CRASH

Started by Finn, April 20, 2005, 05:02:29 PM

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Pubrick

Quote from: pyramid machine on February 23, 2006, 09:16:37 PM
popular films that hate white people:
popular films that hate black ppl:

every fucking movie before 1950whatever and the majority from the next 50 years.

do you understand what i'm saying here? i hope it's not too armchair "psychiatry" or "logicy" or "truey".
under the paving stones.

grand theft sparrow

Quote from: pyramid machine on February 23, 2006, 09:16:37 PM
but we have seen hundreds of films where white people=bad  and the african-americans=good.....crash, flipped that around..its fucked w/ the typical race relations bewtween whites and minorites...that is an original idea that i applaud haggis for.

That D.W. Griffith sure was ahead of his time, boy I'll tell ya.   :yabbse-undecided:

pete

wow, still up to the same old tricks.
3 steps of Neon:
1) make an ignorant statement
2) skips other people's replies
3) repeat step 1

I'm trying to do this for you because I like you and because I wanna eat your sandwiches one day, but you're just making it really hard for the rest of us here by shutting your ears and going "lalalalalalanotlisteninglalalallala" everytime facts have been presented to you.  You can't even counter argue effectively, you can only repeat yourself until the next thread.

Quote from: pyramid machine on February 24, 2006, 01:43:52 AM

:violin:

what is up w/ you?????  

all i'm saying is that this film was different..than the typical race relation genre in the fact that haggis made a statement saying minorites can suck just as much as white people do......you didnt need to go all armchair psychiatry on me...this film doesnt even deserve this much thought devoted to it...

oooh child..things are gonna get easier.....oooooooh, child things are gonna get brighter

 
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

Ravi

Neon's response calls for an appearance from Tony Kaye:


NEON MERCURY

Quote from: matt35mm on February 24, 2006, 02:34:37 AM
Quote from: pyramid machine on February 24, 2006, 01:43:52 AM
all i'm saying is that this film was different..than the typical race relation genre in the fact that haggis made a statement saying minorites can suck just as much as white people do
That's a pretty stupid statement for a film to make, though.  Especially when done so obviously.  "Minorities can suck just as much as white people do" could almost be a line from Crash.

man, you guys take shit waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay to seriously...i am not trying to make this into a white-mans-burden-conservative-diatribe....but all i am saying is that THIS FUCKING FILM WAS DIFFERENT WHEN HANDELING RACE RELATIONS THEN WHAT WE NORMALLY SEE..um, thats all...

and as for as my lin eabout "monirities can suck as much as white people do".ahahahahaha, i was being  tongue and cheek....i was just [knowing my poor grammar skills] summing up my point quickly......i was hoping that soem of you guys woudl get  a laugh out of it......but...we are all anal internet film dorks.....so, i dug my own grave.......

Quote from: Pubrick on February 24, 2006, 08:53:32 AM
Quote from: pyramid machine on February 23, 2006, 09:16:37 PM
popular films that hate white people:
popular films that hate black ppl:

every fucking movie before 1950whatever and the majority from the next 50 years.

do you understand what i'm saying here? i hope it's not too armchair "psychiatry" or "logicy" or "truey".

you just proved my point......

Quote from: coxsparrow on February 24, 2006, 09:48:41 AM
Quote from: pyramid machine on February 23, 2006, 09:16:37 PM
but we have seen hundreds of films where white people=bad  and the african-americans=good.....crash, flipped that around..its fucked w/ the typical race relations bewtween whites and minorites...that is an original idea that i applaud haggis for.

That D.W. Griffith sure was ahead of his time, boy I'll tell ya.   :yabbse-undecided:


:yabbse-huh:

Quote from: pete on February 24, 2006, 10:36:44 AM
wow, still up to the same old tricks.
3 steps of Neon:
1) make an ignorant statement
2) skips other people's replies
3) repeat step 1

I'm trying to do this for you because I like you and because I wanna eat your sandwiches one day, but you're just making it really hard for the rest of us here by shutting your ears and going "lalalalalalanotlisteninglalalallala" everytime facts have been presented to you. You can't even counter argue effectively, you can only repeat yourself until the next thread.

Quote from: pyramid machine on February 24, 2006, 01:43:52 AM

:violin:

what is up w/ you????? 

all i'm saying is that this film was different..than the typical race relation genre in the fact that haggis made a statement saying minorites can suck just as much as white people do......you didnt need to go all armchair psychiatry on me...this film doesnt even deserve this much thought devoted to it...

oooh child..things are gonna get easier.....oooooooh, child things are gonna get brighter

 

you guys again are the ones  not listening and taking shit too seriously/literally.....

here..lets try is like this:

NEON:
"HAVE THERE BEEN MANY FILMS THAT HANDLE RACE RELATIONS...........?"
XIXAX:
"WHY YES, THERE ARE ALOT OF THESE FILMS"
NEON:
"WOLD YOU SAY THAT IN MOST IF NOT ALL OF THOSE FILMS DEALs WITH THE WHITE PERSON BEING A VILLIANOUS CHARACTER..WHILE THE MINORITIES ARE THE HEROES?"
XIXAX:
"YES, THERE'S SLAVERY FILMS, SEGREGATION FILMS, SKIN HEAD FILMS, [so many more types too]ETC., AND NEON, YOU ARE RIGHT..IN MOST OF THOSE FILMS WHITES ARE ANTAGONISTS WHILE MINORITIES ARE PROTAGONISTS..."
NEON:
"KNOWING THIS..DO YOU THINK THAT CRASH WAS DIFFERENT IN THAT MINORITY CHARACTERS WERE ANTAGONISTS OR VILLIANOUS CHARACTERS INSTEAD OF THE TYPICAL WHITE ANTAGONIST CHARACTER IN RACE RELATION FILMS...?"
XIXAX:
___________________________ [fill in the blank]



neon 1
xixax 0

Pubrick

Quote from: pyramid machine on February 24, 2006, 11:46:46 AM
Quote from: Pubrick on February 24, 2006, 08:53:32 AM
Quote from: pyramid machine on February 23, 2006, 09:16:37 PM
popular films that hate white people:
popular films that hate black ppl:

every fucking movie before 1950whatever and the majority from the next 50 years.

do you understand what i'm saying here? i hope it's not too armchair "psychiatry" or "logicy" or "truey".

you just proved my point......
no, neon, i didn't. pay attention: blacks have historically been negatively presented in white popular culture, to put it lightly. by historically i mean since the beginning of media until say the last 40 years. there is no such thing as a "race relation genre", that's the joke pete was making. before the civil rights movement in america there was no question that whites were superior to black people.. IN POPULAR CULTURE we're talking about here. do you disagree with any of this so far? perhaps you didn't know this.

ok. so what i was implying was that what you call the typical "race relation genre" is actually the EXCEPTION, it's RADICAL. here's why: before a certain period in the 20th century it was taken for granted in the american media that blacks were inferior. yes i'm repeating myself, but do you understand what i'm saying? i don't think you're incapable of it. it wasn't a matter of one being the protagonist or the other being the bad guy, it was just a matter of fact that blacks were dumb and wrong and the bad guys and all that. they were not seen any other way in films.

the movies you see today about the KKK and your family are actually revisionist pics. this means that they show that world through the politically correct lens of today. back then it was normal to hate black people simply because everyone "knew" they were the bad guys, and that the white people were the good guys. this is the stuff your community never wanted you to know. (continued below)


Quote from: pyramid machine on February 24, 2006, 11:46:46 AM
Quote from: coxsparrow on February 24, 2006, 09:48:41 AM
Quote from: pyramid machine on February 23, 2006, 09:16:37 PM
but we have seen hundreds of films where white people=bad  and the african-americans=good.....crash, flipped that around..its fucked w/ the typical race relations bewtween whites and minorites...that is an original idea that i applaud haggis for.

That D.W. Griffith sure was ahead of his time, boy I'll tell ya.   :yabbse-undecided:


:yabbse-huh:
the joke coxsparrow was making is in reference to director DW Griffith, who made Birth of a Nation. this movie was made very early in the 20th century and presents the KKK as sort of liberators of the nation, fighting the good fight as it were by hanging black ppl. it reflected the mentality of the time. DW didn't even think he was making a "race relations genre" type movie, and yet he showed white ppl to be the heroes against the blacks who were devils. 90 years before paul haggis. he was shunned soon after and the film is now viewed as having an extremely ignorant/naive view of race relations and it's depiction of negros. is he a hero to you cos he "broke the rules"?

if you are answering yes to the last question then you havn't understood what i've said. you are thinking of the world in the way fox news wants you to think.. that the "liberal media" has taken over, when in fact they have only just started to get their voice heard. for the longest time, before you were born, it was the racists who controlled the media.. but of course they weren't called racist, that's just the way everyone thought.

you think haggis is doing something new when he is actually doing the most retarded thing possible, he's appealing to people like you who think the world of the last 30 years is all that ever existed, and that showing a black person do bad is RADICAL just because no one remembers the hundreds of years when the image of evil black men was taken for granted.
under the paving stones.

RegularKarate

I applaud your effort, P, but I don't think he's going to get it.

I don't think Neon even really watched a lot of the movies he listed as being about "the white man is the devil and the minorities are heroes" because I don't think he realized that he's wrong about a good deal of them.

I also don't think he's right about Crash... I think Crash tries to do what Do The Right Thing did well.  It just fails miserably.

jigzaw

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on February 10, 2006, 11:37:23 PM
It's true, this is a white guilt movie, and not a particularly valuable one... if only because it doubles back continuously by removing some characters' dignity and redeeming others, especially the Matt Dillon and Sandra Bullock characters. And it's a little confusing that it decided to perpetuate most of the stereotypes it deals with... not especially helpful.

This movie strikes me as a pretty good litmus test, and the 77% at Rotten Tomatoes is a bit frightening.

I also didn't appreciate its cheap duplication of Magnolia (it even had a Wise Up moment and a climactic precipitation), or the horrifyingly bad music, or the fake slow motion.

It's refreshing to hear that Paul Haggis knows this movie is trash. I wonder if he's realized the same about Million Dollar Baby.

That song in the "look, unusual stuff falling from the sky, time for an epiphany!" scene even had a similar syncopated rhythm as "Wise Up" and an Aimee Mann sound-alike singing it. 

The one good thing I can say about this movie is that I was never bored during it.  It played like cheap trashy t.v. where you do want to know what happens next, but feel like a chump for enjoying it.  The writing was so bad.  The dialogue was laughable from beginning to end.  There was no subtext whatsoever.  It was like listening to people reading rejected letters to the editor at a newspaper.

Ok, about it's reception.  I thought maybe Ebert would convince me that there was some redeeming value, considering he says it's the best film of the year, but I'm coming away from his review just baffled..  Why does he love this film so much?  It is the worst type of dramatic writing I've seen in a mainstream film lately.  It deals with race relations at the level of a junior-high essay assignment.  I know, I know, he's married to a black woman, but he's not the only person in Hollywood who loves this film.  Jon Stewart on Howard Stern yesterday said he really thinks it'll win Best Picture.  If it does, I'll be laughing my ass off. 

modage

yeah, it seems like if any film will upset Brokeback it will be this one.  if brokeback is too gay for older voters this will safely assure people they do care about young people issues like race.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

polkablues

Quote from: modage on February 24, 2006, 06:10:19 PM
yeah, it seems like if any film will upset Brokeback it will be this one.  if brokeback is too gay for older voters this will safely assure people they do care about young people issues like race.

I have a feeling you're right.  "I, too, feel guilty about believing that every black man I see is going to steal my car, even though he probably is," they will say, and their vote will shine forth, a beacon of hope... hope that someday, God willing, Hollywood will allow films in which white people are the good guys.

My fingers are crossed.
My house, my rules, my coffee

NEON MERCURY

:bravo:....good post!!  one thing that i am not is a douche..you as i've alway said are a bright person and expresss yourself brilliantly.....i will try to work w/you by paragraph...



Quoteno, neon, i didn't. pay attention: blacks have historically been negatively presented in white popular culture, to put it lightly. by historically i mean since the beginning of media until say the last 40 years. there is no such thing as a "race relation genre", that's the joke pete was making. before the civil rights movement in america there was no question that whites were superior to black people.. IN POPULAR CULTURE we're talking about here. do you disagree with any of this so far? perhaps you didn't know this.

i agree w/ what you are saying here about "blacks have historically been negatively presented in white popular culture, to put it lightly. by historically i mean since the beginning of media until say the last 40 years"...but i am basing my arguement on films of my generation...70's-present......the age you are talking about was a different time...you have a good solid but it snot relevant to my arguement...i do however dissagree w/you saying that there is no race relation genre...in my opinion alot of those films that i mentioned as examples do have a common theme of race relations in their subject matter.....american history x, in the heat of the night, seperate but equal, men of honor, glory, a tiem to kill, etc....all of those films have a theme of racial relations.....can you argue aginst that?

Quoteok. so what i was implying was that what you call the typical "race relation genre" is actually the EXCEPTION, it's RADICAL. here's why: before a certain period in the 20th century it was taken for granted in the american media that blacks were inferior. yes i'm repeating myself, but do you understand what i'm saying? i don't think you're incapable of it. it wasn't a matter of one being the protagonist or the other being the bad guy, it was just a matter of fact that blacks were dumb and wrong and the bad guys and all that. they were not seen any other way in films.

i understand what you are saying, again...but everything in bold is true but has nothing to do w/ my arguement for crash. again, i am talkign about my generation....thats how i can compare to what i've seen vs. crash...


Quotethe movies you see today about the KKK and your family are actually revisionist pics. this means that they show that world through the politically correct lens of today. back then it was normal to hate black people simply because everyone "knew" they were the bad guys, and that the white people were the good guys. this is the stuff your community never wanted you to know. (continued below)

:yabbse-huh:


Quotethe joke coxsparrow was making is in reference to director DW Griffith, who made Birth of a Nation. this movie was made very early in the 20th century and presents the KKK as sort of liberators of the nation, fighting the good fight as it were by hanging black ppl. it reflected the mentality of the time. DW didn't even think he was making a "race relations genre" type movie, and yet he showed white ppl to be the heroes against the blacks who were devils. 90 years before paul haggis. he was shunned soon after and the film is now viewed as having an extremely ignorant/naive view of race relations and it's depiction of negros. is he a hero to you cos he "broke the rules"?

again, different times...and of course he is not a hero to me..what i bolded is disturbing and fucked up...its not my thing..i guess birth of  a nation copuld eb considered a "race relation" film but its so irrelevant to my genration of films...anyone who would enjoy watching birth of a nation is a douche bag.....its seems like propaganda..

 
Quoteif you are answering yes to the last question then you havn't understood what i've said. you are thinking of the world in the way fox news wants you to think.. that the "liberal media" has taken over, when in fact they have only just started to get their voice heard. for the longest time, before you were born, it was the racists who controlled the media.. but of course they weren't called racist, that's just the way everyone thought.

explain how this relevant to my arguement for crash....

Quoteyou think haggis is doing something new when he is actually doing the most retarded thing possible, he's appealing to people like you who think the world of the last 30 years is all that ever existed, and that showing a black person do bad is RADICAL just because no one remembers the hundreds of years when the image of evil black men was taken for granted.

hmm, ...in the 30 years of race relation cinema that i've seen -he IS doing something different....

Ravi

It just keeps coming.  Did Ebert forget about Do the Right Thing?  His essay on it is even on the Criterion DVD.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060219/COMMENTARY/60217001

'Crash' owes a debt to Dickens
BY ROGER EBERT Film Critic / February 19, 2006

I was reading Charles Dickens the other day, and realized in a different way why "Crash" is such a good and useful film. Dickens is the best storyteller in the history of the novel, and although I've read him pretty much from end to end, I got into an argument about the character in "The Squid and the Whale" who tells his son that A Tale of Two Cities is "minor Dickens." I thought this opinion was correct, but I re-read it for the first time since I was a child, and found that it was not minor Dickens after all.

Dickens wrote melodramas and romances, comedies and tragedies, usually within the same story. He was a social reformer, filled with an anger that had its beginnings when his father was thrown into a debtors' prison and young Charles was yanked from a happy family into a precarious existence as a child laborer in a blacking factory.

His targets were corrupt educators, exploiters of children and defenseless women, windbags, cheats, hypocrites and toadies. He painted them with broad strokes, and assigned them names to reflect their weaknesses: Mr. Gradgrind was a cruel schoolmaster, Scrooge the archetypal tightwad, the Cheeryble Brothers saw the good side of everything, Miss Havisham got a sham instead of a husband, and I don't know why Uriah Heep's name makes me think of bodily wastes, but it does.

These characters had flaws that defined their personalities. They occupied plots in which coincidence was the bedrock of the story. It was absolutely necessary that characters turn up precisely when the plot required them, and that those with shady pasts turned out to be concealing the very secret that was needed in the present. "Masterpiece Theater" is currently serializing Bleak House, in which many scraps of paper are thrown out, but not the crucial one; in which a young woman's mother turns out to be the very person she is required to be; in which only those conversations are overheard that must be preserved; in which an orphan's protector fortuitously holds the key to her happiness.

Caricatures and coincidences are not weaknesses in Dickens but his method. And "Crash," one of this year's Oscar nominees and my choice as the best film of 2005, uses exactly the same tools. The film's critics believe its characters are caricatures and say its Los Angeles seems to be populated by 20 people who are always crossing paths. Surely life is not a nonstop series of racist confrontations and coincidences?

Well, of course not. But the movie is not about life in general. It is about how racism wounds and stings, and makes its victims feel worthless and its perpetrators ugly and vicious. All true enough, but the brilliance of the movie's method is that victims and victimizers change places, and "Crash" demonstrates how in a complex multiracial society there is enough guilt to go around.

The storylines involving the two cops (Matt Dillon and Ryan Phillippe) and the upper-crust black couple (Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton) have inspired the most discussion. On one day, Dillon stops Howard for DWB (driving while black) and commits a sexual assault against his wife, while the other two men stand by impotently -- Howard aware that if he challenges the cop, he could get arrested or killed; Phillippe a rookie who is intimidated by his brutal partner.

We follow the characters into their lives. Newton and Howard have a lacerating argument in which each says unforgivable things, and each blames the other for pain and ugliness that was certainly not either's fault. Dillon is seen in all the frustration of trying to care for his dying father in the face of heartless HMOs. Phillippe is seen as a decent cop trying to distance himself from Dillon's indecencies. And then, the next day ...

Well, either you know what happens, or I should not tell you. The point is made that in different situations the same people behave in different ways. One life is saved, another lost, not in the way we anticipate. The film does not forgive Dillon's character or excuse his crime; it simply shows that on both days, he has done what it is in his nature to do. The film deals here and elsewhere in irony, in the bitter truth that human nature doesn't divide us into heroes and villains, but gives us situations in which we behave badly, or well.

Many of the film's scenes involve misunderstandings. Many of the racist assumptions are incorrectly aimed; a man of Iranian (i.e., Persian) descent is infuriated that anyone would think he is an Arab, but he leaps to immediate suspicions about the ethnic identity of the young man changing his lock. And then the locksmith ...

I get in a lot of discussions about films with strangers. "Crash" is the one that keeps coming up. Those who dislike it assume it should be more "realistic," reflect "the Los Angeles I know," be less "manipulative," "not celebrate paranoia," not be so "facile."

Those who admire it have a different tone in their voice. They say the movie made them think, made them look within themselves, made them realize that society has shuffled the packs of good and evil and made it more difficult for the good to always be Us and the evil to always be Them. The movie invited them to see that everyone has a story -- a story that does not excuse or justify their actions but places them in a context.

People wrote me. I heard from a black woman who was surprised to find herself sympathizing with the Sandra Bullock character. Well, why shouldn't she? You don't have to be white to be paranoid after a carjacking (to think you do is racist).

I heard from a Canadian with a North American Indian background ("First Nation," as they say in Canada). Because of his appearance, people can't immediately identify him by race, but sometimes they think they can, and he is treated in different ways by those who think he is Asian, Latino, Arabic or African-Canadian; he learns at first hand about the subtleties of racial prejudice.

"Crash" is not a movie with answers, and maybe not even with questions. Maybe it is all made of observations. In a time when we are encouraged to draw sharp lines and leap to immediate conclusions, here is a movie that asks us to think twice, to look again, to look also within ourselves. "It made me think," a lot of people say.

Yes, you can dismiss it, deplore its contrivances, think that by exposing its methods, you have invalidated the film. You can demolish Dickens in the same way. But social arguments are not won by drawing subtle logical distinctions. He brought about actual changes in British laws involving education, child labor, bankruptcy, insanity and legalized theft from estates.

Dickens did it with caricature, coincidence, exaggeration, honesty, passion and truth. "Crash" is using the same methods with the same hopes. It is not an unworthy undertaking.

JG

yeah i read this.  makes me sick.  and he predicts that it will win the oscars. 

xerxes

Quote from: pyramid machine on February 24, 2006, 08:45:23 PM
i understand what you are saying, again...but everything in bold is true but has nothing to do w/ my arguement for crash. again, i am talkign about my generation....thats how i can compare to what i've seen vs. crash...

ignoring and discounting the films, and the history, that came before the 1970s seems to be the basis for many of the problems with your stance. how can you reply to that by just saying that that's not the time period you're looking at. i think that was the whole problem.

NEON MERCURY

Quote from: xerxes on February 25, 2006, 02:59:01 PM
Quote from: pyramid machine on February 24, 2006, 08:45:23 PM
i understand what you are saying, again...but everything in bold is true but has nothing to do w/ my arguement for crash. again, i am talkign about my generation....thats how i can compare to what i've seen vs. crash...

ignoring and discounting the films, and the history, that came before the 1970s seems to be the basis for many of the problems with your stance. how can you reply to that by just saying that that's not the time period you're looking at. i think that was the whole problem.

b/c its not relevant to my point...i am basing my arguement on what [films] i've seen dealing w/ race relations...