Crash

Rating:
Summary: A Movie that has attitude
Review: Wow this is one nasty movie! Well if you're in to the weird erotic kind of movie you will definately want to pick this one up. Definately not for the squeamish. Of course you should expect that with an NC-17 rating. a fair addition to the genre.

Rating:
Summary: Porn as High Art?
Review: Director Cronenburg's retelling of J.G. Ballard's revolutionary 1960's novel is mindblowing and glorious. Living in a post-modern Los Angeles-type world, the main character Ballard and his wife try to escape the tedium of their empty marriage by engaging in numerous affairs, the details of which they share with each other later. When Ballard is hurt in a car crash on the freeway in which a passenger in the other car is killed, he is amazed to discover he feels a new sense of power and purpose in connection with the crash. In effort to recreate this climactic moment, he gets swept up with a group of people who, led by the guru-like Vaughn, are obsessed with car-crashes and their own self-destruction. This movie is a brilliant and provacative statement of the changes wrought by technology on human relationships. The pornographic nature(an explicit sex scene seems to occur every five minutes) and the violence of the film forces a strong and unequivocal reaction from the viewer, along the same lines of what Greek tragedy did for its first audiences. I felt completely disgusted and depressed after watching Leaving Las Vegas, another supposedly outrageous film; Crash, on the other hand, left me uplifted.

Rating:
Summary: Yuck
Review: This was one of the most pretentious movies I have seen in my life. It was comletely UNerotic. This movie was recommended to me by a friend was is a film major, and I just hope he doesn't crank out pointless, stupid films like this one!

Rating:
Summary: "The Sickest of the Sickest"
Review: After seeing this film, I realized just how normal I really am. The film is a insult to all those involved in the making of it.

Rating:
Summary: pure, undiluted, visionary cinema; seat belts forbidden !!!
Review: In the mall zoned megaplex where I first saw "Crash" when it opened in the U.S., more than a few unadventurous members of the audience walked out. This is what sets this film as an experience apart from the predictable formulaic drivel that keeps most of the denizens dense and defensive. If you're able to allow yourself out of preconception and into the meditation on compulsion and obsession that director David Cronenberg has so elegantly composed here then I envy your first time experiencing this film. It still lingers and pulls me back in after more than six viewings.

Rating:
Summary: Eroticism is secondary
Review: The primary criticism of this film has been that its characters, and perhaps its "plot," though I would hesitate to use that word, seem to have been robbed of their content by Cronenberg's Kafka-esque direction. This is a misreading, in my estimation, of the director's intent. Crash has been called "pointlessly hypersexual," although the meaning of the film turns not on the sexual elements of the film, but on the larger theme of the technologization of humanity. Sex is the perfect vehicle, forgive the pun, for the idea that we are becoming more and more melded to the machinery we've created to benefit our relation to the "natural world." The Spader character has sexual encounters with four people in the film, progressing from his wife, to the woman with whom he had a car accident, to another woman disfigured by mechanical prosthetic devices, and finally, gender types are erased in his sexual ancounter with a man. Sex becomes increasingle separated from the "natural," indeed the human. But the film is not merely about sex, and so it should not be judged as a film "about sex." Yes, Ballard's novel includes sex, but Cronenberg's film emphasizes the larger implications of the thematization of technology's effects on humanity. This film is worth seeing, and I would give it four stars, but I refrain for fear of getting your hopes up. In my opinion, this film is very well made, and highly intellectual, and thus is not for everyone.

Rating:
Summary: Well made, interesting premise, but too redundant.
Review: Crash has been derided for gratuitous sexuality and the lack of a conventional story arc. But beneath the "repelling" qualities is a compelling movie that sadly suffers from a few artistic excesses that hurt the experience. I'm a casual fan of Cronenberg's work, but Crash is definitely unusual and weirdly fascinating (and certainly disturbing at times). The amort color scheme (think noirish and dreamy) augments the passionless nature of the characters, who are deliberately acted with a lack of emotion, with sparse dialogue. The gloomy soundtrack is good as well. These qualities are all effective, as they accentuates the unhappy nature of the characters.

This is a strange, sad flick about a group of people who cannot experience pleasure, and find ways to vicariously heighten their zest by enjoying a unique fetish revolving around bloody car accidents. These neurotic people try and rationalize their woeful lives, but by the film's end it becomes clear that they cannot be truly liberated from their distressed condition. Note how the (many) sex scenes are not remotely titillating, because the characters engage them in such a torpid manner. Even the car accidents are calm little smashes. Thematically, the film asks what gives us pleasure, and where is the line between pleasure and pain?

While it's interesting to ponder, in the end I was left with more of a love-hate feeling. The film waxes the artsy elements a too much and feels boring and redundant. Beating a dead horse is no fun, and there's many scenes that just seem to repeat each other. About half of it is genuinely effective, but the rest is plodding. I know that's the point, but I think some more attentive work could have made it more effective in the end.

Rating:
Summary: Wow! Trully Unforgettable.
Review: Soon after a head on car crash James Ballard (Spader) is introduced to a world of fetishists who find arousal in mixing raw sexuality, the mangling of human bodies, and the twisted steel of a fresh auto accident. Their fetish soon becomes a suicidal obsession with death and the ultimate pleasure.

Based on the novel by J. G. Ballard, Crash was one of most controversial movies of the 1990's. Exploring the psyche of those who extract pleasure through risk and eroticism through automobile accidents. James and Catherine Ballard are a married couple whose sex life has been reduced to recounting tales of mutual infidelity to turn each other on. James is eventually involved in a car accident that leaves one man dead. After his long rehab he meets the other survivor of the crash Helen (Hunter). They soon realize that the accident was the biggest turn on of their lives. Helen introduces James to a group, led by Vaughn (Koteas) who share in their fetish. To up the ante the group engage in more and more dangerous accidents to heighten their own arousal.  

Anyone familiar with director David Cronenberg's work should know what to expect from this movie, only here it seems that Cronenberg has license to go as far as possible with the message he was trying to get across about the human animal and our twisted psyche when it comes to what we find erotic. His experiment with Crash was met with much controversy at the time of it's initial release in 1996. While many will find the film repulsive and/or sick, I happen to find it a rather genius character study. A film that succeeds in challenging the viewer by showing them a different side of the human spirit and hopefully pointing out their own sick little perversions. One thing is for sure, whether or not you "like" the movie you have to admire the balls it took to make such an anti-Hollywood film that went against everything "politically correct." What's sad is that a challenging, though provoking film like Crash couldn't be made today and if it were the people making it would most likely be jailed. 
 
Cronenberg injects the film with a dreamy, trance-like quality that sucked me in from second one. That along with the low key score created a menacing atmosphere. The acting from the always brilliant James Spader is top-notch as always. Elias Koteas is one of the most underrated actors out there, he's brilliant here as well. Holly Hunter and the lovely Deborah Unger are also strong in supporting roles. This is what happens when a great script (written by Cronenberg), a great director, and great actors merge to create a truly original and daring film.

Much can be said about Crash, but the bottom line is: GO SEE IT! Rent the NC-17 version if your video store has it and explore this movie with an open mind. Whether you love it or hate it, Crash will challenge, make you think, and hopefully enlighten. Now days when crap films are recycled over and over like a commercially friendly PG-13 pop can, it was great to see a film that didn't treat the viewer like an idiot. Check it out! 

Rating:
Summary: techno-sex
Review: Crash is the sort of film that manages to be so honest in its delivery of sex that it is above ordinary film, and so artful in its execution it is far above pornography.

This Cronenberg adaptation of a Ballard novel is an honest realization of the authors own pure imagination, so it is intentionally fitting that the main character, James Spader, carry the same title. The film, like the novel, is an exploration of honest human eroticism, where characters engage in detached sexual acts only to compare notes about it later. The camera exposes the sheer pleasure the audience receives when in the position of voyeur, as the film opens with three initially unexplained sexual acts, and stays with each subsequent one when copulating couples desperately pretend another character is with them, and as all characters discover the erotic uses of their own scars.

Crash examines the role of technology through the looking glass of sex, taking our dependence on automobiles to an extreme. As characters stage crashes in dimly lit streets, we learn the desperate human need to connect with the 'organisms' of our own making.

Yet the magesty of this film is not necessarily in equating cars and sex in a satirical nod to many modern car enthusiasts, but instead it is to spend time examining the space of detachment. Characters here aren't necessarily endearing to any audience, and the plot doesn't directly revolve around much more than the effects of car crashes.

Instead, it is a film examining passionless passion, keeping the audience a step farther from the characters that indulge in emotionless and cold sexual acts. It is more honest about sex than other film, utilizing metaphor to convey a very detached, fantastical, yet ultimately very real, version of technosex.

Rating:
Summary: Typical Cronenberg, But Not What You Think
Review: If you saw the trailers for Crash you would probably think that this movie had hot, steamy, sex scenes. But that's what they want you to think, but in truth, the sex scenes-- while explicit-- are both cold and clinical.

If you're a Cronenberg fan who is thinking that the the man who brought you Scanners, The Fly, Videodrome, Rabid, and Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers would have an interesting take on
car crahes, you'd be right. But Cronenberg uses sex as a metaphor for... well, God knows what he uses it for in this
film, but it's not what other directors might use it for. Here, the movie is quiet, the dialogue is quiet, and the sex is so
quiet as to make one almost want to yawn. The actual "horror" is in the people who are battered and mutilated in their pursuit of sexual thrills during car crashes, some of which are potentially fatal. But of course, that's the rush these people get; that's when they only come alive when they are near death.

Overall the movie is well-acted and directed, but it's not the action-filled movie the trailers make it out to be, and even Deborah Kara Unger looks bored while she's getting it on with James Spader; like she wishes she was in another film.