Asif Khan (asifahsankhan)
To put it mildly, Crash is a movie that you can either accept or you can't. You are either able to see beyond the trappings presented on the outside, or all you see is the outside. I'm not going to say that you either get it or you don't, because that would be wrong. However, Crash is a film that has been polarising since it was screened for the first time. With that comes a certain idea of what the film is, and all I can say is that the people who take the negative view on Crash are selling the creative mind of David Cronenberg criminally short.If you heard that Crash is all about sex and car crashes, then you heard correctly, but you also heard wrong. The sex and the car crashes are windows into the true story that Cronenberg wants to tell. The ideas he wants to examine are laid out for the viewer through the sex and car crashes. To look at the sex and see only sex, or to look at the car crashes and see only car crashes is to deny what is under the surface of the entire film.What is under the surface you ask, emotion and what it means to us is the simplest answer. That's the problem with this review, I'm doing my best to keep this review and not be long winded. Crash doesn't make that easy, it is a complex and thought provoking film, the type that I could write about for paragraph after paragraph. I am fighting the impulse to break the film down in a massively thorough style, but at the same time I hope that by holding myself back I'm not giving the movie the short end of the stick.Okay, that slight case of being sidetracked is behind me, let's get back to the point at hand. Crash is about emotion, the emotion that we experience in our everyday lives. Sex is nothing but heightened emotion, and on that note so are violent acts, death, and so on. Sex is a deeply emotional and personal act, but that doesn't mean it is an act that is individualistic. We get a charge out of sex because it involves more than just ourselves, the same is true of violence. There is an animal power in both, an animal power driven by the emotions and the people present. Crash asks a few simple questions, where do we draw the line on acceptability and should there be any line?Cronenberg directs Crash so that it is dripping with sex. What he does with atmosphere is brilliant. There are moments when the movie isn't sexual in any way, but he has so ingrained sex into the atmosphere that the audience begins to ascribe sexual connotations to every moment of the film. If, as we try to tell ourselves on a daily basis, sex doesn't dominate our lives then why do we so easily view non-sexual scenes as sexual? The camera also fluctuates, at times Cronenberg lets the camera play the role of an observant stalker. At other times he unleashes the camera like a predator on the hunt. The camera ends up leering and slinking about just as much as it is on its hind legs ready to strike. This creates an interesting quandary for the viewer. We are left without steady footing, Cronenberg is constantly jostling us around, never giving the viewer a moment to think they are safe and actually understand what is going on or what will happen next.Fighting the urge to go more in-depth with my analysis is very hard, to counter that impulse I'm going to try and touch on a few more things and then call it a day.There is a connection between sex, cars and violence. In real life this connection rarely, if ever, happens at the same time. There are people who jones for sex, violence, violent sex, cars, violent car crashes or sex in a car. Crash is very real in some aspects, but it doesn't concern itself with staying real or honest. Cronenberg isn't interested in exploring what real connections may exist between sex, violence and cars. Rather, he is interested in exploring what those three say about humanity when they are heightened to the next stage in their evolution.The last thing I'd like to touch on is the acting in Crash. It would be very easy to watch Crash and come away thinking that the cast doesn't bother to do much. That couldn't be further from the truth, and I dare say that I have seen very few performances that match that of Elias Koteas as Vaughan. He is a haunted man, but he's an intelligent man, a man who can't be figured out and doesn't stop to allow the audience to understand him at all. Koteas may be the highlight acting wise, but the rest of the cast delivers as well. Deborah Kara Unger is icy cool, monotone at every second, but her brain is always working. She isn't dull, she functions on a higher level, dissecting all her experiences beneath her stoic exterior. Holly Hunter is the true thrill seeker of the bunch, always looking for her next fix, the where and the how doesn't matter, her character trembles in anticipation of the next "act." James Spader is aloof, and maybe that is just the character Spader plays in every role, but it fits perfectly in Crash. Lastly there is Rosanna Arquette's Gabriella, who enjoys her handicap. She views it a badge of honour and as an exhilarating way to explore more of her sexuality. I'm not saying for a second that you have to like any of their characters, but the performances behind those characters leave a lot to like.
Irishchatter
I know it had big stars such as Holly Hunter before she was widely known as Mrs.Incredible in Disney's "The Incredibles" and James Spader before he did his second romantic erotic movie "The Secretary". However, I thought the movie wasn't that great because I didn't really understand the whole story line, I felt it was too rushed and all over the top!I really didn't think Hunter and Spader's characters weren't really the match for each other and it was like, they were forced to do the sex scenes rather than enjoying them in a passionate way. Maybe it would've been better if he was partnered with Maggie Gyllenhaal 6 years earlier, then it would be better in my opinion. Not really a movie that I would find the best erotic movie out there but rather a boring one :/
PimpinAinttEasy
Dear David Cronenberg, I take my hat off to you for making a movie based on Ballard's Crash. It really pushes the limits of what can be put/shown on film. The film was true to the book. You captured the coldness and in-humaneness of these characters who are lost in their sexual fantasies. But like in the book, it is the same sexual fantasy and its variations repeated over and over again. It did get pretty tedious after a while. Ballard wrote this in the introduction to his book - "Crash is an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation." Well, I do spend time at work browsing through pictures of supermodels with whom I would never get to sleep. And I do hold those women up as the ultimate standard of beauty. So that is a bit of an extreme situation as it could lead to disillusionment. I guess this is what Ballard was talking about when he wrote - "the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic, and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape." The actors looked cold, distant and aroused all the time. Best Regards, Pimpin. (6/10)
arminhage
After watching Couple of Cronenberg's films I got to the conclusion that probably he wishes to deliver some sort of improved version of Antonioni's nonsense. Generally his movies are within 100 minutes time frame yet the scenes related to the final resolve of his movies are far less, probably 20%. I say improved version not by his genuine intention. He works in Hollywood so he has to deliver something viable for investors with Hollywood mindset. "Crash" does not follow the acceptable Hollywood cliché which has been created for a reason, to make movies dynamic. The screenplay follows the 10% rule which has to offer the hero an opportunity out of his ordinary life but after that its free ride of total nonsense. Too many unnecessary and irrelevant scenes and rather disgusting emphasis on body fetish and pornographic to lure audience, make it erotic enough to follow the nonsense. I am not against pornography as long as it contributes to the final resolve of the movie but to squeeze such scenes into the movie to lure the audience, I find it insulting to the intelligence of the viewer and that is exactly what Cronenberg does. The movie is boring and hard to watch in one piece with lots of whispering hard to hear dialogue so I recommend watching the movie with subtitles although one would lose nothing if miss some of of the dialogue due to poor audio management. On short, the movie is about bunch of accident victims who developed accident and trauma fetish and that's it from start to finish, some grotesque scenes and too much sex, irrelevant sex.
