crash Tagged Articles at Cinematical

For some reason best left to psychologists, there are people who are attracted to what I call ... sex creeps. This type of character goes beyond what is called jolie-laide in women, a term that directly translates to pretty-ugly, although is generally used to describe "unconventional" beauty. There's no real correlation between the jolie-laide and the sex creep. No, the sex creep is attractive but prone to certain, shall we say, peccadilloes that go beyond the pale -- dating blow-up dolls, crashing cars to get off, dabbling in experimental gynecology. These guys all slime their ways between the lines.

In any case, here are seven of my favorite sex creeps. You might also notice there's a certain director who shows up a few times on the list -- he's an honorary sex creep as well. I hope he takes his title in the complimentary manner in which it's given.

After a long battle with prostate cancer, British novelist J. G. Ballard passed away in his home in west London on Sunday at the age of 78. Ballard might not have been a big name in Hollywood, nor lent his time to the world of Tinsel and screenwriting, but his novels did make for two radically different and unforgettable films.

First, there was Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun -- the story of Ballard's expat childhood in China and his experiences in an internment camp when the Japanese invaded during World War II. This also happens to be the film that truly kicked off Christian Bale's career (he played the young, fictionalized version of the writer). Ballard once wrote: "In many ways my entire fiction is the dissection of a deep pathology that I had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the postwar world."

This notion adds a whole other dimension to the other notable film made from his work: David Cronenberg's Crash, which saw James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger, and Rosanna Arquette explore the world of sexual energy bred out of car crashes. Roger Ebert said of the film: "It downloads gigabytes of information about sex, it discovers our love affair with cars, and it combines them in a mistaken algorithm. The result is challenging, courageous and original--a dissection of the mechanics of pornography."

J.G. Ballard, you will be missed.

Perhaps with his passing, Ballard's work will now get new life in Hollywood. Is there any you'd like to see on the big screen?

[via The Hollywood Reporter]

When I first saw the Chicago Tribune headline "'Crash' remains top DVD rental,' I was really hoping it was referring to Cronenberg's 1996 film about car crash fetishists. Sadly, it was referring to the Oscar-winning film from 2005 about interconnected Los Angelinos and their issues with class, race, and general navel-gazing.

Even Crash's director Paul Haggis isn't sure why his movie is still top of the pops at Netflix. He told the Chicago Tribune, "I just assumed it was some sort of anomaly... I have no idea why anyone went to the movie in the first place, let alone rent it. It was a little independent film, and when people started to see it, I was amazed."

Haggis, along with many viewers, was also surprised his movie won the Oscar for best picture in 2005, beating out Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. "It's certainly not a perfect movie," Haggis said. "I love the Oscars; I just think they are the best thing in the world, but if you asked me if it was the best film of the year, I'd say, 'Of course not.'" (So would a lot of people.)

It might have something to do with the Netflix recommending algorithm, which is great but definitely fallible -- it seems to think I want to see 27 Dresses and Henry Poole is Here. Or maybe people are really committed to watching all 81 best picture winners now that they're unemployed. What's your guess?

"Oh, good grief, it's Oscar."
--Lucille Bluth, "Arrested Development"

(The following post is written to the tune of Bruce Springsteen's "The Wrestler," which was not among those nominated for Best Original Song when the 81st Academy Award nominations were announced earlier today.)

Have you ever seen a one trick pony in the field so happy and free?
We'd call 'em by another name, the Academy
Have you ever seen a piece of pap that they all wouldn't eat?
If you've ever seen that Crash, then you'd agree.

Then you'd agree, The Dark Knight should've had more of a shot
Then you'd agree, Gran Torino deserved to go home with naught
Then you'd agree, I'm struggling to come up with just one more bon mot
Tell me, friend, can you ask for anything more?
We sure as hell would've asked for a whole lot more

Couldn't Let the Right One In have been recognized outside of Foreign?
If they'd even seen that movie, then they'd agree
Didn't The Reader leave most of these guys snorin'?
If they'd stayed up for this movie, then they'd agree

Then you'd agree, Dear Zachary... shouldn't have been snubbed from the start
Then you'd agree, The Fall was a tremendous work of art (direction)
Then you'd agree, they left off Gommorah too, old fart after old fart
Tell me, friend, can you ask for anything more?
We really would've asked for a whole lot more

Those nods that have comforted me, I drive away
For all of Milk's attention, I just cannot feel gay
The snubs here and there have caused far too much dismay

Have you ever seen a year where AMPAS actually got it right?
I'll plan to watch something else that February night...

Well, it's sure been quite the week for movie-inspired television series that no one asked for. First up, by way of Ain't It Cool News, is a spot for G4's Spaceballs: The Animated Series. I'm not sure what prompted this Flash-animated wonder -- I mean, it's not like I want to give The Clone Wars that much credit for anything, let alone the likes of this -- but at least we know that something's keeping Mel Brooks and Daphne Zuniga from over-twiddling their thumbs.

Secondly, via /Film, is a promo for Starz' Crash, inspired by Paul Haggis' awards-sapping drama (and not David Cronenberg's psycho-sexual noir of the same name). Apparently, every other character is a corrupt cop, Dennis Hopper is the biggest actor in the cast, and it's shot like a faux-Showtime dose of pay cable conflict. Yeah, let's see the Emmys try and stay away...

I'll be impressed if one or the other lasts beyond a single season (the former premieres on September 21st; the latter, on October 17th). Are any of you genuinely compelled by either prospect? How about a show of hands for those who'll be driven by morbid curiosity and/or mere DVR convenience to give an episode of each the once-over?

Death is the ultimate dramatic device, but great art doesn't emerge from strong devices alone. In Take, the directorial debut of Charles Oliver, the impact of a single, startling tragic death immediately conveys the sense of watching a gravely serious movie, which is definitely the case. However, having immediately provided a tone, Oliver fails to follow up with a story powerful enough to justify it. That's not to say that the experience Ana (Minnie Driver) goes through after her son dies in a freak accident before the start of the film isn't relentlessly bleak, but there's hardly anything distinctive about the circumstances to make viewers care any more than they would if they were glancing at it in the morning headlines.

Still, Olilver has made a quietly observant work solely driven by the specific needs of two downtrodden protagonists with completely believable motives. In flashback, we learn that Ana struggled with her son's elementary school, which wants to put him in a special needs program. Meanwhile, she has a hard time communicating with her husband and finding decent work to get by. Elsewhere, reckless gambling addict Saul (Jeremy Renner) destroys his life in a whirlwind of debt. His misfortune, as it's shown in early scenes at a prison where Saul awaits execution, will lead him to accidentally murder Ana's innocent child, Jesse (Bobby Coleman).

Fidel Castro might be showing up as a character in Steven Soderbergh's Che flicks, but it looks like his daughter, Alina Fernandez, is getting a bit more involved in the movie biz. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Crash co-writer and Oscar winner Bobby Moresco is bringing her story to the big screen. Fernandez will consult, Moresco will possibly direct it, and the project is currently out to writers. However, this won't be a straight biopic.

It seems that her story will somehow be intertwined with the stories of others, like Crash, to "show the Cuban and American perspectives and ideologies along with Fernandez's story." Basically, she's the product of an affair Castro had while married to his first wife. She "spent her childhood in the country's shadow, only learning at age 10 that the man who visited her at night and whom she saw on TV every day was her father." In the '90s, she disguised herself as a Spanish tourist and fled to Spain, and then the US, where she now lives.

Fernandez is involved to try "to make people be a little more aware of how glorious we are and how many limitations we have." I'm sure that will depend on how the film is portrayed and then perceived by audiences. I happened to really dig Crash, but many people were put off by it, so it'll be interesting to see if this project takes on a different tone to circumvent comparisons.

This year, television is going to get one heck of a drama! It's got all the ingredients for a hit. Sex. Dysfunction. Car Crashes. No, no, no. I kid. While I'd love a series based on David Cronenberg's Crash, especially if Elias Koteas was in any way attached, this is about that other one -- you know, the Crash that won the Oscar. Yahoo reports that the adaptation will be cable station Starz's first original drama series, with 13 one-hour episodes planned.

The series even has handful of the film's names coming back behind the camera -- Paul Haggis, Bob Yari, Don Cheadle, and Mark R. Harris. As for in front of the camera -- no cast members have been picked yet, although production is scheduled to begin in the spring.

Now, I'm one of those people who actually really dug the movie. I thought it was interesting, thoughtful, and entirely gripping. I was happy to see it win the big statue. That being said, I wonder how this will play to audiences. Many people have noted it's heavy-handedness, so what will that mean for a weekly series? A few hours of it, sure, thirteen hours -- not so sure. What do you think?

Screenwriter and director Paul Haggis gives a pretty good interview over at the Guardian, parting with some amusing anecdotes, like the fact that David Cronenberg is apparently "quite upset" with him over using Crash as the title of his 2004 film, despite Cronenberg already having a film with that title. He also talks a bit about In the Valley of Elah, and defends its box office, saying that it did well in the Midwestern markets, where people go to see a movie because "I like Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, she's pretty." Gee, who would have ever thought Paul Haggis had a condescending attitude toward red-staters? Haggis also gives his views on the writer's strike and talks a bit about Million Dollar Baby, but the most interesting thing for me to note is that he's still not ready to part with the title for Bond 22, apparently because he doesn't have one.

According to the interviewer -- don't you wish the Guardian would just print Q&As instead of doing everything in profile, by the way? -- Haggis confirmed that the project is "still known only as Bond 22" and that his "contribution is unlikely to include advice on the title. He admits to never knowing what to call his scripts and when writing Crash, only used it as a working title." Although Haggis is known to have been not-quite-finished with the Bond 22 script when the strike happened, the producers were apparently satisfied enough that they decided to push forward anyway. I guess we'll find out how wise that decision was soon enough. In the meantime, what do you think the title of the next Bond picture should be? Take what you know of Casino Royale and Ian Fleming-sounding titles, and add in what you know so far about the next one -- it will be partially set in South America, it will have another Eurotrash villain, and will have Daniel Craig again.

What do Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and David Cronenberg have in common? The first two are considered the founding fathers of psychoanalysis; the latter will be making a film about them. According to ScreenDaily.com, Cronenberg's next project "will be an adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play The Talking Cure, re-teaming him with Crash producer Jeremy Thomas."

Hampton's play, which premiered in December 2002, is set in the early 20th Century and centers on Jung, portrayed on the London stage by Ralph Fiennes. A review by Lizzie Loveridge at CurtainUp says that Hampton "looks at the issues which initially united these two pioneering psychiatrists and that which eventually divided them and took them off into other areas of investigation." The narrative then plunges into the relationship between Jung and an 18-year-old Russian woman who was his first patient. The CurtainUp reviewer felt that the 2 hour and 25 minute play "tells us more about Jung's affairs than his ideas."

Cronenberg always seems to be shuffling priorities on his projects, dependent on financing and other factors that are probably out of his control, but the combination of Cronenberg and psychoanalysis sounds potent, a great match of filmmaker and subject, and probably a welcome change of pace for the director after A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Producer Jeremy Thomas has an excellent track record; in addition to Crash, he and Cronenberg worked together on Naked Lunch. No word on casting yet, but Fiennes previously gave an excellent performance in Cronenberg's Spider, so I imagine he would be first in line to recreate Jung on the big screen.