Hacker CinemaCrash
Crash
2004 · Film · short · 5 min
Directed by David Moore
Doug and Phil are mates from way back growing up on the edge of a knife in rural Australia. Doug is the local up and coming football hero, Phil is the different one, who doesn't fit in. One very drunken evening in front of the TV something happens and the code is broken and inevitable crash must happen.
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19 comments on Hacker News
As with most self-congratulatory inter-industry awards, the Oscars are mostly a joke. Obviously, lots of good films get recognition from The Academy but you can glance at the number of titles in any given year winning piles of Oscars and then disappearing into the mists of time because they were trash that hit all the buttons and played the game.
The most notorious of recent memory is Crash, a film you probably haven't heard of if you're just casually into film (or a sicko like me lol)
It was at least a good film. Unlike Crash, which was just horribly bad
The Oscars often don't agree with critics, either. I don't think anyone had Ordinary People, Dances with Wolves, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, Crash, Green Book, even CODA at #1 on their year-end best of list. Best Picture is usually going to favor something that is at least serious enough that the voters don't feel like children for loving it, i.e. they're never going to award a tentpole or franchise entry, sci-fi, fantasy, horror genre-type stuff will only very rarely even be considered, but they're also going to favor relatively inoffensive, unchallenging, often feel good work that isn't particularly novel or ground-breaking, which is more what critics will lean toward. They also have a tendency to reward message movies and films about filmmaking and Hollywood itself, even if no one likes them.
That was the thing that got me to sign up for Apple TV+ and I was shocked by what a terrible film CODA turned out to be. Just complete schlock. I put it up there with "Crash" among films that won Best Picture purely due to lack of candidates that year.
I tried to watch some of the stuff they were heavily promoting, but couldn't get into them. Shining Girls is really bad. Tehran, a 3rd-party adaptation from Israel, is Netflix-grade trash that strains one's ability to suspend disbelief. Adding Glenn Close, an elderly American WASP, as a Mossad agent, did nothing to make this weird Israeli propaganda vehicle more believable.
Anyway these are all matters of taste but objectively I believe Apple TV+ has very few subs, which was my main point. It doesn't seem like a massive advertising opportunity.
I think J.G. Ballard said everything that could be said about this in his 2004 Academy Award winning film "Crash"
You're right. There are certainly some "make you think" movies that win for their portentousness and are promptly forgotten ("Crash" and "The English Patient" -- lookin' at you).
I ran the Google Cinema Club for 10 years. In all that time, no one ever asked for those movies, and we never even seriously considered them.
On the other hand, "The Princess Bride" was constantly being requested, as was "Office Space." There was some reason we couldn't show them; can't remember now what it was.
film critics tend to be "connoisseurs" which means that they prise the unusual, technical or some other subtle feature that's only really obvious after lots of repeat viewing.
Not only that, they are intensely competitive to heap praise on cool stuff and dump shit on stuff that's not "cool"
For example Crash one the best picture oscar in 2006. Its a shit film. Yes it talks about racism, and that perhaps the racist isn't that bad because he's got a sick dad. But still he can feel up a black woman though, thats allowed.
Its just such an unsatisfying movie.
near that time https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cumulative/released-in-2006 all these came out, and there are some genuinley entertaining movies in there. V for vendetta, The queen, casino royal
All sorts.
But the critics loved crash because it was "brave"
was it fuck. It was a mashed about script that barely survived the gazillion re-writes and "tweaks" from producers that have more money than sense.
In short, most critics should be ignored, and placed in the same bin that contains "film theorists"
As someone who was both forced to take a film theory module in uni, and then went to work in the movies for ten years, I can firmly tell you that film thoery is mostly wank
1) author theory. Nope, its a massive team effort, no such thing
2) Feminism in hollywood: there is none. there are like 6 female directors of rank, of which at least two are only there because of their dad. Most screen writers are male as well. Any female script will be "tightend" by a committee of men, you known to make it sell.
It was up against the biopic of the Williams sisters' father "King Richard", Japanese film "Drive My Car", Stephen Spielberg's remake of "West Side Story", and gay western "The Power of the Dog".
Perhaps the last was the second time such a film has been snubbed by the Academy, after "Brokeback Mountain" was infamously passed over by "Crash" in 2005.
The (forgettable) film Crash with Sandra Bullock won Best Picture in the mid-2000s... but it's mostly (for the first half or so) a sanitized, watered down, far less daring or interesting version of Magnolia, which is an absolutely brilliant film.
Yes, it was puzzling for me too. I mean, there was this movie "Crash" once. The plot and the motivations, all so completely alien to my own culture.
Look harder. Try to catch the part that is never told, because it is too hard to be told.
But once it falls into place, your standard model will start to make sense. Americans are no different humans than any others, well, duh.
I would suggest Crash, IMHO the best film on racism ever made.
Probably 'Crash'. Yes I know it's contrived, cheesy, and everything else. But I thought it did a pretty good job of explaining the fact that everyone you meet is having their own struggles, and to a lesser extent why some people act the way they do.
Also, Run Lola Run. It was the first movie I'd seen that showed how each seemingly small thing you do each day affects outcomes.
The premise of the movie Crash (Academy Award winner) is that these glass and steel objects insulate the various cultures and races from each other... until they crash into each other.
This is a massive delay of a reply, but I liked this response so much, I felt I needed to respond.
So, I think you've done a good job on listing modern narratives, but there are others, such as everything from the Sopranos and the Wire to Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy where those good/evil distinctions start to blur. You could possibly fit Walter White into the "good who is forever corrupted", but it's tough to say if he was ever good. He was already a somewhat petty, jealous man who was still bitter and jealous of his friends' success. And he was also the victim of some crap circumstances. Or you can look at a movie like Crash (2004 one) at the characters there. How do you fit Matt Dillon's atrocious and racist cop into also being the same guy who can be an amazing hero to even those he victimized? I mention that to say, depending on how you wish to view a narrative, modern or ancient, it can be either very binary or very nuanced.
Death, and Hades, are both judged and thrown in the lake of fire in Revelation 20:14, which seem to be the culmination of His punishments. I’m probably reading a lot into that, but it seems to be describing them as both concepts and individuals.
Ultimately, I would say that the binary definitions of good and evil go back into antiquity, but in some cases, I believe the haziness you see may be down to the ancient mind focusing on a different chunk of the spectrum of virtue than our modern minds. So perhaps, in the same way we emphasize compassion, love, kindness and bravery, etc. an ancient culture might have emphasized honor, fidelity, holiness, courage, etc. But in those cases, I’d say it’s just as binary, but we can haze it up because we hear some violation of modern tropes that the ancients would have ignored.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. If I may, I think that you have taken U.S. sensational news stories and popular movies as your entire context of the U.S. Since nobody else is respecting your point of view, I'll share.
1. Smoking tobacco is seen as a mild taboo, but many people still do it. As long as the smoking is done outside and away from a main entrance, it's unlikely anyone will comment.
2. A large amount of people are addicted to prescription opiates, but if you go to New Mexico or Ohio, it's not going to look like a scene out of The Walking Dead. The total amount of addicted people is estimated to be 2 million [1]. Out of 300 million people, it means that this tragedy is hidden unless you personally know an affected person. By the way, many in California are affected by this issue.
3. Tobacco isn't considered a "gateway" to cannabis use by experts or credible laypeople. Tobacco users and Cannabis users have little relation or overlap.
4. Cannabis is usually introduced in the same manner as alcohol (at parties or small gatherings of friends), though alcohol is far more socially acceptable. Cannabis has never been primarily considered a "trippy" drug in the U.S. ---though there are many people who do use it that way--- it's more of a recreational substance. Cannabis use has declined among the under 18-year-olds over the past decade, but has increased among adults.
4. There are many methamphetamine and heroin addicts in absolute numbers, but again, they do not dominate any metropolitan area. Sure, it is easy to find addicts among homeless populations, but it isn't like Crash, Breaking Bad, or The Wire in terms of pervasiveness and intensity.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html
The thing is, if you're not doing some sort of incredibly bloated production, you don't need 10,000 people to make a movie. Most movies are NOT Lord of the Rings.
For instance, one of the best critically received movies of the last decade was probably No Country For Old Men. Budget? $25 million. Made back well over triple that at the US box office alone.
The King's Speech? $15 million, made over $135 million
Argo? $44 million, and that had lots of expensive location shoots in the middle east
The Hurt Locker? $15 million
Slumdog Millionaire? $15 million
Crash? $6.5 million
Million Dollar Baby? $30 million
All movies that did very well at the box office, and were made for $25 million or less (with one exception). They also all won the Best Picture oscar. So there is PLENTY of evidence that you can make a great movie without getting anywhere near a 9-figure price tag.
Of course, for "indie" films, you can go well under that. "Clerks" cost about as much a new car. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre was barely over $100k....the first Saw movie was made for just over $1m and grossed 100 times that.
It's not that most current AAA games or movies are good, it's just that I think we tend to see past ones with rose colored glasses, and to compare best of "the past" (decades) with "the present" (a few years), which is clearly unbalanced.
I was never a big fan of playing games for their stories or characters; I value gameplay over almost everything, preferring mindless fun (e.g. Metal Slug) or multiplayer games, but Portal 1 & 2 are certainly better than most of the big budget games I remember playing.
As for movies since the 2000, sure you have crap like those, but you also have decent movies like (from the top of my head) the Coen brothers', the Eternal Sunshine, Mulholland Drive, Children of Men or Crash. Were the previous decades much better? I don't think so.
The story brought to mind the movie Crash (2004). I remember thinking "wow, this is basically just manipulating me as a viewer to bring a tear to my eye" – and it worked, just as this story did.
Your post reminded me of a quote from the movie Crash I thought I'd share.
"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."