4 result(s) tagged “Crash”

Final thoughts on Crash at the Oscars:

• From Roger Ebert.

• From his Web site’s editor, Jim Emerson, who also offers this nugget about the recent disconnect between Best Picture and Best Director winners:

  “Perhaps the professional membership of the Academy is, in a roundabout way, distinguishing a kind of authorial vision from lesser directorial efforts when it separates the Steven Spielbergs from the John Maddens, the Roman Polanskis from the Rob Marshalls, the Ang Lees from the Paul Haggises ... “

• And Emerson again and yet again. (I like Mr. Emerson.)
• And, surely, this is a joke. Right?

What the hell is happening with the delayed polarization that Crash has engendered? Nobody got terribly worked up about Paul Haggis’ sincere, overstuffed race-relations drama when it was released in April. But as the buzz started building that Crash might (gasp!) win the Best Picture Oscar, indignation showed its ugly face.

Blogger Anthony Kaufman makes an astute observation about the divided critical reaction to Paul Haggis’ Oscar-nominated Crash: “According to the top-ten lists available, not a single critic who resides in New York or Los Angeles placed Crash in their top five. ... So the vast majority of Crash fans come from everywhere in between.” Kaufman concludes that this is a function of the movie being simple and unsophisticated.

I rarely complain that a movie is too short, but Paul Haggis’ Crash is too short. I don’t mean that I didn’t want it to end — quite the contrary. Instead, I mean that at 113 minutes it’s overcrowded, rushed, and skeletal, all to the degree that it’s only intermittently credible.