#Crash (2005)

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summer kayak
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Poll here: #unspooled-polls message

summer kayak
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<@&961324191204925460>

candid linden
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I had such a difficult time watching this for the first time, especially because I was watching via 2023 and not 2005.

It felt like a time capsule in a pretty bad way, though I think even for its time it felt rough. The dialogue, though in my experience was a conglomeration of things I'm confident I've heard over my years, felt borderline absurd sometimes. I think a big part of why I didn't like this was because it felt like there were too many characters and storylines all kind of happening independently until they eventually sort of click together.

The whole thing sort of came off to me as a sheltered rich kids college dissertation on how they'd fix racism by suggesting citizens just be nice to each other and it will go away, but I'm not even sure it landed there for me.

By the end, it didn't feel like any of the characters, except maybe Don Cheadle, wanted to change at all. Ludacris freeing the people chained to the van, but then simply dumping them on the streets coupled with some slurs, felt like the overall message was what, we're all terrible anyway and just keep perpetuating problems? Idk

Those that know me I think know that I tend to try to find reasons to like things, but this was a rare instance where I struggled.

Some of the performances I feel were good, though it confuses me that Matt Dillon was the only one put up for an (imo undeserved) supporting actor oscar.

The scene where he was the one who would have to rescue Thandiwe's character felt SO forced and gross, just like the scene where he pulled them over did.

Having time away from the watch has made me feel less strongly and sort of wanna just forget it, but mid-watch this was painful.

I am genuinely interested in what people who enjoyed it in 2023 liked about it because I'd like to dislike something less intensely. It feels weird.

To my mind, skip the rocket ship and put it in the dump where the copies of E.T. the video game got buried

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If I imagine myself watching via 2005, where discussions around race and racism were very surface level without deeper examination, I can almost see where they were to trying to go, but even that feels just flat to me.

Had they picked one of the sets of characters and their storyline, but then drilled down and done deeper examination, it could've actually been something great.

river barn
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I'm dying to see this, been curious about it since release. The blu ray arrived today but I'm unable to watch it for now...hopefully soon

candid linden
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Hopefully my post doesn't bias your watch 😅 be interested to see what ya think after

river barn
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I've only ever heard strong negative things so don't feel bad about it LUL

spiral cypress
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I loved this back when it came out, and shared Roger Ebert's frustration with all the people who were bashing it, often seemingly out of a pro-"Brokeback" agenda rather than anything to do with "Crash" itself. But I have not seen it in nearly twenty years now, and remember very little about it. So I see it is on HBO MAX and intend to rewatch this weekend. I will report back after I see it and listen to the pod.

wide swift
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Crash is the only movie I’ve ever walked out of in the theater. I was even on a date and I told her I’d be in the arcade if she wanted to finish it. She joined me. I did go back to watch the full movie a few years later at a friend’s request. Did not redeem it whatsoever. Regarding the episode, I’m halfway thru and I had to just pop on here because Paul describes (around the 40min mark) how this movie undercuts every major choice “don’t make that choice and then take it back” “every bold choice is completely erased” and this is exactly the sort of thing I was attempting to articulate about TLJ. It was never about the rules of the force, but the rules of good storytelling. Nothing I hate more than a high stakes moment of true consequence miraculously erased to smooth things over for an audience.

brisk matrix
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I am agnry because there were no orange bandicoots in this movie

candid linden
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No bandicoots, zero boxes broken, no kart racing, absolute scam

formal cobalt
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I saw this film early at a sneak peek, before any hype or hate, and I did not like it. It felt like it was says “everyone is racist, no matter what, there’s no solution” and it was wrongheaded. Then it didn’t make much money and faded.

I could not believe it when it resurgent in late 2005 and made its way to Best Picture. This little film I saw and disliked 9 months earlier was Best Picture?? Couldn’t believe it.

And it doesn’t help that I loved Brokeback Mountain.

elfin cypress
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A director (who's a mutual acquaintance of Adam Pally's) related that the Academy Awards uses a ranked voting system e.g. if Movie A is voted by members in wildly different ranks (one member voted no . 1 but another no. 5 and so on), but Movie B is voted more consistently but at a lower rank, say, in no. 2 then Movie B could actually gather enough points to come out as the winner. Could that be what happened to Crash when it got Best Picture?

formal cobalt
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For the record, I think Saving Private Ryan should have won Best Picture for 1998, but I still think Shakespeare in Love is an excellent film. I don’t hate it for winning, but I wish it hadn’t.

formal cobalt
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A lot of people have suggested that the favourites last year split the vote, and Coda won because it was a popular second choice. That may just be a dig at Coda, though.

dusk shard
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Coda was my favorite.

candid linden
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looking back at last year's noms, I agree w Coda. I love Dune and even though I felt like at it's core, Coda was sort of hallmark-y, it was hallmark-y through a very underrepresented lens and exposed a lot of people (myself included) to the lives of deaf and family of deaf folks which is a very good thing imo, so it felt deserved

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also to say i think it was much better quality than any hallmark movie ive ever seen, but in the sense that was ultimately a family feel good emotional story, hopefully my meaning isnt lost in my brain garble 😂

dusk shard
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In any case, I felt validated by the episode (and many of the comments here) in not rewatching Crash.

I don’t want to necessarily dismiss the idea that people could find value in it, but I disliked it a great deal. Like Paul said, they try to call it a fable in order to justify how contrived and shallow everything is, but there’s no real lesson except, “everyone sucks, but what are you gonna do?”

candid linden
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yup, I'm glad others have said there's no sense of "we solved racism" which is a sense I sort of had in my head going in, but then by the end I was just like....so its just inevitable?

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and WHAT HAPPENED TO THE YOUNG COP WHO SHOT LUDA'S FRIEND AND JUST VANISHED?!

dusk shard
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Even worse, the way it handles the whole “everyone has prejudice” issue is that, in some ways, it lets actual hardcore racists watch and say, “see everyone else does it too. I’m normal.”

candid linden
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right?? I'm not sure any lessons were learned except again maybe by Cheadle's character but even that felt up in the air

dusk shard
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While it is true that prejudice can take many many forms, I don’t think a big shrug is the way to address it.

candid linden
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yeah, for sure. Perhaps one positive point is how visceral the reaction to it is via 2023 can be a positive indicator of some sense of social progress since 05?

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😄

formal cobalt
candid linden
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LOL, listen I'm grasping at any straws I can conjure

formal cobalt
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I get it, lol. And it’s not that serious. But it’s like when people say “no one knew Birth of a Nation was racist in 1915! We discovered that later!” And then you find out it was protested at the time. Again, not that serious, but we knew Crash was problematic immediately. Lol

candid linden
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it's good to know, I totally missed out on it on 2005 so wasn't super sure on initial reception other than comments here (haven't listened to the episode quite yet either)

supple crest
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Paul just nuked this movie in the first 15 minutes. I'm curious where they can go from that. 😆

formal cobalt
candid linden
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I'm so excited to listen to the episode

noble bough
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I find the value in that people sometimes forget racism exists. Especially so distant from Rodney King and pre Treyvon Martin. It’s very easy to live in a homogenous community and be ambivalent to racism existing in the modern environment. And sometimes there’s also this view that racism is just a Southern thing, that I appreciate this avoids. But I agree with Amy it feels unresolved. I’m glad racism wasn’t solved in this film by Sandra Bullock adopting a football player etc. but there should have been a more substantial arcs. It’s kind of like a less stylish, less cohesive Do The Right Thing.

candid linden
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that feels like a fair value add, though with what was presented in the movie I'd almost worry that people already aware would just think it's gross and those that unaware, may feel empowered when there are largely little to no consequences for it? It's a delicate balance. Maybe I take for granted being so aware of things because I surrounded myself with people who are. Fully agree on a more substantial arc(s) - I do really think if like half of the arcs were removed and whatever remained got deeper examinations and resolutions, there's a lot of potential for something

supple crest
noble bough
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I think it's capturing a type of racism that is not present in most other films. You can watch traditional films about racism, like Ghosts of Mississippi or We Are Titans, or the aforehinted, The Blindside; and they always have these caricatures of racists. There is an obvious bigot or bigot family or bigot community that are "them" and usually unapologetically evil. These films distance the problem of racism from themselves, the viewer doesn't have to question whether some thoughts or feelings they have might be racist because they are not "them". I'd argue this is what the type of people who forget racism exists think racism is.
When this kind of casual racism has been captured, like the barbershop scene in Gran Torino, this racism is just a fun thing for people who don't have to worry about being shot by the police.

supple crest
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Is this a world where Do The Right Thing doesn't exist? There's plenty of interpersonal racism and different shades in that movie. Is that movie really more combative or off putting than this movie? If it is, I think that's purely because of Crash's performances and herky jerky plots, and that it's possible to read as nihilistic kind of shrug--which I don't see as likely to be productive or very educational

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Or Nothing But A Man (1964) if you want a racism in every corner type movie. That was also directed by a white guy--European, but is way more empathetic.

summer kayak
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When I first saw this back in 2005, I remember being closer to Amy's view: this movie isn't very good, but at least it's saying something challenging and bracing and it has some good scenes/performances. I was stunned that it won Best Picture but hadn't returned to it since that first viewing.

Watching it again this week, I thought it was the most risible thing I'd ever seen. It's all just surface tit-for-tat interpersonal racism with no further analysis or depth. Nobody learns anything or changes (I mean, MAYBE the closest thing to it is the Matt Dillon character changing the way he talks to Thandie Newton in the emergency situation, but that's fleeting at best). It's just throwing racism in your face, over and over.

The film doesn't do it in a believable way either. It's not just people revealing themselves in private moments. People are SCREAMING racial epithets at each other on the streets, or in a house/office where other co-workers can hear. Who does this? It's a cartoonish version of how sublimated racism actually expresses itself. I don't buy Haggis' claim that this is all just a fable either. The film's aesthetics don't suggest this to me at all. Guillermo Del Toro movies with heightened design elements, those are fables. Crash, with its grungy street-level photography, does not present itself as a fable. I agree with Paul that this sounds like the filmmakers trying to cop out after hearing criticism of the film's message.

I did not expect to be this negative on the movie after rewatch, but man . . . it's bad.

fierce shore
noble bough
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No, but in 2005 Do The Right Thing was 16 years old 😅. Like I said it's far away enough from Rodney King,( or Do the Right Thing (as well as having an exponentially higher box office)) for racism to be a "memory". I've never heard of Nothing But A Man, but I guarantee there are better films that have a similar concept. I don't know any that made nearly 100 million dollars though.

To be clear I think Crash is a shit movie, I don't think it belongs near the rocket; but I do think it had value in 2005 in making people think about racism in a less mustache twirling way and without presenting that racism can be cured in 90 minutes or without radical changes.

summer kayak
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Amy mentioned how it rips off Magnolia (which itself is already a take on Short Cuts), but it also occurred to me that it was trying to copy the urgency of Soderbergh's Traffic, another sprawling multi-character drama commenting on a major social issue. But of course, those movies had depth of character and situation that this one doesn't.

supple crest
# noble bough No, but in 2005 Do The Right Thing was 16 years old 😅. Like I said it's far awa...

A memory? For who? Clearly, OJ has continued to live in the American cultural memory. MLK has a holiday, etc.

I don't think the state of societal issues in 2005 was so dire that it's a "gotta support this for the cause" type of situation. If so, might as well support Mark Wahlberg vs gentrifying corruption in Four Brothers and Adam Sandler's efforts at racial/inmate solidarity in The Longest Yard remake 😆

noble bough
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Oh man, I was not suggested this movie ought to be supported. I was suggesting this movie had value in 2005 to a niche of suburban white people.

summer kayak
supple crest
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I do take your point that this movie has a different approach than something like Remember The Titans, which was a few years before and does has some hilarious and bad racism is solved type of scenes. But that movie also kinda rules.

noble bough
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MLK having a holiday is exactly the kind of thing that leads people to believe "Racism is over"

supple crest
noble bough
candid linden
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I think I can sort of see what you mean coop - I've definitely interacted with that type of person who would watch this movie, think to themselves "Well, I'm not that bad, and I don't think my friends & fam are, which must mean society is fine??"

supple crest
supple crest
candid linden
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Right. I think by Brokeback not winning and Crash getting the award speaks to the Academy (and perhaps even US culture at large) has largely been too afraid to confront issues through a deeper lens and remains so surface level

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Less so the case now I think but certainly early 2ks and 2k10s

noble bough
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I mean Green Book won just a few years ago. It’s sounds exactly like the kind of “America used to be racist but we can solve racism in 90 minutes” wide audience film that I was bemoaning earlier.

candid linden
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good call, I didn't watch it for exactly that reason 😂

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well played

noble bough
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I think tv shows are going to be better able to handle race anyways. Allow for the nuance and long term change. In fact was The Wire was concurrent with Crash?

candid linden
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good question, im not super sure tbh. Heading into a few work calls, excited to catch back up in a few!

summer kayak
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There was some discussion in the episode about how the Academy members were too scared to vote for Brokeback Mountain, or perhaps too nervous to even watch the movie in the first place. Maybe, but it's worth remembering that it did win the other Screenplay award and Best Director for Ang Lee, so clearly a lot of them did watch it and like it.

But I could see, in a close race, a large enough minority of voters being a little too homophobic to vote for Brokeback and casting a vote for Crash to support another "social issues" movie that was more palatable.

supple crest
noble bough
# candid linden I think I can sort of see what you mean coop - I've definitely interacted with t...

I think I actually meant the opposite of this; people who believe racism is over because their communities are isolated/mostly culturally homogenous, might rethink casual racism they don’t think is racist.

But the more we talk about it the more I think Paul’s hypothesis that it just made casual racism okay might be more true.

When I watched it I think I thought look at all these shit racist people with their problematic lives not having a good time. Now they’re doing nothing to fix the racism in their lives. Now the movies over and racism is still a problem.

But now I can kind of see how a casual racist might be like “racist car jacker saved the human traffic. The racist cop saved the woman. Everyone can be racist and still a hero”

candid linden
tulip field
candid linden
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Oh duh, right. I guess I actually didn't piece that together somehow, I was too frustrated by the movie 😝

tulip field
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Was the director rich? Probably. There aren't that many poor people making feature films you'd ever hear about.

The idea that people should be comforted in watching this because they aren't as bad as the racists onscreen is ironic... because the Ryan Phillipe character is disgusted by Matt Dillon's racism and then does something horrible himself. He just didn't know he was capable of such awful behavior until he did it. And he wasn't the "guiding light" of the movie at that point either. As his superior (played by Keith David) pointed out, he wasn't going to do anything to stop the actual terrible behavior of his partner, instead merely placing himself away from it.

The idea that Crash depicts any racism being "cured" is one of the most off-base interpretations I've heard. Rivalled only by the idea that the message is "It's ok not to change". How is that at all compatible with the horrible behavior we see in this movie!? Nor does Matt Dillon's character saving the life of a woman he'd previously sexually assaulted have ANYTHING to do with Driving Miss Daisy. I'd ask if Paul has ever watched Daisy, but I sometimes find it hard to believe he watched Crash even while he's describing it. He can't even avoid contradicting himself from one sentence to the next when he says that the film's message is that "All we are" is base reactions, and that past those base reactions there's more to us.

Magnolia is worse than Crash. The rain of frogs doesn't make it "smarter".

I still don't think Shakespeare in Love was good. "Huh, so that's where Shakespeare got this line and that line!" It's like if an entire movie consisted of the worst parts of franchise prequels today.

What is the "Brendan Fraser type character" if he's a character-actor? He's the lead in The Whale.

candid linden
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I think there might be some pod episode points or points others made I'm not connecting there, but I think what I struggled with so much on watching, was the real lack of consequence for any of the terrible behavior. Everyone suffers pretty deeply, but I feel like it was often at the hands of other people being terrible and not because of their terrible behavior.

It felt very....fatalist? Nihilist? I'm having trouble finding the right words at the moment.

I do think you have a point and feel like my initial reaction on it being a "cure" or "solve" was off base, because it didn't really offer any thought at all from my viewing on where to go from there

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If any of my previous things on it, especially my initial comment at the very top (I was up way too early today 🙃) don't make sense, I'd be up to try and explain it more if I can

candid linden
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Finally listening to the episode 😌

digital tide
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I've never seen it but I literally always just think of the David Lynch crash about people who have sex and crash their cars

summer kayak
digital tide
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Thank you

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I never SAW it

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I think the trailer was on a VHS I owned and watched a lot

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Anyway I was very confused when "crash" won an oscar

unborn cipher
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I am in the middle of listening to The Phantom Podcast (the precursor to the Blank Check podcast) and Crash kept making me think about Griffin Newman's 10th grade paper called "Black in Blackface" that he was convinced was going to solve racism.

candid linden
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Cronenberg's crash I do like 😝

noble ice
# dusk shard Even worse, the way it handles the whole “everyone has prejudice” issue is that,...

Yeah but
the thing about that type of person lol
is that. They watch it. And jump on the hate of it. And come away feeling like they’re enlightened about race. In a “The movie was bad and wrong and misguided. Actually racism/racism like this doesn’t exist At All.”
The thing about a certain type of person is, no matter What, they’re gonna come away with a bonkers idea about race and any other so-called social issue you can think of.

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I need to rewatch. The thing about modern film critique is it is very anti-“Obvious”/“Overt”/On The Nose”/Preachy” and all that stuff, which the movie was accused of, we’re told equals “Bad” filmmaking. The thing about racism in real life is it is
insidiously imperceptible to a ton of people. What with microaggressions and what have you that are specific to any particular demo and often only raise the antenna of That demo. That are constantly being repackaged and sold in digestible, politically concocted and good-sounding ways for the masses (Hi, All Lives Matter). Not to mention how easy it is to say “Race (gender, orientation) had NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.”
I’m a firm believer that sometimes some anvils need to be dropped. Especially in a medium like film it’s going to be a B to get a point across with something as mercurially slippery as modern racism. It’s why so many works about the subject are set in the Past, when everything was Extremely out in the open and, for lack of a better word, dramatizable.
I think people walk away feeling superior to this movie
not because they have a real world, nuanced take on the realities of racism in the world
but literally because they think it doesn’t exist. And this film, for any flaws it has
shows it
existing.
Yeah. I’ve always thought it got a bad rap. Like I said I have to rewatch đŸ€·đŸżâ€â™‚ïž

candid linden
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Those are some good points, I am definitely in agreeance that via 2023 - it lacking any form of subtlety or nuance definitely contributed to how sour I was on it. I'm curious how you'll feel after the rewatch!

fervent epoch
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Liked it back in high school where they first showed it. Then realized it's a "I'm 14 and this is deep" material when i got older.

I don't hate since there are good performancea and sequences, but as a whole it doesn't really have anything interesting or provocative to say about racism, Los Angeles, or the human condition.

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Compared to material tackled by Spike Lee where he is abrasive how the system and personal biases divide and destroy communities and people's souls. It's done with style, confidence, humor, and energy like a well shaken, mixed alcoholic drink.

Crash in comparison is like a water bottle. Easy, but nothing stirs you up.

noble bough
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Yeah, it’s a bummer it wasn’t compared to a Spike Lee joint on the pod.

quaint leaf
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I needed to decide if I would watch the movie before listening to the pod. I watched a 3 minute trailer and was already exhausted 2 minutes in. It felt like watching the whole thing would be like attending a mandatory 16 hour cultural sensitivity training sandwiched between two days of trauma first aid and another two days of corporate budget approvals and accounting processes.

quaint leaf
# summer kayak Honestly, if there was a societal issue in 2005 that merited "gotta support this...

Is “it adresses a timely and important issue” a good reason to give a movie an award though?
I can see that being a tie breaker but ultimately shouldn’t it be about is it a good movie. I dislike the recurring phenomena of “Oscar bait” movies where filmmakers try to reverse engineer what the voters will think is relevant rather than just telling a good story.
I go to the movies to be entertained, not lectured to.

summer kayak
spiral cypress
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I just rewatched the movie after probably sixteen years or so (I didn't see it in the theater, but I don't think it was long after it went to home video) and took some notes:

Clever twist, that the one guy recites a whole litany of reasons they should be offended by Sandra Bullock's reaction to their presence, before whipping out their guns and carjacking the couple.

The Kevin Dillon/Thandie Newton scene is a powerful depiction of how abuse of power doesn't always leave someone dead, beaten, or in police custody. And there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it because they were in fact guilty of a crime (one I myself have committed multiple times).

It's hard to have much sympathy for the shop owner, as the locksmith clearly communicated to him what he needed to do, and the guy obviously understood given the way he reacted, he just didn't believe him and thought he was pulling some kind of scam even though he collected no money and didn't recommend anyone else. (I do feel sympathy for his wife, who was not there and did not participate in his bullheaded negligence.)

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Is it a real thing, that they have some cops drive solo while others have partners? If a partner isn't really needed, it seems like a waste to have them in any cars; if they are needed, why would they have any solo cars? Are those sent to investigate less serious crimes, maybe?

Interesting that both Rhodeys are in this movie.

Great shot, slowly zooming in on the dumpster.

Oh man, that scene with the fire approaching the car was super intense.

One fair criticism of the film is that sometimes characters fire tendentious ("frank") monologues at each other that just wouldn't happen IRL (like the white assistant DA talking to the Black detective). This is probably a Mamet influence, but Mamet is more skilled and even he doesn't always pull it off.

Beautiful shot near the end of the film when the daughter enters her dad's shop late at night: all the reflective surfaces and everything look gorgeous.

Nice callback to the earlier "Discovery Channel" exposition, when the young cop burns his car. I guess he will report it stolen? Hard to explain what happened to it otherwise.

Final thoughts:

Sure, Crash is not as good as Magnolia or Short Cuts, but not many movies are. I appreciate having more filmmakers working in this "hyperlink" subgenre, and this is a good one even if it isn't a masterpiece.

I don't believe it's the best film of 2005 (BTW, why do some sources say its release year is 2004?), as I ranked it fourth-best of the year, after Closer, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Vera Drake. But none of those were even nominated for Best Picture. I saw all the nominees except Capote, and none of them came close to Crash in my opinion.

noble bough
# spiral cypress Is it a real thing, that they have some cops drive solo while others have partne...

I can speak to the solo/partner cars. Police in my city are expected to have a back-up/secondary before they interfere/engage in scene but aren't partnered and drive their own vehicle. I think it's cheaper and easier to get more cars than more police. So when a dispatcher calls out a for a dispatch, usually one police with a car will respond, and another officer in a different car will respond as "backup". It's fairly common there's book keeping or transport to do after a call, so the primary will finish out a call and the secondary will go on another call, either as primary or secondary.

Traffic stops do not fall under this umbrella, as they are mostly police initiated rather than dispatched to. I don't know the specific rules regarding them, as I've only worked as dispatcher.

spiral cypress
river barn
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Anytime I've been pulled over for a traffic violation there's always 2 or more cop cars on scene

summer kayak
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I think I was pulled over by a single cop once.

spiral cypress
noble bough
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Only one time I can recall two cops pulling me over they were in separate cars.(I ran a red light in a rural location in the middle of the night) But our city has had a police retention problem for a decade+. They do run plates asap, and if the plates have a record they’ll bring in the nearest available car.

supple crest
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I've been pulled over by single cops plenty of times. It's going to depend on the unit. Highway patrol is often alone.

river barn
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I was just pulled over by highway patrol coming home from a wedding a couple of months ago. Pulled me over for speeding and decided to use me as a teaching tool for some newbie cops to learn how to go through all the sobriety tests. There were at least 4 cars there, it was a party.

My hometown was very low with crime but due to its location (right over the GWB) 5 separate forces had jurisdiction there. And since there was no crime they had fuck-all to do but harass teenagers.

summer kayak
spiral cypress
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Ok, now my feedback on the podcast episode.

Oh, that was the rapper Ludacris? I have definitely heard of him, but I guess I didn't know what he looked like. He's a really good actor!

Interesting that Haggis said his aim was to f**k with people, particularly liberals. That is definitely what Donald Glover was up to in the reparations episode of Atlanta last year.

Paul seemed put off by Ludacris just dumping the trafficking victims on the streets of LA, but he had them caged in a stolen van. I don't see it working out well for him if he took them to the authorities. At least he refused to sell them, took them to Chinatown rather than some other random location, and gave them some cash to get some food. $40 isn't a lot (about $62 after adjusting for inflation), but it was probably most of what he had, and if they share they could get some food in their bellies. (My concern was more whether the guy he gave the money to was actually going to share.)

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I disagree with Paul and Amy about the Ryan Philippe character. He wasn't entirely wrong to think the kid was laughing at him--maybe not in that moment, but definitely when he said he had just written a country song (which he had, but one that intensely mocked the whole idea of country). And when he was pulling the statue out his pocket, he was yelling in an aggressive, angry tone.

I'm not saying he deserved to be shot, but the way it all went down made sense to me: the scene clearly wasn't intended to depict a sudden transformation of Philippe from an enlightened guy to a trigger-happy bigot, but something more in a grey area where it unfolded in a tragic manner and Philippe is definitely going to be wracked with guilt about it, which will hopefully keep him on the path of being a more enlightened cop. And I think Haggis succeeded in what he was going for there.

It's a very tricky needle to thread, so it's impressive IMO how well he pulled it off. How many movies show one character killing another while leaving you feeling sympathetic to both of them? The only one that comes to mind is in Pulp Fiction, but even there, Tarantino didn't have the extra combustible element of race injected into the middle of the scene (thankfully, because IMO that is QT's Achilles heel).

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Paul looks askance at Sandra Bullock only discovering warmth toward a Hispanic person when it benefits her, like that's not realistic; but then he immediately points out how this actually does play out with politicians who are anti-gay until they discover a close relative is gay. I do agree with Amy that it would have been better for her maid to give us the impression that "you're not my best friend" (which, in fairness, is a misquote: she said "you're my only friend").

All the changes Paul suggested would make the screenplay worse, IMO. He keeps saying he wants it to be "more nuanced", but his changes would make it less nuanced IMO, so I find that a strange argument. [And then later in the pod, Amy pushes back gently against Paul in a similar vein to what I am saying: listen for about 90 seconds starting at 1:10:00, up to "...is a lesser movie".]

In the actual scenario in the film, the white cop was innocent, and the Black detective really wanted to clear him, even passing up a plum job (he only changed his mind to save his brother, which is understandable). If Cheadle's character was also white, then this storyline would be a lot more problematic; but as is, it made for an effective twist whereas what Amy sounded like she would prefer would be far more pedestrian and programmatic.

I think Amy's read on the burning car scene is better than Paul's. The scene is very nuanced.

Oh god, but then Amy lost me when she said The Blind Side is basically Sandra Bullock doing Crash again. I don't know how I got roped into watching TBS, but I did see it--and that movie is straight trash in my opinion, in no way comparable to Crash.

They talked at the end about doing Slumdog Millionaire. My least favorite Best Picture winner, ever.

That's funny that Brendan Fraser consistently speaks in that affected manner in interviews.

Dennis Hopper on TV? Would watch!

fierce shore
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First time watching in a long time. What a lazy script. Genuinely disliked it. Maybe they could have made a smaller movie focusing on only a few story elements, but that probably wouldn't have worked.

fierce shore
fierce shore
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So given how Haggis was a TV writer, I wonder if that's partially why the script feels the way it does. It's six shallow plots. Any one of them would be fine for tv, but in a movie, he puts them all in.

fierce shore
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Actually, Amy says the same point at the end. I hadn't gotten there yet.

summer kayak
digital tide
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Have no real opinions but can I say just how much I dislike Gwen stefanis music then and now?

noble bough
summer kayak
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I still like some old school No Doubt.

digital tide
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That's different. Love old Skool no doubt!!!

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Hollaback girl is awful

summer kayak
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Hmm, The Sweet Escape is a pretty catchy one.

river barn
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i was about to say, Sweet Escape and What You Waiting For? are great

digital tide
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đŸ€·

Go nuts. 😉

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I like her on Moby Southside.

noble bough
fervent epoch
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So what's been Paul Haggis been up to? I know he's written some of the James Bond films.

summer kayak
digital tide
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Amy briefly touched in that early in the EP iirc. Sexual assault or abuse allegations? Or harassment

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It's so cringe to me that he made this as a high ranking member of scientology

I have so rarely heard Paul here or on HDTGM be this pissed at a text. I love it

candid linden
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Yeah I can't recall the exact charge but it was serious and he was recently found guilty

elfin cypress
summer kayak
candid linden
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Ah good correction, you're right

river barn
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finally getting to this. I'm 15 minutes in and, hoo, this is rough so far

river barn
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omg that was awful. genuinely baffled at what the film was trying to do.

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it was like someone rewrote Clerks but all of Randall's rants were the most shallow takes on racism ever and presented unironically

river barn
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Listening to the podcast: Nice shoutout to Bamboozled from Paul! I saw that movie for the first time last year and it's a really great hidden gem. Would be a great one for them to cover.

spiral cypress
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I still think this movie is pretty great. Nothing really too new to add but since there is so much intense negativity about it in the thread, I wanted to sprinkle a little bit of positivity back in.

fierce shore
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I think there's still time to vote in the poll

spiral cypress