The best director of the year goes to Ang Lee (he’s great… but didn’t deserve it for this film)… and the big surprise for the night is Best Picture going to Crash instaed of Brokeback Mountain.
Doug rounds up the show and gives his overall thoughts. Hear it here.
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First off, I wasn’t manipulated by “Crash”. My personal opinion on the Best Pic upset is that if any other picture other than “Brokeback’ won, the masses would still be bitching.
About Crash: “But then he reveals that there was a misfire,” – well, uh, no. The gun never misfired. Farhad simply did not know American customs and mannerisms, his daughter, Dorri, did. Dorri bought blanks for the gun instead of real bullets. Farhad did not know this at the time.
The two carjacking dup played by Chris ‘Ludicrous’ Bridges* and Larenz Tate were merely working themselves up for the crime; when Anthony summed up Jean’s reaction to them, it merely provided “the excuse” to carjack them. Anthony’s reasoning is that he would not rob another black man – but white people who “may be” racist are fair game.
Also, I never once thought the film was heavy handed and every bit as topical as some of the other nominees.
*note: it is the second film last year in which a character played by Terrance Howard beat the stuffing out of a character played by Bridges.
All I’m getting from you is that you simply don’t like the movie. Don’t try and put in EVERY detail of “how bad it is.” You have better luck with Paul W.S. Anderson’s films. Sure, you don’t like the film, but it is still a good movie! As for Brokeback Mountain, I haven’t seen the film, but I feel the reason for all this hype is because it came in theaters just WEEKS before the Oscars.
Sure, it is also a good film, but Crash is my favorite. Don’t insult me that “You never seen Brokeback Mountain!” BS! I’ll agree that you don’t like it, but I disagree that it is as bad as you put it (unless you’re a Uwe Boll fan).
fuck you Crash indeed.
http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10448&reviewer=392
“Crash” is two hours of Paul Haggis yelling in your ear. About nothing.
Haggis, who co-wrote “Crash” (with Bobby Moresco) and who makes his directorial debut here, is best known for his screenplay for “Million Dollar Baby.” Several critics before me have already noted how “Baby” was subtle in ways “Crash” could never dream of being, and isn’t it odd how the same writer could create two vastly different works. This is not entirely true, however; “Baby” was quiet, yes, but not at all subtle. Its story was told in broad strokes (the selfish hick family, the lovably dumb boxer wannabe). What made “Baby” so wonderful is that although it worked in broad strokes, it handled those strokes with a remarkable elegance, a grace that allowed the characters to grow within their bold-outlined world.
“Crash,” meanwhile, makes no room for such things as character development. It is too concerned with talking down to us, taking the audience for morons, assuming that the only way to deliver a Very Important Message is to deliver characters that are not anything more than vague stereotypes. I do not even recall the characters’ names. All I remember is that we met Bigot Cop, Nice Cop, Obnoxious White Lady, Uptight Politician, White-Hating Thug, Non-White-Hating Thug, and so on, and so on. These characters are so embarrassingly generic and superficial that you might wonder why Haggis just didn’t cast the Village People instead. Ah, look, it’s Leather Biker Guy, and he’s mad at Gay Sailor. With Matt Dillon as the Indian Chief!
The film purports itself as grand commentary on modern race relations in America, and Haggis feels that the best way to discuss racism in all its forms is to put it right there in the open, cold and ugly and offensive and staring right at you. This may be true, but Haggis has no clue what to do with this idea.
And so we get a collection of underdeveloped characters who talk in ways very few people actually do Рthe gimmick being that these characters have no filters, and so they immediately say what an ordinary person, hiding his prejudices under the guise of decency and manners, would only be thinking. This is intended to shock the viewer, and right off the bat, too. One of the first things we see is Jennifer Esposito, whose car was just rear-ended by an older Asian woman, go off on a tirade about the woman’s thick accent. This is soon followed by a shop owner who, upon hearing two Persian customers speak to each other in their native tongue, calls them “Osama” and berates them for 9/11.
When not spouting racial slurs on a constant loop, the characters debate about the nature of prejudice. Again, it does not matter who actually speaks like this so frequently (I wonder if we’re just following a series of people with some sort of clinical conversational dysfunction, as though they are simply unable to chat about the weather or sports or whatever); Haggis is so intent on getting the audience talking after the movie’s over that he crams every corner of his film with commentary, never mind if it actually fits.
(Here is as good place as any to mention that most of the cast, either by choice or by direction, works in either an obnoxious whine, a piercing screech, or some combination of the two. While Terrence Howard, Larenz Tate, and rapper Ludacris do the best they can with such limp material, the rest of the performers are shrill and unwatchable. Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Ryan Phillippe, and Brendan Fraser look like they’re reading from cue cards, while the consistently horrible Thandie Newton’s wretched overacting threatens to take the film into a level of camp that would be hilarious if it weren’t so dismal.)
And then, alas, there is the in-your-face cleverness of the piece. Haggis structures his film to be a series of overlapping storylines held together by the flimsiest of coincidences, obviously modeled after such works as “Short Cuts,” “Grand Canyon” and “Magnolia.” But Haggis is no Robert Altman, and his web is consistently unbelievable, reliant on connections that never actually work. (At one point I was convinced that only nine people live in the entire greater Los Angeles area. How else to explain why they keep bumping into each other over and over again?) And with only blank templates instead of interesting characters filling up the plot, there’s no real reason to become involved with this ever-growing human tangle.
This, however, is the least of Haggis’ grasps at cunning. His screenplay tries Рtoo often Рto trick the viewer. Consider the two young black men whom we first meet as they are arguing about racism; one grumbles about whites always thinking he’s out to steal from them, a comment which is immediately followed by him carjacking a white couple. “Ha ha!” Haggis cries into the night. “See what I did there? A little misdirection! Now you’ll be talking about how maybe some prejudices are actually well founded, but you’ll hate yourself for thinking such things. Aren’t I the smart little puppet master?”
(My friend John, a man so much smarter than I, described the goings-on this way: √¢‚Ǩ≈ìIt√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s not about race at all. It√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s about Paul Haggis√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ infatuation with his own cleverness, or what passes for cleverness when you’re not actually very clever.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù As I said, he is much smarter than I.)
Haggis struggles to invent new ways of manipulating the audience, and in one instance, he backs himself into an impossible corner. You see, in one scene, we’re led to believe that a character has been shot. We even get the slo-mo and the sweeping music and the angst and grief and et cetera. And we’re told Рno, commanded Рto feel the loss. But then he reveals that there was a misfire, the character is in fact unharmed. Meaning, of course, that Haggis wants to have a Big Dramatic Moment without having to follow through in dealing with the emotional weight of it.
Anyway, later in the film, we get a very similar incident. A flash of gunfire, someone’s been shot. Now, here’s the dilemma: If Haggis lets the supposed victim live, he’s just recycling a bit of cheap manipulation, and it doesn’t work. But if he lets the victim die, then the earlier scene was only included as a set-up to help make this scene even more manipulative (which also goes to make the first scene even more manipulative by extension). Damned if you do, and so on.
There is also the matter of yet another character suddenly getting injured, for no real reason than to have that character get injured, surprising the viewer and getting a quick gasp moment. This scene and the barely-there follow-up it (barely) requires have nothing to do with the plot, nothing to do with the development of anything, and yet it is here. Why? So Haggis can pull one more shock from the audience. It’s cheap and pointless and quite ridiculous. (As is the entire out-of-nowhere subplot about the Asian slaves, and the goofy showdown between a beleaguered Terrence Howard and the LAPD Рwhich, of course, ends in a way no actual showdown would ever end, ever, ever, ever Рand… well, you get the idea.)
But oh, it’s so smart, you see, because it is daring in its discussions on the underlying problems of a nation. If this is the case, though, why end on such an up note? Haggis actually has the unmitigated gall to decide to end his story with a slight fender bender, in which a black woman and an Asian woman emerge from their cars, comically screaming, and we’re actually supposed to chuckle and think, “well, here they go again, those kooky bigots!” Oh, and because this is not all, we also get to hear Рas the finale of this supposedly moving, serious, insightful, deeply political work Рa rump-shakin’ hip hop club tune from Ludacris play on the soundtrack. I do believe my first thought here was, and I quote: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Backtracking to that final shot of the fender bender. This last jokey bit happens solely because we are told in a lengthy (and very, very, very serious) opening monologue that because modern living keeps us apart, “we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” This is that Very Important Message of the movie, that lack of contact has developed withdrawn personalities that feed off of prejudices. It is the kind of thing that sounds all serious and profound on the surface, but there’s absolutely nothing underneath. It’s a sentiment that’s as shallow as the film that features it. For all its posturing and scheming and false fronts, “Crash” is unbearably empty.
Crash fucked up my Oscar pool ballot. Fuck you Crash!
There was something about last year’s Oscar show which I didn’t think for one minute would show up this year, but it did, and it was very noticeable.
John, Doug…did you count how many tech glitches there were?
Here’s my count:
1) A camera angle pulling out, very shaky, unprofessional. The same angle then zooms in three percent after the pull back.
2)Microphone glitches -not including cutoff/silence the mike- although they should have let the Crash co-writer say his piece since Paul Haggis ate his shoe.
3)Morgan Freeman backstage. They cut to him, because he narrated the ‘Penguins” doc. Someone says something to him, he looks back. Maybe it’s nothing, then POW! Spotlight on Morgan Freeman!
4)Late in the show, while the upcoming presenters are announced, you can clearly hear the tech director over the speaker system give directions to his crew.
5)Was the Will Farrell-Steve Cantrell joke repeated with Jennifer Garner? I don’t think so, but whoever did Jen’s makeup did a hack job. Did you see that glob on her forehead, or was it just me?
6)If it were ONLY Lauren Bacall, I’d say her eyesight is going. But I lost count over how MANY presenters could not read the teleprompter! Was the teleprompter obscured or the writers misspelling words? What was up with that? When the presenters kept stumbling (Bacall was really bad) this ate up the clock.
7)The most annoying was Bill Conti having to play Muzak over every winner’s acceptance. There were occasional times when the music was too loud- so the winners had to speak up.
8) Whenever a winner talked about family in the audience, a quick shot would be on thier spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend and not brother,sis, or dear Mom. (ex. Reese Witherspoon)
Time issues…
1) Okay, I did not mind the musical numbers…and…well, okay, I did mind them. While I’m tickled that “Hard Out Here Being A Pimp” was being performed, and to cover thier butts they did an homage to West Side Story, I have to admit: Crash and the Hustle and Flow tunes were showy; I loved the simplicity of Dolly Parton. I also admit (and I think I said this before) that the category itself was weak. Still John & Doug: take note that there were three songs and not five. And yes, I know that a few years ago a Best Song winner (“Lose Yourself” from 8 Mile) was never performed onstage.
2) Aside from the “glitches” with the teleprompter (either that or the house lights were low) and presenters “trying” to read it, here’s where I think time could have been saved: Like Dave Letterman’s turn when the Oscars became Late Night, Jon Stewart turned the Oscars into his talk show. Take out the “Actress Negative Ad Campaigns” and things of that nature, that would spare a good 15 minutes of fame. However- despite of what I been reading from CNN TV critics this morning, I think Stewart did a good job for the first timer.
3) Get rid of the animated characters giving awards. It eats up the clock just to set it up.
4) The montages (aside from honoring those passed on and the Lifetime achievement) were…yes I 100% agree! Pointless! Which made Sewart’s joke about sending clips by old Beta funny, but yeah, the montages were pointless. Pointless! Pointless and tacky! The only thing these were good for is a sign for the Bathroom Break.
5) Ben Stiller’s gag went on and on…I think that if the novety of the joke wears off fast/first few jokes bomb…move on with it.
6) A HUGE annoyance, aside from tech problems, was that the clock starts ticking AFTER the winner(s) get out of the seats. Thus what happens is this:
a) They run/walk fast to the stage and ar out of breath or need a moment for composure
b) The music plays over them so they speak up or they “think” they are being rushed.
c) They are aware of the clock- folks should train themselves not -NOT- to mention the ticking seconds. To my surprise- one person thought about this in advance. To keep his Thank Yous short, he thanked his family and then gave out “go to the website and see your name with a full list” or something to that effect.
e) They won and get stagefright – resulting in a co-winner who has things to say not get a chance to say anything. (screenplay-Crash)
What pissed me off: Cutting off the mike on the Best Pic winners. Yes, they ramble on- but there are no more awards to be handed out. It’s over. Four more seconds is not going to kill you. Besides, folks have already turned the channel.
When I laughed the hardest: It wasn’t during the telecast, but a skit on ‘Jimmy Kimmel’ later that evening, where Kimmel popped a “monster zit” in the center of Jon Stewart’s forehead.
I predicted ‘Crash’ would beat ‘Brokeback’. With the exception of the best song, I was wrong everywhere else. Especially on Kong winning the tech awards. Liked the fact that Memoirs Of A Geisha won a few of Oscars. Never saw that coming. That to me was the better -and most welcome- surprises of last night.
I loved the stage setup. Loved it. Loved it loved it loved it loved it. Loved it so much until…Jon Stewart pointed out the big ice like statue of Oscar that for most of the evening was out of camera frame.
I hated the stage setup now. Hated it hated it hated it. Then I noticed since Stewart pointed it out- presenters had a tough time finding the mircophones.
-Sealer needs an Oscar for being a Good and Faithful Servant To The Movie Blog but will accept an appearance in the next montage.
PS
Don’t forget to mention the Razzies, where you discover the real reason Jenny McCarthy ditched her husband- “you killed my career as an actress”…well, okay, that wasn’t the real reason. McCarthy can’t act. Still…
Hanks did not look happy.
Feedback on the Oscar Special Podcast:
– I liked it!
Next year:
– Take away the “Showbusiness” music in the background and replace it with other sound effects like crowds and so on.
Just my two cents.
/Joel
Yeah, I saw that too. It looked like he said “fucking moron”.
I don’t really see how that fits in with the ‘unobtrusive orchestra’ skit at the beginning though. I actually thought he was really mad at someone backstage. Maybe he’s just that good of an actor.
That was based on the skit they did at the begining of the show with Hanks pretending to go too long with an acceptance speach.
WTF was with Tom Hanks looking pissed and swearing as he walked up to present? Am I the only one who noticed that? Did it have something to do with Stewart’s joke (which I didn’t understand) about breaking something over Hanks’ head?