Crash (2004, USA)

Paul Haggis’ Crash has risen to the top of many critical top-10 lists, and even earned itself an Oscar win for Best Picture. This acclaim has been won through the film’s supposedly “unflinching” look at contemporary American race relations. Set over the course of a few days in Los Angeles, Crash’s multicultural, multiracial characters all have strong words for their black/white/Latino/Asian/Arab neighbors. This turns out to be a specific problem – what does an audience do with a film when every character in it is racist? The effect is not only alienating and reductive, but leaves us with only one or two, if any, at all sympathetic characters.

This problem is compounded by simple abundance – with so many people moving so quickly in and out of scenes, it is impossible to create characters with enough internal life to separate them from their racist tendencies. William Fichtner, a very good character actor, actually shared in an ensemble SAG award for his participation in one 5-minute scene. This generally fine group of actors does their best with the material – Terrence Howard is particularly skilled at fleshing out a slim, superficial character – but the short running time and enormous cast doesn’t allow for development of even the characters of marquee stars like Sandra Bullock and Don Cheadle. With this all-pervading lack, the audience can do little more than assume that racism is grounded at birth, a facile and unproven theory at best.

The closest possible example of what the filmmakers were attempting with Crash might be that juggernaut of spoiled Southern Californian life, Magnolia. Despite that film’s own internal problems, Haggis could have taken a lesson or two from P.T. Anderson, or if he set his sights higher, Robert Altman, on how to adequately structure a film this complex. As it is, Crash merely pays lip service to a heady amount of white liberal guilt, and in the end, its themes don’t delve much deeper than a high school civics class. For a really interesting take on urban racism in America, in Los Angeles even, you can get four episodes of FX’s drama series The Shield for the same rental price.

Breakfast on Pluto (2005, UK)

Neil Jordan’s film is based on a novel by Patrick McCabe, but plays like The Crying Game as seen through Dil’s eyes. Despite the narrative and occasionally thematic similarity between the two films, Patrick “Kitten” Braden, the hero(ine) of Breakfast, is a fully realized character in the way that Dil, the transsexual love interest in Crying, never was. In the role, Cillian Murphy shows us a sweetness and power that has been underutilized in nearly all of his films thus far, save perhaps Intermission. There are also some fun turns by Jordan regulars – Liam Neeson as a regretful priest, and Stephen Rea as a wide-eyed magician, as well as Brendan Gleeson in a hilarious 5-minute bit that is impossible to justly describe in this space. However, Murphy carries the full weight of the film, weaving in and out of the highs and lows of life as an idealistic young transsexual in the 1960’s and 70’s. His character faces near-constant threats to both idealism and safety, but Murphy never allows Kitten’s protective barrier of charm slip. In one scene, two IRA militants threaten Kitten with death after he discovers a cache of weapons hidden in his boyfriend’s house. Thrown in a pit and threatened with guns, Kitten continues to joke and verbally play with his captors until he has finally impressed his humanity onto them, and they walk away without doing him harm.

Having Murphy to center the film works well, as the picture itself seems trapped between exposing its audience to the rather gritty, ugly underbelly of Kitten's life, and presenting the world as the setting for a modern fairy tale. Kitten’s narration and relentlessly optimistic mindset plays to the fairy tale, while the action on screen often offers a different version of events. Though Jordan does manage to make clear his strongest theme, the power of the imagination to create worlds within the mind that can in turn affect everyone and everything around an individual, the tone of the film is a bit muddled. On the other hand, there’s no denying that Breakfast is a fun watch – the play of fantasy and pure free spirit, along with Murphy’s incredible performance, prove stronger than the occasional lapses in tone and energy.

However enjoyable it might be, Breakfast raises one rather large issue, common to Jordan’s previous films – specifically The Crying Game and Mona Lisa. As a writer and director, he is quite obviously fascinated by transgender characters (there’s even a male-to-female transsexual in The Good Thief, who is delightful, though inexplicable in some ways), but he doesn’t seem ready to fully deal with the realities of alternative sexualities. Despite a couple of boyfriends and a few stints as a sex worker, Kitten’s sex life is never really investigated. The audience never sees him even kiss a lover or a john. His desires are portrayed as purely romantic, never sexual. Jordan walked a similar line in Crying, playing Dil’s sexuality for shock value as much as emotional content, but he still ended up firmly placing her as a romantic idealist. Likewise, the simplistic and sensationalistic portrayal of lesbianism in Mona Lisa is just as troublesome as these transvestite eunuchs, if not more so.

There are certain aspects of Kitten’s story that Jordan sees clearly, but his views of alternative sexualities have long been problematic, and this ends up impacting Breakfast’s overall effect. Because of Jordan’s hesitancy to depict Kitten’s burgeoning sexuality as he grows into adulthood (while simultaneously not sparing on the sexual proclivities of other characters), he misses a genuine chance at depicting a whole character. As sexuality and sexual fantasy, especially for one such as Kitten, often provide a bridge to the real world, a true opportunity has been missed here. Had Jordan been able to engage this element, perhaps a greater balance between reality and fantasy could have been struck.

Stay (2005, USA)

More and more often, I see the legacy of Memento and The Sixth Sense in American indies, almost always with diminishing returns. Stay is a perfect example of this increasingly dull and predictable trend – an overly convoluted story that uses every possible narrative gimmick in order to forestall a painfully obvious “trick” ending. Perhaps the primary difference between the earlier films and Stay is the latter’s heavy use of visual tricks as well – it gallops right out of the gate, making it clear that there is nothing in this film that meets the eye, and thus making it absolutely impossible to care about anything it has to show its audience. Had Marc Forster built these elements into his film, rather than beating the audience about the head with them from minute one, perhaps the whole endeavor would have been less exhausting and pointless. However, in order to do so, he would have had to have something more to hang his film upon.

The story in Stay is weak at best, as psychologist Ewan McGregor (looking totally befuddled) and artist girlfriend Naomi Watts (with nothing much to do at all) try to puzzle out what exactly is torturing McGregor’s patient (Ryan Gosling). There might actually be something there if it weren’t so plainly obvious that Forster cares nothing about these characters, as he’s much more interested in how to tease his conceit – one person is constantly turning into another, or switching places with another, time and space jump about like an absurd game of leapfrog – to the maximum. In the end, Stay is really about nothing at all – it’s the worst kind of shaggy dog movie, as the audience ends up with less than what it started with.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006, USA)

As hangover movies go, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (or as I like to call it, The Fast and the Furious: Cracker in Japan!) nears the pinnacle of the genre. It’s truly awful, but supremely enjoyable. The car tricks are awesome – I haven’t seen the second installment, but the stunts in Drift certainly exceed the car work in the original Fast and Furious. For that reason, I kind of regret not seeing this on the big screen, though I may have had to go to the theatre in a mask. In any case, the dialog is horrible, the plot nonexistent, and the cast is very, very pretty (who knew that Lucas Black would grow up to look like this?).

One note of regret – though Better Luck Tomorrow wasn’t the best movie, it was certainly interesting, and it spoke to part of the American audience that doesn’t get much attention from mainstream or independent cinema. It’s a little disappointing to see Justin Lin making crap like Tokyo Drift and Annapolis after a promising debut, but everyone’s got to pay the bills.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005, USA)

To be perfectly honest, the only two things that drew me to Memoirs of a Geisha were a) Koji Yakusho, and b) boredom. I had serious problems with Arthur Golden’s novel, particularly its Oprah Book Club-style narrative (everything bad that can happen, will) and highly problematic romance. However, it did have a stunning sense of period detail and style, which made reading about such a secretive subculture intriguing in an anthropological sense.

Unfortunately, the movie version of Memoirs wastes this aspect of the book in favor of the aforementioned romance and endlessly bitchy interactions between warring geisha. It’s a bore to watch, really, and that it clocks in at over two hours doesn’t help. Yakusho is entirely wasted in the thankless supporting role of Ken Watanabe’s right-hand-man. The ladies don’t fare much better – while Gong Li seems to be having a good time playing the most evil geisha imaginable, Michelle Yeoh fares far worse as the near-saintly mother hen who takes Ziyi Zhang’s little lost sparrow under her wing. Zhang, though gorgeous, is lightweight as the centerpiece of the narrative. And in setting up the romance between her character and Watanabe's, the filmmakers make the affair even less appetizing than Golden did – the visual component of seeing a eleven-year-old girl fall in “love” with a forty-five-year-old man is extremely off-putting, especially considering all that she endures in her subsequent years of geisha training, all in the name of getting her man.

I can’t help but mention my issues with the casting – the men are played by Japanese actors, but save for the “ugly” geisha, all of the central actresses are Chinese. Nothing against this lovely-looking cast, but it strikes me as extremely xenophobic for an American studio to make a movie about a pivotal time/place in Japanese culture and stock it full of Chinese actors. Not that Memoirs would necessarily have been improved by an “authentic” cast – what’s broken here couldn’t be fixed that easily – but the move smacks of such a romantically Western sense of Asia that it’s no wonder that ethnic identity is easily glossed over.