Crash, House of Flying Daggers, Little Fish

06Mar2006 [movies]

I saw these movies a few weeks ago, when I hired about a dozen in the space of a couple weeks, catching up for the year overseas. I'd only managed to write a sentence on each though, so I'm lumping them all together here.

• Crash :: (Then:) A fascinating exploration of racism and human nature. Best of all, the film has no answers, and makes no clear judgements -- all the characters have shades of grey. (Now:) Crash just won the Best Picture Oscar, thus lumping it in with movies I must not like ('cause hey, that's worked for me so far...). And well, I've been able to think about it more... I still think it was well-acted, and I enjoyed the ambiguity. People have reacted very differently to the depiction of racism though. My basic thought is that people are in denial if they think that this kind of racism doesn't exist anymore, and well, it's a movie, it deliberately sets up coincidences, brings that suppressed racism to the surface. However, some of my uneasiness has been expressed (though my own thoughts aren't as strong) by Matt Zoller Seitz (The House Next Door :: Anything But This 27Feb2006):

  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.

• House of Flying Daggers :: A beautiful film. The story, for all its plot twists, was relatively simple. It was really a love story (you don't find out what happens to the Flying Daggers, and it doesn't even matter), handled with a very light touch. But key to the film is the look. The costumes and sets, the cinematography, the visual effects, the choreographed fight scenes, all beautiful.

• Little Fish :: (Then:) All star Australian cast, amazing look at life, struggle, drugs. (Now:) Still don't have a lot to add, just that it was a brilliant re-introduction to the Aussie film scene for me... Gives me hope returning to a film-making final year (full-time anyway) at uni.