Movielog: Crash

[yesthattom]

I saw “Crash” last weekend. Wow. Very powerful. Though, it sort of gave me the impression that things are a lot more tense in that part of the country than in other places.

Comments

[dieppe.livejournal.com]

"Crash" was an excellent movie... but I'm not sure it really describes real life over here, ya know? Any more than, I dunno, "Midnight Cowboy" describes NYC life. :)

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I really didn't like it. I felt like it had "I was written by a straight white upper-middle-class MALE MALE MALE!" stamped all over it. I felt like "Inside Man" (which I saw the same week) was so much more honest about race.

[nulldevice.livejournal.com]

The MALE MALE MALE thing wasn't apparent to me (although the white upper-middle-class thing certainly was), but I found most of the film to be incredibly heavy-handed. It didn't delve into the subtleties of race relations beyond "hey look, things are bad but we're all related! Oooh deep!" That irritated me.

[ex-serenejo.livejournal.com]

Oh, I loathed that movie. Some good acting performances, but the rest was a bludgeoning with Race 101.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

101 to you, but over the head of the Newark high schools students I saw it with last year.

[vasilatos]

Hey, talk about that some more. I'm very interested.

[geeksdoitbetter.livejournal.com]

exactly

i loved this movie - all the time aware that i wasn't it's target audience

[seasings.livejournal.com]

I can't count how many times my students referred to that movie! Apparently it moves them -- the white, middle-class ones anyway. I found it entertaining but thought it had the subtlety of a club to the skull, or an after-school special.

[tim1965.livejournal.com]

My reaction was quite the opposite. I found it pretentious. "We're all the same under the skin." Wow, what insight! The liberal cop blowing away the black man at the end: Boy, didn't see that coming about two hours earlier.

Matt Dillon is pretty good in the film, and perhaps the first 20 minutes are very well acted and scripted. But from then on, I thought it was junk.