Crash into me
Mar. 11th, 2006 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhIn a rather last minute plan, I went out to chez ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ali_wildgoose et emsariel and saw Crash last night.
One of the things I'd read about Crash and the win was that it was about race in LA so people voted what they knew. I can see that; the movie fairly drips LA and I'm not sure it's entirely navigable without at least a working knowledge of race relations in our second-largest city. In that way it contrasts starkly with Do the Right Thing which is all about how New Yorkers live on top of each other even though they don't want to. Our interconnectedness here is immediately apparent; clearly Haggis & co. wanted to show that LA is no different. Which as fine as far as it went. Crash is a very ambitious movie and for the most part it succeeds.
But. While the overlapping storylines were handled with more care and craft than in Syriana there were still far too many people running around for me to really care about any of them. Less stereotypes than archetypes, more effort was made to ensure that each character was both noble and venal than to ensure that they were actual human beings. The dialog was too pat, the contrasts too stark and almost cutesy. The set piece events and extreme conservation of characters (I know I said there were too many people, but there were also, like, no extras) felt forced as did the constant sucker punching to "fool" our expectations. No one dies in the car explosion! The cops don't kill Terence Howard! The little girl doesn't die! The nice white cop kills the kid! I mean, enough already. I get it. We're all guilty. Ali said that someone she knew had said that this was meant to show you how much you, too, move with racial stereotypes but that really isn't what was happening. Rather, it was surprising because the plot set you up for one outcome, then showed a different one.
This constant sense of pulling back from the brink of disaster gets emotionally tiring about two-thirds of the way through the film such that Ryan Phillippe shooting Don Cheadle's brother was anti-climax rather than climax. (Also? You put all that shit in the universe and it's going to come back to you. That wasn't irony; it was karma.) The scene of everyone staring into space while "In the Deep" played and the snow started to fall reminded me very strongly of Magnolia (a better film). Nearly every conversation between Ludacris and his accomplice was straight out of Quentin Tarantino, including the clever twist at the start.
Still, I can't get away from what the film was trying to do, at which it was relatively successful. I know some were annoyed at it being self-congratulatory but when was the last time we had a movie that truly dealt with race that wasn't made by Spike Lee? I'm not sure, given the current conversation about race (which is really a non-conversation, an uneasy detente where everyone tells themselves that the movement is over) that a film about race could be anything other than this. Preachy it certainly was not and in fact it was very funny in many parts, that humor of recognition I suppose. I wouldn't go so far as to call it brave and I'm not entirely sure, given the sketched-in characters, that it will provoke all that much conversation, but I'm beginning to think that the point is to not shut up about race, to keep talking about it even when your entire flist wishes you would knock it off already; to risk being the uppity black girl in order to keep it from sliding off the radar.
Do I think it deserved Best Picture? Eh. It certainly did NOT deserve Best Original Screenplay; the dialog was stilted, the plot a little too clever, the resolutions pat even if open ended. What worries me about the current dialog—and I am in debt tokitsune13's eminently sensible take on it—is that we seem to be pitting a film about race and a film about sexuality against each other, in that way that the dominant culture loves to take the minorities and set them up to fight like bulldogs in a ring. It isn't a zero-sum game, first; and second, if you're looking for validation from a bunch of sexagenarian white people living in Brentwood, you've got bigger problems than I can solve here. In the end, the Oscars are no less obscurely political than any fandom awards you can think of. That Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture doesn't change the impact of the film itself, which reverberated across the culture long before March 5, 2006.
ali_wildgoose et emsariel and saw Crash last night.One of the things I'd read about Crash and the win was that it was about race in LA so people voted what they knew. I can see that; the movie fairly drips LA and I'm not sure it's entirely navigable without at least a working knowledge of race relations in our second-largest city. In that way it contrasts starkly with Do the Right Thing which is all about how New Yorkers live on top of each other even though they don't want to. Our interconnectedness here is immediately apparent; clearly Haggis & co. wanted to show that LA is no different. Which as fine as far as it went. Crash is a very ambitious movie and for the most part it succeeds.
But. While the overlapping storylines were handled with more care and craft than in Syriana there were still far too many people running around for me to really care about any of them. Less stereotypes than archetypes, more effort was made to ensure that each character was both noble and venal than to ensure that they were actual human beings. The dialog was too pat, the contrasts too stark and almost cutesy. The set piece events and extreme conservation of characters (I know I said there were too many people, but there were also, like, no extras) felt forced as did the constant sucker punching to "fool" our expectations. No one dies in the car explosion! The cops don't kill Terence Howard! The little girl doesn't die! The nice white cop kills the kid! I mean, enough already. I get it. We're all guilty. Ali said that someone she knew had said that this was meant to show you how much you, too, move with racial stereotypes but that really isn't what was happening. Rather, it was surprising because the plot set you up for one outcome, then showed a different one.
This constant sense of pulling back from the brink of disaster gets emotionally tiring about two-thirds of the way through the film such that Ryan Phillippe shooting Don Cheadle's brother was anti-climax rather than climax. (Also? You put all that shit in the universe and it's going to come back to you. That wasn't irony; it was karma.) The scene of everyone staring into space while "In the Deep" played and the snow started to fall reminded me very strongly of Magnolia (a better film). Nearly every conversation between Ludacris and his accomplice was straight out of Quentin Tarantino, including the clever twist at the start.
Still, I can't get away from what the film was trying to do, at which it was relatively successful. I know some were annoyed at it being self-congratulatory but when was the last time we had a movie that truly dealt with race that wasn't made by Spike Lee? I'm not sure, given the current conversation about race (which is really a non-conversation, an uneasy detente where everyone tells themselves that the movement is over) that a film about race could be anything other than this. Preachy it certainly was not and in fact it was very funny in many parts, that humor of recognition I suppose. I wouldn't go so far as to call it brave and I'm not entirely sure, given the sketched-in characters, that it will provoke all that much conversation, but I'm beginning to think that the point is to not shut up about race, to keep talking about it even when your entire flist wishes you would knock it off already; to risk being the uppity black girl in order to keep it from sliding off the radar.
Do I think it deserved Best Picture? Eh. It certainly did NOT deserve Best Original Screenplay; the dialog was stilted, the plot a little too clever, the resolutions pat even if open ended. What worries me about the current dialog—and I am in debt to
kitsune13's eminently sensible take on it—is that we seem to be pitting a film about race and a film about sexuality against each other, in that way that the dominant culture loves to take the minorities and set them up to fight like bulldogs in a ring. It isn't a zero-sum game, first; and second, if you're looking for validation from a bunch of sexagenarian white people living in Brentwood, you've got bigger problems than I can solve here. In the end, the Oscars are no less obscurely political than any fandom awards you can think of. That Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture doesn't change the impact of the film itself, which reverberated across the culture long before March 5, 2006.
