'I'm beginning to feel like a potted plant...'

[waitsjunkie]

Thursday started with a visit to the rheumatologist. I wish I could say she had really good news for me, but she didn't. The short version of the visit is with my predisposition to arthritis and with my joints being hypermobile there's a good chance that the arthritis won't be going away and will be a chronic thing.  I'm less than pleased about

Comments

Crash

[ogrevi]

Yeah, not really one to enjoy. It is, as I said, grotesque. Exquisitely grotesque, but still very hard to watch in places. May I share what my favorite movie critic, Joe Bob Briggs, wrote about it?

This is the rarest of films, the kind that actually changes your own ideas of what it means to be human. If you let it, of course.
Many people didn't. When Cronenberg first showed the sparse seventy-seven-page script to his agent, the agent said, "Do not do this movie. It will end your career." Christopher Tookey, in the Daily Mail of London, said the film was "the point at which even a liberal society should draw the line" because all it offers is "the morality of the satyr, the nymphomaniac, the rapist, the pedophile, the danger to society." Tookey was especially upset by the sex scenes, because "the initially heterosexual characters lose their inhibitions [and] they experiment pleasurably with gay sex, lesbian sex, and sex with cripples."...Alexander Walker, in the London Evening Standard, called it "a movie beyond the bounds of

Re: Crash

[waitsjunkie]

I don't think I really agree with those reviewers either. The film was a bot ugly in places, but it certainly wasn't meaningless. Personally, I'm a longtime fan of Roger Ebert and tend to agree with him about 90% of the time. In this case he said ``Crash'' is about characters entranced by a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has. Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result. Take out the cars, the scars, the crutches and scabs and wounds, and substitute the usual props of sex films, and you'd have a porno movie. But ``Crash'' is anything but pornographic: It's about the human mind, about the way we grow enslaved by the particular things that turn us on, and forgive ourselves our trespasses.'And I think I agree. The film seemed to me like it was exploring fetishes and the way people can become entranced by them and go to extremes to fulfil their desires from a position that most people would be able to watch subjectively instead of getting turned on by it the way they might be a normal erotic film. But

Re: Crash

[ogrevi]

Yeah, I suppose there are people who are turned on by Crash, but I don't think that's the general reaction.
I got into an internet discussion once involving this movie. We were talking about Naked Lunch and how it was rated R for "bizarre sexuality." Someone asked if that had really happened and we all told him, yes, that's true. Sometimes films freak the old hens at the MPAA out enough that they slap that silly-sounding label on them. So the guy asked what other films had gotten the label. We were able to name four: Crash, sex, lies, and videotape, Secretary, and Naked Lunch. Common denominator? All of them were directed by Cronenberg, starred James Spader, or both. Maybe the MPAA should just make an automatic "Cronenberg/Spader Label" to save themselves the horror of actually watching any of these movies.

Re: Crash

[waitsjunkie]

Also, I'm not sure what I made of the final scene. I was a bit confused by it to be perfectly frank. My best guess would be that James was so succumbed by his obsession that he was either trying to kill or cripple Catherine and was turned on by the notion of either happening to her. Regardless of whether it did, he still enjoyed the crash and got off on it. What did you take from it?