First of all, it was a very strong field. By Oscar standards, all of the Best Picture nominees deserved to win. Of the five, my personal favorite was Good Night, and Good Luck, but I figured Brokeback Mountain would win because Lee was a shoe-in for Best Director and because it was a beautiful romantic movie, a la The English Patient, and because of all of the talk surrounding it.
I did not expect Crash to win. I thought it was a good movie, i enjoyed it, but I thought it was the weakest of the nominees. Hell, I didn’t even think it was the best film of 2005 in which Terrance Howard beats the crap out of Ludicris!
Or AT LEAST recognize that you understand the arguments in favor of scripting the many coincidences and respond to those arguments, and just stop parroting “the coincidences were too much.”
If you think that using coincidences and cariacatures is an ineffective tool for what the movie tried to do, well then, make your case.
But when I read that “the coincidences were too contrived,” all I hear is, “I missed the point.”
For those that though Crash was so ground breaking and original for 2005, read Roger Eberts review of Grand Canyon. Same themes throughout, same city, same multi-star cast.
Grand Canyon was an allright movie that didn’t receive any extra-special attention. I felt the same way about Crash.
What coincidences is everyone talking about. Other than Matt Dillon meeting up with Thandie Newton again, nothing was particularly coincidental: We were following, not random people, but people who were interacting with each other for various logical reasons.
Complaining about the coincidences shows that you basically have no conception of what fiction is.
Exaclty. I mean, didn’t the two opposing groups in *Munich *end up overnighting at the same “safe house” during the movie? Holy coincidence, Batman!
I really liked Crash, and was glad to see it win. The only other nominated movie I saw was Capote. I thought both were excellent, but Crash seemed more mulit-dimensional.
The Moderator Speaketh: Rodgers01, please go to Forum Rules and read them all, but especially note post #2. You may NOT quote a full article here. You provided a link, that’s sufficient. You can quote a line or two, as you would in a school paper. But it is a violation of copyright to quote an entire article.
On another issue, I’m not going to change the thread title, since that’s “news” rather than a spoiler, in my opinion. It’s going to be front page on every newspaper in the country and half the newspapers around the world. I don’t think “news” fits the same definition of spoiler. Just mentioning it because someone commented earlier.
Come on, person A interacts with B, who interacts with C, who then interacts with A. That kinds of stuff. It just didn’t feel natural to me, and it didn’t feel contrived enough for me to just accept it, like with Magnolia. Neither one thing nor the other. I might have believed it if it had happened in Manhattan, but not in LA.
Of course, since I am gay, and grew up on a cattle ranch in Idaho, I was drawn in by how accurate the portrayals were in Brokeback. Ennis could have been any number of ranch-hands that worked for us, and the details were just right. The LA in Crash didn’t feel right to me.
Well, there was the thing with the blanks in the gun.
The whole run-in Ryan Phillippe had with the guy he shot was overly set-up.
They’re not so much “coincidences” as “contrivances”. I’ll readily admit that the movie is filled with them. The problem with complaining about them is like complaining that “people get killed” whenever Angela Lansbury shows up in “Murder, She Wrote”.
The movie was overly contrived so that it could demonstrate (how to phrase it). . .the liquidity of morality or something.
Now, IMO, that’s the jumping off point for the discussion of the movie. Were they effective with their contrived screenplay? Was there enough of a narrative to keep your interest or was the movie nothing more than sequence of vignettes? Was the acting and directing enough to hold it together? Was there actually a good point made with that technique, or was it overly simplistic and didactic?
If you can’t get past the point of “there’s too many silly coincidences”, you’re looking at the movie way too literally.
Personally, I think the movie walked a very fine line but managed to do it artfully. It was a skillful balancing act of a movie, and wihout even considering the themes, that’s one reason why it’s a great film.
The difference, of course, being that the two teams ending up in the safehouse was no coincidence and was, in fact, revenge on the part of their intel provider for the team working with the Isreali government on the previous job - something that Avner had specifically denied he would do.
As I’ve said before, I’m a big “Crash” hater. I didn’t think it deserved being nominated as Best Picture, much less winning it. The coincidences I didn’t have a problem with. The caricatures - that’s where my gripe lies. I just think that if you’re going to tackle a subject that is prevalent like racism, the least you can do is project the subtleties of it in a way that is realistic enough to compare back to real life. The racisim in this movie was so over the top that it felt more like a cartoon or afterschool special than a portrayal of flesh and blood human beings. Yes, race is an issue, but it’s not the only issue. Even if it’s the only issue being addressed in the film, I think it’s irresponsible filmmaking to make the characters one-dimensional just to focus on it as it then reduces real people to cardboard cut-outs representing issues.
I went and saw “Crash” last June after hearing some buzz about it being thought-provoking and possibly disturbing. I think I’d seen one trailer for it. When we walked out of the theater at the end, my roommate asked me “What the hell kind of movie did you drag me to?” and I was just as much in shock over how bad I thought it was. I was blown away when I saw that the majority of the reviews were positive.
My theory is that the theater I went to was accidentally sent a b-roll footage version that left in the worst parts of the script and cut out the brilliant ones that everyone else seems to be watching.
I know one of my gripes with Crash is that I live in L.A. and it bears no resemblance to the city. It gives the impression, or at least it seems to me, that LA. is full of racially insensitive people. And undoubtedly they are. But the universe of characters in the movie is both too small and too big. It is no where near representative of the prevailing attitudes in L.A., ergo too small. But by portraying so many different races and so many different lifestyles it is in some ways trying to be all-encompasing of L.A. (and I suppose of society as a whole), ergo too big. So it fails, in my mind. I think the movie could have been so much more effective if they had consentrated on one of the storylines.
The movie was too unrealistic for me to use it as a springboard to discuss real life issues surrounding racism. I would have preferred a story that more closely matched my own experiences of how people act, and the situations they encounter.
The lack of realism was more suggestive of bad writing than a clever story telling tool.
Ben Stiller almost never makes me laugh, but he did on Sunday. “Envelope… open yourself!” Steve Carrell and Will Ferrell were also funny (and I don’t like Ferrell either).
I’m in the minority who felt Shakespeare in Love deserved Best Picture in 1998, so I can deal with being in a Crash-liking minority too if that’s how it shakes out.
Ack. That whole post probably should have been in the Oscar rehash thread. I could follow Crash’s plot, but can’t remember what thread I’m reading. GREAT…
When you say “The movie was too unrealistic for me to use it as a springboard to discuss real life issues surrounding racism,” you’re ascribing an intent to the filmmaker that may or may not have been there and then judging him on the effectiveness of delivering that.
I enjoyed “Harry Potter” last year, but it didn’t get me to discuss real life issues surrounding racism either.
That’s just being provocative.
It won best original screenplay for a reason. That was a complex, artful screenplay with a great sense of dialogue. The quality of that screenplay is the first thing that jumps out at a viewer. The accolades for the writing were deservedly prominent in many reviews of Crash. Do a quick scan of Rotten Tomatoes. . .
“Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it’s easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, though it is not for the fainthearted.” -Dave Denby from the New Yorker
“Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.” – Ebert.
:smack: Oops! Sorry…I’m echoing 90%, not 100, since I have not yet rented Crash. But I have this feeling that I’m not going to like it nearly as much as I liked BBM and several others.
As I live in Australia, and we don’t get to see it until 6 hours after the US, it would be nice to go into it blind. This doesn’t seem to occur to utterly any form of news media, though, so I don’t think I’ve ever watched it not knowing at least one or two winners ahead of time.
Yes I am, or I wouldn’t have apologized. And I apologized for sounding cranky, not for my opinion. Nevertheless, I’m fully aware that my post is tangential, so I’ll bow out and let it go.