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More Oscar articles
Some more interesting articles about Crash and the Oscars. Gotta say I'm wanting to see this movie less and less, sorry to anyone who liked it... as both articles point out, racism today is generally much more covert and overt, and there are a lot of complexities surrounding the issue which it sounds like the movie pretty much ignores. Pity, because if they had set out to represent all the complexities of racism as it truly exists today, then I think it could have been an excellent film. I gather that the acting is very good, it's just the writing which is so typical and heavy handed.
Anything but this
There are whispers that Paul Haggis’ “Crash” might take Best Picture from
Ang Lee's gentle-spirited presumptive frontrunner “Brokeback Mountain.” I
really hope it doesn’t, because if it does, I'll be so angry that I’ll have
to retire my long-term posture of benign condescension towards the Oscars
and start hating them on general principle.
I realize the academy has been making lot of wafer-bland Best Picture
choices since the 90s (“American Beauty,” “Shakespeare in Love,” “A
Beautiful Mind,” “Chicago”), honoring films that are slick and entertaining
and perfunctorily “smart” but not the least bit resonant, films that don’t
hold a candle to at least 10 or 15 English language films from that same
year that didn’t win, and that certainly cannot stand proudly alongside such
previous Best Picture winners as “The Deer Hunter,” “All About Eve,” “On the
Waterfront,” “Gone with the Wind,” “The Last Emperor,” “Amadeus,” the first
two “Godfather” movies, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and even “Silence
of the Lambs” and on and on and on. But compared to “Crash,” the recent
batch of best picture winners looks positively brilliant. If Haggis' movie
wins, it won’t just take home a statuette, it’ll claim a new title: the most
indefensible Best Picture winner since 1956’s tax shelter spectacle “Around
the World in 80 Days.”
Yes, I admit, the movie’s more primally exciting than, say, “American
Beauty” or “A Beautiful Mind” or “The English Patient,” and more
superficially “edgy.” But it’s also dumber and meaner and uglier, an
Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank. And it’s lazy and
simplistically cynical about its central subject, race, in that it
promulgates a false idea of how Americans express racial attitudes in
public. Cowritten by Haggis and Robert Moresco, "Crash" directly contradicts
what we know about how race plays out in the U.S. today, not just in Los
Angeles, but all over. In the name of Big Drama, it ignores the chilling
effect of political correctness, which compels everyone who's not a
fringe-dwelling hatemonger or a person pushed to the edge of his or her rope
to express racist thoughts in code.
Ignoring this psychological given, "Crash" is set in Archie Bunker World, a
nostalgic land where race is at the forefront of every consciousness during
every minute of every day, where elaborately worded slurs are loaded into
everyone's speech centers like bullets in a gun, ready to be fired at the
instant that disrespect is given. The characters are anachronistic cartoons
posing as symbols of contemporary distress. They seem to have time-warped in
from the Nixon era, when the country’s pop culture purveyors decided to roll
up their sleeves and get all this race stuff out in the open and show we
were all secure enough to call each other bad names and then laugh about it
and move on. That was a nervous, belligerent response, an overcompensation
that came from sitting on this stuff for hundreds of years and seeing it
explode into riots and shootouts. But the contrived frankness served a
valuable function at the time; it was a little taste of the poisons lurking
beneath the American façade, a rhetorical inoculation designed to toughen up
the body politic. And it's over now. We're still a racist country, but we're
a hell of a lot more sophisticated about it, and the inability or
unwillingess of "Crash" to admit this makes it both stupid and pernicious.
Racism expresses itself more subtly and insidiously now than it did in
Archie Bunker's day. Neither the public nor the private language are the
same; political correctness constrains people of Boomer age or older, while
the younger generations are likely to view the multicultural future not with
dread, or even idealism, but simply as a given. Notwithstanding the efforts
of button-pushers like Bill O’Reilly and Al Sharpton, the Nixon mode of
Racially Charged Public Theater hasn’t made dramatic sense since Spike Lee’s
late 80s and early 90s race dramas, which were also obsessed with Getting
Stuff Out in the Open in the bluntest manner imaginable. (Lee only got away
with it because his movies were set in New York, which is more socially
advanced than the rest of the country in some ways, but laughably backward
in others.)
Haggis doesn’t care about such distinctions because deep down he doesn’t
actually want to say something useful about the modern state of race
relations. He just wants to be able to play with racially charged material
and be acclaimed for his bravery. The up-to-the-minute realities of American
racism are too subtle and elusive for Haggis and his cowriter to grasp, and
require too much care to dramatize. Even if Haggis acknowledged the need for
subtlety, he'd probably ignore it anyway, because it would clash with his
preferred directorial mode, monumental primitivism. This filmmaker wants
blood and thunder in CinemaScope and Dolby digital. He wants to shake you
up. So he lays bare the American psyche circa 1971, dresses it in 2005
fashions and hopes we’re too stunned and moved to notice that he’s lied to
us.
“I can’t talk to you right now, ma,” says Don Cheadle’s cop, pausing
mid-coitus to take a phone call. “I’m fucking a white woman.” "Holy shit,"
another character exclaims. "We ran over a Chinaman!" "I can't look at you,"
Dillon's cop tells a black female paper-pusher, making like Peter Boyle's
character from the 1970 white-man-on-a-rampage melodrama "Joe," "...without
thinking of the five or six qualified white men who could have had your
job." Dyno-miiiiiiite!
Beneath our politically correct facades, Haggis says, we’re all secretly as
racist as Archie Bunker or George Jefferson, and we can't stop obsessing
over skin color, ethnicity, religion, national origin and so forth. Say
what? Over a decade and a half ago, when Spike Lee seized headlines with a
series of incendiary films about race in America, astute critics were
already questioning the truth of Lee's belief that this is how people think
and talk about race, in New York or anywhere. The passage of time has made
Lee's presumption even more ludicrous. Racism is still everywhere, but with
infrequent exceptions, it cools its temper for survival's sake, inflicts its
damage through evasion and omission, and otherwise keeps its true face
hidden.
Haggis' depiction of a world where everyone's thoughts and words are
filtered through a kind of racist translator chip -- like a Spike Lee slur
montage padded out to feature length -- and then spat into casual
conversation is ungenerous, because it depicts every character as an actual
or potential acid-spitting bigot, and it's untrue to life, because it
ignores the American impulse to at least pretend one isn't a racist for fear
of being ostracized by one's peers. (That why hardcore big city bigots keep
their voices down when discussing race in public; they don't want to get
their asses kicked.)
Haggis' depiction of modern race consciousness is so wrongheaded in so many
ways that the film's critical and financial success might actually inflict
damage on the culture, by making apoplectic, paranoid racism seem like the
norm and encouraging audience members (particularly the young) to think
Haggis is tearing off society's mask and showing how things really are, all
of which will allow those same ticket buyers to feel superior to the people
in the movie and think themselves incapable of "real" racism, the type
depicted in "Crash."
Quentin Tarantino was deservedly criticized for his no-big-deal early-90s
deployment of racist slurs, in otherwise unreal movies that had no
defensible reason to include them. But at least his characters used the
words in a jocular way that said, "Look, they're just words." That's a
questionable assertion, but it's preferable to Haggis' apparent belief that
slurs express the truth of individuals' feelings, and by extension society's
feelings, and that people in all walks of life carry them around in their
heads just in case they need to use them.
Having established that deep down, we're all racist, Haggis then muffs the
questions of what that fact might mean and whether racist thoughts are ever
justified. The DA and his wife (Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser), for
instance, were right to be racist, since they get carjacked by the young
black men (Ludacris and Larenz Tate) they suspect of being dangerous. The
latino locksmith (Michael Pena) betrays no racist tendencies when dealing
with the volatile Iranian-American shopkeeper, but fate proves him naive
when the shopkeeper tragically misunderstands something he said, blames him
for the racist vandalizing of his shop, and comes after the locksmith later
with a gun. Even one of the young carjackers is late proved justified in
fearing white people because he will be senselessly killed by one.
But wait, "Crash" cries, hold on: bile-spewing racists are people too, as
evidenced by racist cop Matt Dillon's relationship with his kindly, dying
dad and his willingess to save the life of the African-American TV
director's wife (Thandie Newton) after groping her at at a traffic stop.
"We're all racist," the movie proclaims, "except when we're not." Whatchoo
talking about, Willis?
Haggis and the film's defenders can pretend this is evidence of complexity
and contradiction all they want; it's really just evidence of Haggis'
version of Powerful Dramaturgy, which mixes the schematic earnestness of an
old afterschool special and the Zen pulp grandiosity of Michael Mann in
full-on existential dread mode, complete with pulsing synth music, massive
telephoto closeups and time-suspending action montages. This movie should
have been called "Mess."
But despite its pretensions to muscular lyricism, "Crash" doesn't even
deserve the top prize when judged as pure filmmaking. It's nowhere near as
brutishly powerful as Mel Gibson's roundly sneered-at 1995 winner
“Braveheart” -- in my view, not really a historical movie as Oscar typically
defines it, but the first atavistic action film to win Best Picture; the
sort of movie Cornel Wilde would have directed if during the 1960s he’d been
given tens of millions of dollars to throw around.
Nor is "Crash" as good as "The English Patient," a classy timewaster that
almost nobody wants to watch twice. It’s a message picture conceived at the
same jacked-up visual and emotional pitch as a Super Bowl ad or action film
trailer; it’s Stanley Kramer in a ‘roid rage. Unlike other recent Best
Picture contenders, "Crash" isn't slick, clever and safe, it’s hot, stupid
and dangerous, and slick and “powerful” in that peculiarly West Coast way
that used to be showcased on “Six Feet Under.” The characters chatter
bitterly, like drunk screenwriters trying to one-up each other with
demonstrations of hardboiled cynicism about life but then rallying at the
last minute to exhort each other to go forth into the world and Make a
Difference. (Translation: "Get Attention.")
Amazingly, this movie has been embraced by some of the country's most
prominent critics. "Along the way, these people say exactly what they are
thinking, without the filters of political correctness," writes Roger Ebert,
flattering Haggis by presuming that "Crash" is set in an alternative
universe where people verbalize thoughts that would otherwise stay hidden,
rather than calling the script what it is: a shortcut to dramatic power that
evades the modern reality of its subject. "It shows the way we all leap to
conclusions based on race -- yes, all of us, of all races, and however
fair-minded we may try to be -- and we pay a price for that," Ebert writes.
"If there is hope in the story, it comes because as the characters crash
into one another, they learn things, mostly about themselves. Almost all of
them are still alive at the end, and are better people because of what has
happened to them. Not happier, not calmer, not even wiser, but better."
Gag.
Variety's Todd McCarthy summed up the movie's moral and aesthetic confusion,
praising its "...collection of powerful individual scenes" but noting that
it "...seems to promote an ideology of victimhood, and shoves race-based
thinking to the fore of every human exchange. In his earnest attempt to
speak plainly about how racial stereotypes and ingrained prejudices play an
often insidious part in everyone's daily lives, Haggis protests too much,
and in the process contracts the scope of his film."
Which, ironically, is precisely why entertainment industry dumbasses who
live in monocultural bubbles and experience race relations via news reports
if they experience it at all would deem "Crash" a work of searing truth. If
this movie wins Best Picture, the statutette should be headless.
POSTED BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ AT 2:48 AM
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
LOCATION:BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
Journalist and filmmaker, born in Kansas City, raised in Dallas, currently
living in downtown Brooklyn with wife & two children.
Article #2 (outside link)
Anyway, I went downtown today. Bought Harry Potter from Futureshop (shiny holographic cover!), then used my gift certificates at Chapters to buy Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars (tucking it away without unwrapping it so that I'm not tempted to open it and look at it before I finish the series... but at least it's there when I do!) and Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (includes the short story, the shooting script, a few pictures, and 3 essays about the process of adapting the story to a movie). Have $2 left on the gift card now, yay. ^^;
Still haven't started writing the essay which I'd planned to have finished for tomorrow. Ehehe. Oh well, long as I finish it in Toronto for Monday...
Anything but this
There are whispers that Paul Haggis’ “Crash” might take Best Picture from
Ang Lee's gentle-spirited presumptive frontrunner “Brokeback Mountain.” I
really hope it doesn’t, because if it does, I'll be so angry that I’ll have
to retire my long-term posture of benign condescension towards the Oscars
and start hating them on general principle.
I realize the academy has been making lot of wafer-bland Best Picture
choices since the 90s (“American Beauty,” “Shakespeare in Love,” “A
Beautiful Mind,” “Chicago”), honoring films that are slick and entertaining
and perfunctorily “smart” but not the least bit resonant, films that don’t
hold a candle to at least 10 or 15 English language films from that same
year that didn’t win, and that certainly cannot stand proudly alongside such
previous Best Picture winners as “The Deer Hunter,” “All About Eve,” “On the
Waterfront,” “Gone with the Wind,” “The Last Emperor,” “Amadeus,” the first
two “Godfather” movies, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and even “Silence
of the Lambs” and on and on and on. But compared to “Crash,” the recent
batch of best picture winners looks positively brilliant. If Haggis' movie
wins, it won’t just take home a statuette, it’ll claim a new title: the most
indefensible Best Picture winner since 1956’s tax shelter spectacle “Around
the World in 80 Days.”
Yes, I admit, the movie’s more primally exciting than, say, “American
Beauty” or “A Beautiful Mind” or “The English Patient,” and more
superficially “edgy.” But it’s also dumber and meaner and uglier, an
Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank. And it’s lazy and
simplistically cynical about its central subject, race, in that it
promulgates a false idea of how Americans express racial attitudes in
public. Cowritten by Haggis and Robert Moresco, "Crash" directly contradicts
what we know about how race plays out in the U.S. today, not just in Los
Angeles, but all over. In the name of Big Drama, it ignores the chilling
effect of political correctness, which compels everyone who's not a
fringe-dwelling hatemonger or a person pushed to the edge of his or her rope
to express racist thoughts in code.
Ignoring this psychological given, "Crash" is set in Archie Bunker World, a
nostalgic land where race is at the forefront of every consciousness during
every minute of every day, where elaborately worded slurs are loaded into
everyone's speech centers like bullets in a gun, ready to be fired at the
instant that disrespect is given. The characters are anachronistic cartoons
posing as symbols of contemporary distress. They seem to have time-warped in
from the Nixon era, when the country’s pop culture purveyors decided to roll
up their sleeves and get all this race stuff out in the open and show we
were all secure enough to call each other bad names and then laugh about it
and move on. That was a nervous, belligerent response, an overcompensation
that came from sitting on this stuff for hundreds of years and seeing it
explode into riots and shootouts. But the contrived frankness served a
valuable function at the time; it was a little taste of the poisons lurking
beneath the American façade, a rhetorical inoculation designed to toughen up
the body politic. And it's over now. We're still a racist country, but we're
a hell of a lot more sophisticated about it, and the inability or
unwillingess of "Crash" to admit this makes it both stupid and pernicious.
Racism expresses itself more subtly and insidiously now than it did in
Archie Bunker's day. Neither the public nor the private language are the
same; political correctness constrains people of Boomer age or older, while
the younger generations are likely to view the multicultural future not with
dread, or even idealism, but simply as a given. Notwithstanding the efforts
of button-pushers like Bill O’Reilly and Al Sharpton, the Nixon mode of
Racially Charged Public Theater hasn’t made dramatic sense since Spike Lee’s
late 80s and early 90s race dramas, which were also obsessed with Getting
Stuff Out in the Open in the bluntest manner imaginable. (Lee only got away
with it because his movies were set in New York, which is more socially
advanced than the rest of the country in some ways, but laughably backward
in others.)
Haggis doesn’t care about such distinctions because deep down he doesn’t
actually want to say something useful about the modern state of race
relations. He just wants to be able to play with racially charged material
and be acclaimed for his bravery. The up-to-the-minute realities of American
racism are too subtle and elusive for Haggis and his cowriter to grasp, and
require too much care to dramatize. Even if Haggis acknowledged the need for
subtlety, he'd probably ignore it anyway, because it would clash with his
preferred directorial mode, monumental primitivism. This filmmaker wants
blood and thunder in CinemaScope and Dolby digital. He wants to shake you
up. So he lays bare the American psyche circa 1971, dresses it in 2005
fashions and hopes we’re too stunned and moved to notice that he’s lied to
us.
“I can’t talk to you right now, ma,” says Don Cheadle’s cop, pausing
mid-coitus to take a phone call. “I’m fucking a white woman.” "Holy shit,"
another character exclaims. "We ran over a Chinaman!" "I can't look at you,"
Dillon's cop tells a black female paper-pusher, making like Peter Boyle's
character from the 1970 white-man-on-a-rampage melodrama "Joe," "...without
thinking of the five or six qualified white men who could have had your
job." Dyno-miiiiiiite!
Beneath our politically correct facades, Haggis says, we’re all secretly as
racist as Archie Bunker or George Jefferson, and we can't stop obsessing
over skin color, ethnicity, religion, national origin and so forth. Say
what? Over a decade and a half ago, when Spike Lee seized headlines with a
series of incendiary films about race in America, astute critics were
already questioning the truth of Lee's belief that this is how people think
and talk about race, in New York or anywhere. The passage of time has made
Lee's presumption even more ludicrous. Racism is still everywhere, but with
infrequent exceptions, it cools its temper for survival's sake, inflicts its
damage through evasion and omission, and otherwise keeps its true face
hidden.
Haggis' depiction of a world where everyone's thoughts and words are
filtered through a kind of racist translator chip -- like a Spike Lee slur
montage padded out to feature length -- and then spat into casual
conversation is ungenerous, because it depicts every character as an actual
or potential acid-spitting bigot, and it's untrue to life, because it
ignores the American impulse to at least pretend one isn't a racist for fear
of being ostracized by one's peers. (That why hardcore big city bigots keep
their voices down when discussing race in public; they don't want to get
their asses kicked.)
Haggis' depiction of modern race consciousness is so wrongheaded in so many
ways that the film's critical and financial success might actually inflict
damage on the culture, by making apoplectic, paranoid racism seem like the
norm and encouraging audience members (particularly the young) to think
Haggis is tearing off society's mask and showing how things really are, all
of which will allow those same ticket buyers to feel superior to the people
in the movie and think themselves incapable of "real" racism, the type
depicted in "Crash."
Quentin Tarantino was deservedly criticized for his no-big-deal early-90s
deployment of racist slurs, in otherwise unreal movies that had no
defensible reason to include them. But at least his characters used the
words in a jocular way that said, "Look, they're just words." That's a
questionable assertion, but it's preferable to Haggis' apparent belief that
slurs express the truth of individuals' feelings, and by extension society's
feelings, and that people in all walks of life carry them around in their
heads just in case they need to use them.
Having established that deep down, we're all racist, Haggis then muffs the
questions of what that fact might mean and whether racist thoughts are ever
justified. The DA and his wife (Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser), for
instance, were right to be racist, since they get carjacked by the young
black men (Ludacris and Larenz Tate) they suspect of being dangerous. The
latino locksmith (Michael Pena) betrays no racist tendencies when dealing
with the volatile Iranian-American shopkeeper, but fate proves him naive
when the shopkeeper tragically misunderstands something he said, blames him
for the racist vandalizing of his shop, and comes after the locksmith later
with a gun. Even one of the young carjackers is late proved justified in
fearing white people because he will be senselessly killed by one.
But wait, "Crash" cries, hold on: bile-spewing racists are people too, as
evidenced by racist cop Matt Dillon's relationship with his kindly, dying
dad and his willingess to save the life of the African-American TV
director's wife (Thandie Newton) after groping her at at a traffic stop.
"We're all racist," the movie proclaims, "except when we're not." Whatchoo
talking about, Willis?
Haggis and the film's defenders can pretend this is evidence of complexity
and contradiction all they want; it's really just evidence of Haggis'
version of Powerful Dramaturgy, which mixes the schematic earnestness of an
old afterschool special and the Zen pulp grandiosity of Michael Mann in
full-on existential dread mode, complete with pulsing synth music, massive
telephoto closeups and time-suspending action montages. This movie should
have been called "Mess."
But despite its pretensions to muscular lyricism, "Crash" doesn't even
deserve the top prize when judged as pure filmmaking. It's nowhere near as
brutishly powerful as Mel Gibson's roundly sneered-at 1995 winner
“Braveheart” -- in my view, not really a historical movie as Oscar typically
defines it, but the first atavistic action film to win Best Picture; the
sort of movie Cornel Wilde would have directed if during the 1960s he’d been
given tens of millions of dollars to throw around.
Nor is "Crash" as good as "The English Patient," a classy timewaster that
almost nobody wants to watch twice. It’s a message picture conceived at the
same jacked-up visual and emotional pitch as a Super Bowl ad or action film
trailer; it’s Stanley Kramer in a ‘roid rage. Unlike other recent Best
Picture contenders, "Crash" isn't slick, clever and safe, it’s hot, stupid
and dangerous, and slick and “powerful” in that peculiarly West Coast way
that used to be showcased on “Six Feet Under.” The characters chatter
bitterly, like drunk screenwriters trying to one-up each other with
demonstrations of hardboiled cynicism about life but then rallying at the
last minute to exhort each other to go forth into the world and Make a
Difference. (Translation: "Get Attention.")
Amazingly, this movie has been embraced by some of the country's most
prominent critics. "Along the way, these people say exactly what they are
thinking, without the filters of political correctness," writes Roger Ebert,
flattering Haggis by presuming that "Crash" is set in an alternative
universe where people verbalize thoughts that would otherwise stay hidden,
rather than calling the script what it is: a shortcut to dramatic power that
evades the modern reality of its subject. "It shows the way we all leap to
conclusions based on race -- yes, all of us, of all races, and however
fair-minded we may try to be -- and we pay a price for that," Ebert writes.
"If there is hope in the story, it comes because as the characters crash
into one another, they learn things, mostly about themselves. Almost all of
them are still alive at the end, and are better people because of what has
happened to them. Not happier, not calmer, not even wiser, but better."
Gag.
Variety's Todd McCarthy summed up the movie's moral and aesthetic confusion,
praising its "...collection of powerful individual scenes" but noting that
it "...seems to promote an ideology of victimhood, and shoves race-based
thinking to the fore of every human exchange. In his earnest attempt to
speak plainly about how racial stereotypes and ingrained prejudices play an
often insidious part in everyone's daily lives, Haggis protests too much,
and in the process contracts the scope of his film."
Which, ironically, is precisely why entertainment industry dumbasses who
live in monocultural bubbles and experience race relations via news reports
if they experience it at all would deem "Crash" a work of searing truth. If
this movie wins Best Picture, the statutette should be headless.
POSTED BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ AT 2:48 AM
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
LOCATION:BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
Journalist and filmmaker, born in Kansas City, raised in Dallas, currently
living in downtown Brooklyn with wife & two children.
Article #2 (outside link)
Anyway, I went downtown today. Bought Harry Potter from Futureshop (shiny holographic cover!), then used my gift certificates at Chapters to buy Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars (tucking it away without unwrapping it so that I'm not tempted to open it and look at it before I finish the series... but at least it's there when I do!) and Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay (includes the short story, the shooting script, a few pictures, and 3 essays about the process of adapting the story to a movie). Have $2 left on the gift card now, yay. ^^;
Still haven't started writing the essay which I'd planned to have finished for tomorrow. Ehehe. Oh well, long as I finish it in Toronto for Monday...