Slowly Going Bald

When I clicked on this at Pajiba, I just scrolled down to see if you would bash Return of the King.

yep

If I had known the Mystic River vitriol would have piled up like that, I wouldn't have gotten on early and voiced my objection to that one. Anyway, I thought the rest of the piece (and even that piece, really, despite my difference of opinion) was excellent. And I think most of the commenters feel the same, even though, yeah, there's some kind of Mystic River beehive out there that you definitely hit with a rake.

Oh, I also kind of liked Ordinary People, even though it is kind of schlocky -- but you're right that Raging Bull deserved to beat it.

Cool idea for a guide. I'm trying to think of my next one.

Oh, my. That YouTube clip is tremendous. I hadn't watched it before I commented. Thanks for sharing.

I haven't paid much attention to the comments, but I'm distressed to learn there's a contingent of Mystic River haters out there.

I don't know if Crash deserves all the bashing. Yeah, it's pretentious to "give" all the answers. And it had Sandra Bullock in it. And many other faults. But it also had two young intelligent black men who actually DO rob people. And a white man calling a Middle-Eastern man "Osama" and losing his temper? Is that really that much of a stretch in post 9/11 America? And the word "fuck" dominating a heated exchange in a car chase and one after it? The narrator wasn't actually in the same situation. So I don't think he'd know. Howard's character's wife was molested earlier in the film by a white cop- which put an immense strain on their relationship. After that, and being held at gun point, he acts... well, differently from the snarky video editor who's uploading a clip on YouTube while cracking jokes.
I think this film has shown a lot of behavior and type of conversation that aren't cinematic, nor apologetic. But they are there in real life. Saying it's all an exaggeration is ignoring the truth.

I have tried to understand the white hot Pajiba hate for Crash since the beginning, but after watching the above clip... I am only left with the words pompous and sheltered.
Your reasoning is as obscure to me as this movie seems to have been for you.

Eek. At the risk of turning Dan's blog into a battleground, I'll just say that for me, the problem with Crash wasn't just that it had oversimplified thoughts about racism, but that the script was just ridiculously engineered to bring about certain absurd situations and reversals so that it could make its points. I just thought it was clumsy. I don't think you have to be overly sheltered -- Dan lives in L.A., and I live in New York, another place where people of different ethnicities interact with each other every day -- in order to think the movie just didn't do a good job on its own terms.

Great clip - plus now I don't have to watch the movie.

All anyone really needs to know about racism can be learned from watching this Heartfelt, touching and thoughtful piece of television (now out on DVD):
http://www.tv.com/its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia/the-gang-gets-racist/episode/455281/summary.html?tag=ep_list;ep_title;0

IS THAT MY DAUGHTER IN THERE???

Kevin,

I hope you aren't mocking Sean Penn's awesomeness with that comment.

Sarah

See, it was the engineering of the script that I loved - the heightened, Dickens-esque plot twists and coincedences worked really, really well for me as a kind of throwback to that kind of writing. And applying that style to a pretty straightforward representation of the many faces of racism? To me, THAT was the film's genius.

Flatout hilarious.

I agree with you on most of your choices, especially Titanic and the Scorsese upsets... but Mississippi Burning? That is the absolute nadir of "white man saves the black man" movies, in which white people, fictionalized into heroes (though in real life, the white government agents didn't want to get involved), champion the helpless black people, who are all one-dimensional victims, and who are not represented by a single major character in a film allegedly about civil rights (if IMDb is accurate, the first black actor is TENTH in the credits). HATED that movie.

Goddammit, Dan. You make it so hard for me to legitimately like Crash. Can't a girl just be a sucker for a silly plot and good acting? Can't she? 'Cause that scene when Dillon pulls Newton out of the burning car gets me every time.

But still, damn you, 'cause now I'll have to pawn the DVD off this weekend.