Reviews

Your assessment of this movie depends completely on what you are looking for. If you come to this film without any knowledge of who and what and why, it will be disappointing. But if you approach the film not as a movie in the regular sense but as an historical document of a moment in time, then it becomes an entirely different experience. In this sense it helps to understand what is being documented and who these people are. Some working knowledge of the late 70s NYC downtown scene, the Mudd Club, T.V. Party, the lower east side art boom, the post-punk music world, etc. gives you a much greater sense of appreciation. Understood historically and not just as another film, whether the movie works as a traditional film, whether the plot is interesting or the characters well developed (a tricky proposition seeing that the original dialogue was lost and had to be re-dubbed) doesn't matter. What you are seeing is the last truly avant garde art and music scene in the US before AIDS, money, MTV and the rest destroyed it. And it focuses on someone right at the center of the storm, Basquiat before his rise to international fame. (Another commentator questioned Basquiat's cultural credibility, but I'm not sure what culture he is talking about). Beyond that the musical performances are exceptional and rare and are worth the price of admission by themselves. This is a portrait of something lost and timeless. It is a fascinating historical document and should be appreciated as such.

Too many movie critics are wanna-be pundits. They seem bored with their profession and spend a disproportionate amount of time with their reviews trying to make political or cultural observations or in a vain search for novelty that can alleviate their own lack of enthusiasm. The point is that critics are supposed to review a film with some sense of what it is trying to be. Night at the Museum was intended to be a fun, family-oriented movie. That it wasn't Citizen Kane or the Seventh Seal, that critics were too self-important to enjoy such a movie, etc., should not have been the point. Rather the point should have been if we, the unwashed movie-going audience, would like the film. Having seen it on cable this week I actually enjoyed it a lot. As the film made 250 million dollars domestically despite lukewarm reviews, it seems a lot of other people liked it too. Critics exist supposedly as a service to the audience. It would therefore be nice if critics kept an audience's expectations and desires in mind when writing their reviews.

I caught this one on television and I liked it quite a bit. Is it a great film? No. But it was a good film and was solidly entertaining. There is a distinction I make between a good television movie and a good theater movie. A good television movie is not a movie with substandard production values; the production values for this film are actually quite good. Instead it is a film that for whatever reason just seems more satisfying on TV at home than after all the hassle of going to a theater, paying 20 bucks, being generally irritated, etc. It does nothing groundbreaking. All it does is entertain. The film has Vikings, swords, battles, barbarian hordes-all the ingredients of a healthy, long-running, well deserved cable television life, the type of film that plays on television twenty years after its release.

Crash is in essence a glossed up remake of Grand Canyon. The premise is the same: a racially diverse group of people in Los Angeles who live separate lives are thrown together by coincidence. But for these coincidences, their lives would never intersect. Every interaction in Crash is racial in a way that hits the audience over the head with the movie's theme. Racism in Crash is a matter of not being treated with sensitivity. People are meant to endure the "tryanny" of being insulted. The people in Crash, like Grand Canyon, live lives of unremitting grimness that seems gratuitous. The movie suggests that if only people would be more racially sensitive, life would not be so grim. The oppression of having to actual endure racial insensitivity is unintentionally juxtaposed with lives that don't seem that bad. I definitely got the impression that the film writer (who can stand in for most of the Hollywood establishment) projects his own personal racial isolation on the world at large. This accounts for the film's superficial take on the subject. People who actually interact with people from other racial and socio-economic backgrounds know that life is not so gratuitously race-obsessed. The Magnolia-like editing of the film means that the characterizations in the film are not nuanced. We see only a sliver of their lives. The one exception is Dillon's character, but none of the other actors did anything remarkable. The film does have some decent plot twists. The film is well done, but is style over substance. A decent film, but not an Oscar-worthy one.