movies!

[fox]

crash -- have you all seen it?  (i lose track, all the way over here, of when things come out on your side, when there's not a simultaneous worldwide release.)

if you haven't, and you still can, go now.  this thing's (eta: directed, by the way, by paul haggis, whom many of us have heard of, haven't we [g]) going to win awards, man.  i could even go out on a limb and say Ludacris gets nominated for best supporting actor.

Comments

Crash

[wholenother.livejournal.com]

Wow, yeah . . .

Saw it in May just after finishing my exams. What a way to celebrate!

Re: Crash

[esti626.livejournal.com]

I actually saw Crash twice and LOVED it. My reaction to the movie was very visceral, and there were several intense scenes.

BUT..

Consistency bothered me, both stylistically (why don't we get subtitles throughout the whole movie?) and within characters (how can an LA cop not know how to talk to a black woman whom he is asking for help; how can a man who is successful enough and speaks English well enough to establish a business not know the basic words "door" and "broken" -- and a man paranoid enough to buy a gun would probably not leave his shop with a broken door)

But that's just my thoughts.

Re: Crash

[wholenother.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they certainly could have made better use of clipboards. I think, though, that the guy with the broken door didn't want to understand: you know how hard those Mexicans can be to understand. I see that all the time. I don't remember the cop who didn't know how to talk to the woman, but the obnoxiousness of the assumption that we should understand some people and not others (hence the selective subtitles) is just, yeah, a bit beyond questionable for a movie that's supposed to be critical.

Re: Crash

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

see, what i got was, Officer Matt Dillon certainly could have talked to the HMO lady correctly if he'd wanted to; i thought he was actually thinking he could shame her into realizing she owed him (or his father) what he was asking for. he must know how to defer to people, but it simply doesn't occur to him that she's someone for him to defer to in any way at all.

as for the subtitles, we got subtitles when two conditions were met: (a) the persian characters were speaking farsi, and (b) characters were present who didn't understand farsi. other times, the persian characters spoke english to each other (which normally bothers me, when non-english-speaking characters speak english -- with accents! -- when they're alone, but as the daughter apparently grew up in california and is a native english speaker, it's a different thing and i'm okay with it), or, when they occasionally spoke farsi, the fact that they were speaking A Language Other Than English wasn't a plot point.

oh, but wait, was there anyone else in the hospital room at the end when the chinese guy (the people in the van weren't chinese, but the older couple was, right?) was telling his wife to get the check out of his wallet? that's the only other use of subtitles i can think of at the moment ...

and i agree with wholenother about the broken door thing. :-)

Re: Crash

[esti626.livejournal.com]

See, I would agree with you about Officer Dillon except for the fact that his boss is black. Even if he thought, at first, that he could shame Ms. Healthcare into helping his father at first, someone a lot dumber than Officer Dillon is purported to be would figure out it wasn't working at the first exaggerated eyeroll.

And, notwithstanding Mr. Farsi's desire not to understand Mr. Mexican, he would still be paranoid enough to stay in his shop all night if he's paranoid enough to buy a gun. At the very least, he understood that Mr. Mexican didn't fix his lock.

And my beef with the subtitles is that, at first, they use subtitles but then they switch to the "I'm going to say something in Language A and then repeat it in Language B so that our viewers know what I'm saying". Crash was aimed at a pretty adult audience, and I think we could have dealt with a few (more) scenes reading subtitles.

Of course, I could just be being nit-picky....