Howard Who?

So I’m pleased to inform you that three of the films nominated for best picture were also in my top 8 of 2005. Brokeback is perhaps the one truly great film that will be seen as a cultural cornerstone. Every future debate about gay cinema will include Brokeback. Every future debate about the merits of its principal and supporting actors will include Brokeback. Every future discussion about the liberal tendencies of Hollywood will include it. But most importantly, every discussion of thoughtful, elegant, and evocative cinema will and should include it. Capote is also great in its well-executed examination of the creative mind and its unintended evils. Anchored with a great performance, it is perhaps last year’s best biopic (despite having liked Walk the Line as well). And Munich knocks everything you thought about Spielberg away. He comes out with guns blazing as he shows ideas, characters, and stories so dark that they only breed paranoia. It is the most questioning film of the season that says something counter to the popular mood.

 So what didn’t I pick? Good Night, and Good Luck is an excellent film in its own right with its dream cast, cool cinematography, and near factual retelling of a major moment in our political history. But the fact remains that it is not as complex as the films above. In fact, it’s almost like an art film for the masses. The jazz sequences, where Dianne Reeves graces a recording studio with her tactile voice, come out of nowhere and seems to scream just how tasteful this movies believes it is. Much of the dialogue is taken straight from Edward Murrow’s mouth and channeled into David Straithairn’s. I can appreciate the look and the relatively obscure topic, but it sheds little light on what actually happened and focuses instead on a homerun moment in time for liberalism in this country. You want to root for them, but their victory is so inevitable that it’s overkill. Respectable but not great.

 That leaves of course Crash, perhaps the worst movie in recent history to get a nomination for best picture. It is a classic example of unfocused drivel. It has no point to make other than race relations are hopelessly strained and symbiotic. The characters are not there to be people, but to become symbols of various ethnic groups that play out their own stereotypes in supposedly surprising ways. More importantly, this is not a film of our time, but a film for a previous generation, the Baby Boomers. Hence why Ebert finds it so thoughtful and progressive. Because to him progress still revolves around the black versus white debate. The film takes place in Los Angeles, and if anything, the Latino and Asian debate are the most progressive and need to be addressed. And it plays against comfortable Baby Boomer existence by showing us some gritty but verbose black thugs, the home life of a Latino locksmith, and Persians who are persecuted wrongly for being Arabs. The reality is that in Los Angeles all these people live side by side, enclave by enclave. As an Angeleno, you can just drive around town and end up in the epicenter of various different ethnicities and races. The film, however, doesn’t show us the geography of racism or the relative calm of our spread out city. It shows something gritty and immediately satisfying to the latent LA-noir impulse we have to show just how corrupt people’s hearts and minds are. In Haggis’ world, everyone’s actions are dictated by race. After a while this formula gets tiresome. You half expect someone to trash a pot of black coffee just for being black. While Munich and Brokeback were both accused heavily of being polemics, Crash is definitely one, an annoying one at that, and hopefully we will go back to remembering that Crash was actually a David Cronenberg film.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 11:07 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.