were blanks) or when the cops implausibly let Terrence Howard go or when the woman escapes the exploding car, which are meant to signal the film's true genre.” Maybe. Maybe. But first of all, you can’t be like “it’s magical realism, so it doesn’t matter that none of the characters have coherent motivations.” Second of all, magical realism is gay. Third of all, if you’re not working in the realist mode, don’t present yourself as a social problem film. It’s disingenuous.  Red pill or blue, Crash: do you want to be The Wire, and systemically trace problems through chains of cause and effect, or do you want to get high and cry about the evil inherent to the human condition and the whims of Lady Chance? You can't have it both ways. You can't expose something as "gritty" and "real," while at the same time allegorizing that thing in grotesque exaggerations.

Or at least you can't, Crash, because you suck. Some people can. To illuminate, and in the spirit of A Unicorn's Unicorn's "gayness scatter plot", I have constructed this Realness Scatter Plot (click for large view):




Additions and amendments welcome.

Finally, I leave you with a Would You Rather: Would you rather watch Crash every week for the rest of your life, or listen to "Crash" by Dave Matthews every time you have sex for the rest of your life?

The Darjeeling Limited is good

I just watched Darjeeling Limited and it turns out it's really good. Why didn’t anyone tell me?

"Anderson is still a maddeningly cool filmmaker. He's remote from his characters, which makes him remote from his movies. There's also a way in which he uses race as a novelty, suggesting an assertively white-kid view of the world."

Paging Dr. Obvious: Salon.com needs you in the operating room STAT. (What? Somebody please teach me how to use that expression.) Saying that about Wes Anderson is like complaining that Jane Austen’s novels are all set in drawing rooms or that gold is maddeningly expensive. That’s just how it is. The sun provides heat. This movie is about the white-kid view of the world. And who doesn’t want to spend two hours seeing the world through the eyes of a rich globe-trotting expat? It’s Henry James, if only Henry James didn’t take for boring eternity to read. It’s not an oppressive colonizing of normativity, it’s “normative fan fiction,” and it’s beautiful.

“I give this painting a bad review because Whistler doesn’t seem to love his mother.” – overheard at Salon.com’s great-great-great-great-grandfather (just a physical salon).

The Darjeeling Limited is a movie about literature, and it’s better than most short stories. The two best parts of this movie come close to being the two worst parts: one, the scene where Owen Wilson takes off his bandages and the brothers say that he’s still healing. First you’re like, “really??” Then you’re like “oh. The metaphoric and the literal have been caught in the world’s most charming feedback loop. Well played.” It’s Nick Adams making coffee, coffeemaker design courtesy Marc Jacobs. And a Rolling Stones B-side playing in the background that I’m going to download right now.

The other best part is the scene toward the end where the train goes by and you see all the individual compartments, like the frames of a film strip. Oh yeah, did I mention this is also a love letter to the magic of cinema? That's right. Fuck you, Salon.com.

Then, as a final twist, Angelica Huston as the mom says something about trying to communicate without any words, and you realize what this is: a short story written by the smartest kid in your senior-year fiction writing workshop, who you were jealous of at first, but by the end of college have come to admire not even begrudgingly, translated into cinema.


Wes Anderson: dude is for all time. I blogged it. No turning back.

Theater Review

In ancient Greece, the people of Athens would once a year gather for a grand festival of drama to honor the god Dionysus. The greatest writers in the land would compete in a game of moving the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens with tragedies and comedies that played upon and brought to light the commonalities of the Greek soul and vision of life. The theater was a secular temple of imagination, a shrine to the power of images and narrative, an experience of worship where art combined with the collective gaze and body of the audience brought the spirit of the god to life, if only for an evening.

Similarly, in the 21st Century the friends and families of people who want to be on TV really bad gather in local community centers and non-profit art spaces as few times as possible to be robbed of $15 dollars and several hours of their time. They sit in the darkness and their imaginations run wild as – right before their eyes – a mere “performance” becomes a “reality” of it’s own, and reality starts revealing itself to be, more and more, a mere performance better when you're watching TV. Thoughts swirl: “Why did we spend do much money for our son to go to film school?” “I’m glad I don’t run the risk of accidentally going to a theater major party anymore. God those sucked. Those people ruin everything,” “Why is it acceptable for adults to spend their time dicking around like this? I wish they were just doing this with their friends at their house and I could imagine they were drunk or had some excuse” “I bet those two are fucking. I'd fuck her.” Cell phones are checked, words of praise and encouragement are practiced silently in heads, how quickly what the last actor just said could lead to a possible end to the story is guesstimated. Dionysus lives again.

Theater: 1 ½ stars, and owes me $15.