Mov es Excellent: National Lampoon's Animal House Good: Old School Okay: Revenge of the Nerds Bad: PCU No stars: National Lampoon's Dorm Daze
Crash
(☆☆☆☆)
R,113 minutes. Now playing at South Wind 12
Great movies linger with us after the lights dim and the credits roll as we leave the theater and go out for coffee afterward to discuss what was just seen with a friend who you saw it with. Crash is a perfect example of that kind of movie. It features more than a dozen people strung together through coincidence. These characters have nothing in common with each other — they have different jobs, live in different parts of town and are part of different social classes. But one thing is similar: They all feel separated by their races.
Crash does not have a central plot, and it's made up of several smaller plots that mingle every now and then. Some of the plots and characters work better than others: A pair of black thieves (Terrance Howard, Ludacris) carjack the SUV of a white couple (Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser); two cops (Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillippe) pull over and harass a black couple because one of the cops mistakenly thinks its occupants (Larenz Tate,
Thandie Newton) for an interracial couple; two police detectives (Don Cheadle, Jennifer Esposito) investigate a shooting death between white and black undercover police officers; a Persian shopkeeper (Shaun Toub) buys a gun and keeps being mistaken for "Osama."
Downfall
(☆☆)
R. 156 minutes Starts tomorrow at Liberty Hall
One of the most interesting things about this movie is that it presents its characters as flawed, most all are racist on some level, but that they came to be that way through circumstances beyond their control and can still be decent human beings. One character in particular is first presented as a total scumbag, but the audience is forced to re-evaluate him after an act of heroism. All of the performances are excellent, particularly Cheadle, Dillon and Newton. Though some characters and coincidences are a little too much, the payoff is a thought-provoking movie that stays with you.
In his review of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, film critic Roger Ebert wrote: "I prefer to evaluate a film on the basis of what it intends to do, not on what I think it should have done."
Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall, which is one of the first German productions to deal at length with the Nazis, depicts the final years of the Third Reich. Based in part on the memoirs of Hitler's stenographer, Traudl Junge, this 2005 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar nominee achieves a grim authenticity as it stalks the mazelike bunker below Berlin, where the Führer pores over maps and screams himself blue in the face before blowing his own head off.
The fact that Junge claims to have been largely unaware of the Nazis' misdeeds while she was under their employment strikes me as very convenient. Telling the film through her point of view gives Hirschbiegel the dramatic license to ignore the war's most unimaginable atrocities. A postscript states, "Six million Jews were murdered," and it almost comes across as an apology for the filmmaker's reckless oversight.
Jon Ralston
Allow me to violently disagree.
By now, most filmmakers seem to understand the risks they're taking with the Holocaust. When Schindler's List grossed $321 million worldwide, director Steven Spielberg dispensed his profits to Holocaust and Jewish-continuity projects. "It was blood money," Spielberg said in an interview with the New York Times Magazine.
Hirschbiegel doesn't seem to have learned the same lesson. What makes his film so infuriating is how absolutely compelling it is. Every time the director invited me to connect with the officers onscreen on an emotional level, a little voice in my head said, "Dude, they're Nazis!"
If you can get past the film's questionable narrative device, this is a vivid historical epic. Hirschbiegel meticulously recreates the fall of Berlin, and Bruno Ganz's lead performance is a triumph of controlled lunacy. There's also a heartbreaking subplot involving the horribly brainwashed children of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. Still, I couldn't help thinking I was watching a dangerously skewed film.
—Stephen Shupe
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