The critics at Movie Smackdown have offered their arguments for the one Christmas movie you should make sure to see this holiday season. Since Bryce was aghast when I recommended Silent Night, Deadly Night, I decided to go with A Christmas Story instead.
Christmas Movie Smackdown: Vote for Your Favorite Holiday Flick
Will the Last Person with a New Idea in Hollywood Please Turn Out the Lights When You Leave?
This is not a joke. (We mean — it’s a joke, but it’s also a real movie.)
Best Description of Crash Yet
We know; we tend to get a little obsessive (and off-topic) from time to time.
Nonetheless, we needed to share this great description of Crash from Karina Longworth at Cinematical:
For those who have not yet had the pleasure, Crash is a science fiction film, set in an alternate universe that looks suspiciously like Los Angeles. This mythic dimension is populated exclusively by about a dozen men and women of various races and ethnicities; their only common trait, the compulsion to speak in stilted expository paragraphs. Singularly unintelligent and consumed with racially-motivated hatred, this crew has been cursed to encounter one another over and over again through easily preventable traffic incidents. In the film’s most compelling narrative knot, the District Attorney of Los Angeles (played by Brendan “Encino Man” Fraser; he apparently ran on a campaign devoted to “ample nugs, grindage, and minimal weezing on the juice”) has his car jacked by two black youths. The stolen SUV apparently has time shifting properties, for soon the two men find themselves in the 1860s, where they run over a “Chinaman” who is presumably standing in the middle of the street whilst working on the railroad. In the end, we learn that women tend to cry and scream a lot, and people of opposite races, apparently, don’t really get along. Also, when it comes to acting nominations, I know I’m not the only one who thinks Tony Danza was robbed.
Update: We love, love, love a sore loser — at least when she’s talking about a movie we hate, hate, hate…
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN author ANNIE PROULX has slated the Academy Awards for giving the Best Picture Oscar to CRASH at this year’s (06) presentation ceremony. In an essay published by British newspaper The Guardian, Proulx describes voters as “out of touch” and “segregated” from current issues, and insists they were easily influenced by Crash’s production company Lions Gate Entertainment. She writes, “Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. “And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of ‘Trash’ – excuse me, Crash – a few weeks before the ballot deadline. “Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.
Although we’re sure others will curse you for feeding our obsession, we thank Bill Green for the tip.
The "Crash" Quiz
Please excuse us while we continue to vent our spleen over Crash. We promise we’re almost done.
From Erik Lundegaard:
Here, let’s take a little quiz. Say you’re an Asian woman who has just rear-ended the car in front of you. What do you do? Do you …
1. Wait in your car until a police officer arrives
2. Exchange licenses with the driver of the other car
3. Notice that the driver of the other car is someone who looks like Jennifer Esposito, immediately assume she’s Mexican-American (as opposed to, say, Italian-American), and then tell the African-American police officer that “Mexicans no know how to drive.”How about this one? You’re talking to a bureaucrat on the phone about getting extra care for your father who is having trouble urinating, and she is not helpful. You ask for her name and she tells you: Shaniqua Johnson. You still need her help. What do you say?
1. “Shaniqua. That’s a beautiful name.”
2. “Shaniqua. You could do a better job of helping my father, who is in pain.”
3. “Shaniqua. Big f—ing surprise that is.”One last one. You’ve just been told by your hot, hot girlfriend, with whom you’re lucky to be sleeping in the first place, that she is not Mexican as you presumed; that her mother is from Puerto Rico and her father is from El Salvador. What do you say?
1. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m surprised I didn’t know that. Now come back to bed.”
2. “Really? How did they meet?”
3. “Who took [all Latinos] and taught them to park their cars on their lawns?”And on and on and on. Every scene. Put a little pressure on somebody and they blurt simplistic racist sentiments. Right in the face of someone of that race.
Worse, none of it feels like sentiments these characters would actually say. It feels like sentiments writer/director Paul Haggis imposed upon them to make his grand, dull point about racism, when a more telling point about racism might have emerged if he’d just let them be. “Crash” is like a Creative Writing 101 demonstration of what not to do as a writer. To the Academy this meant two things: Best screenplay and best picture.
Actually, it sounds likes a series of “composite anecdotes” to us.
Technorati tags: Journalism, Oscars, Crash, Movies
Debra Lafave: Back in Jail (and Bored Men’s Fantasies)
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