GirlsAloudFan
Blue Crack Addict
You went to the theater for all six Harry Potter movies and fell asleep during all six of them?
I'll take moderately realistic
oh...and anyone who said Crash needs a taste implant IMO.
oh...and anyone who said Crash needs a taste implant IMO.
You went to the theater for all six Harry Potter movies and fell asleep during all six of them?
Zoolander is hilarious.
I'd probably also leave the word 'pretentious' out of the discussion when defending Crash
“Crash,” meanwhile, makes no room for such things as character development. It is too concerned with talking down to us, taking the audience for morons, assuming that the only way to deliver a Very Important Message is to deliver characters that are not anything more than vague stereotypes. I do not even recall the characters’ names. All I remember is that we met Bigot Cop, Nice Cop, Obnoxious White Lady, Uptight Politician, White-Hating Thug, Non-White-Hating Thug, and so on, and so on. These characters are so embarrassingly generic and superficial that you might wonder why Haggis just didn’t cast the Village People instead. Ah, look, it’s Leather Biker Guy, and he’s mad at Gay Sailor. With Matt Dillon as the Indian Chief!
***
And so we get a collection of underdeveloped characters who talk in ways very few people actually do - the gimmick being that these characters have no filters, and so they immediately say what an ordinary person, hiding his prejudices under the guise of decency and manners, would only be thinking.
***
While Terrence Howard, Larenz Tate, and rapper Ludacris do the best they can with such limp material, the rest of the performers are shrill and unwatchable. Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Ryan Phillippe, and Brendan Fraser look like they’re reading from cue cards, while the consistently horrible Thandie Newton’s wretched overacting threatens to take the film into a level of camp that would be hilarious if it weren’t so dismal.
***
And with only blank templates instead of interesting characters filling up the plot, there’s no real reason to become involved with this ever-growing human tangle.
***
Haggis struggles to invent new ways of manipulating the audience, and in one instance, he backs himself into an impossible corner. You see, in one scene, we’re led to believe that a character has been shot. We even get the slo-mo and the sweeping music and the angst and grief and et cetera. And we’re told - no, commanded - to feel the loss. But then he reveals that there was a misfire, the character is in fact unharmed. Meaning, of course, that Haggis wants to have a Big Dramatic Moment without having to follow through in dealing with the emotional weight of it.
***
There is also the matter of yet another character suddenly getting injured, for no real reason than to have that character get injured, surprising the viewer and getting a quick gasp moment. This scene and the barely-there follow-up it (barely) requires have nothing to do with the plot, nothing to do with the development of anything, and yet it is here. Why? So Haggis can pull one more shock from the audience. It’s cheap and pointless and quite ridiculous. (As is the entire out-of-nowhere subplot about the Asian slaves, and the goofy showdown between a beleaguered Terrence Howard and the LAPD - which, of course, ends in a way no actual showdown would ever end, ever, ever, ever - and… well, you get the idea.)
***
Backtracking to that final shot of the fender bender. This last jokey bit happens solely because we are told in a lengthy (and very, very, very serious) opening monologue that because modern living keeps us apart, “we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” This is that Very Important Message of the movie, that lack of contact has developed withdrawn personalities that feed off of prejudices. It is the kind of thing that sounds all serious and profound on the surface, but there’s absolutely nothing underneath. It’s a sentiment that’s as shallow as the film that features it. For all its posturing and scheming and false fronts, “Crash” is unbearably empty.
I'm not defending Crash, it's in no need of any defense. Only a minority here and in real life hated it. The majority of moviegoers scored it an A, followed closely by B for a total of about 76% approval, with only something like 19-24% of the ratings falling at or below C. It won awards in pretty much every industry show/demographic on earth, and deservedly so. It's understandable and expected that some were made uncomfortable by it, it's uncomfortable subject matter.
However, despite not liking Crash, I'd have a hard time calling it the worst film I've ever seen, that seems like a stretch to me.
Most of these points are funny to hear, but are rather nitpicky.
Well the first time they don't even know the shields are there. The second time he's trying to catch up to Qui-Gon, and that distance isn't very far. If that power makes him rocket forward, it's too close to wildly plow forward, especially when Qui-Gon isn't expecting it or looking behind him. When they use the force run earlier in the film, they do it together as a team.
Crash sucked.
I own the extended boxed set of LOTR and watch the whole series once a year, all the way through, while drinking beer from a tin tankard.
I can't hate any movie that pushes Sandra Bullock down a flight of stairs by the power of her character's racism. That's retardedly awesome.
It's understandable and expected that some were made uncomfortable by it, it's uncomfortable subject matter.
Hell, I don't think anyone's listed any Lynch film yet. That's got to be some sort of record.