5. Stephen Holden, The New York Times:
"Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn."
I guess this means we are going to have to sit through a whole new generation of actors who think that they can evoke Brando by being incoherent.
4. Armond White, New York Press:
"Of all the films about American heroism, the dullest are those paeans to the integrity of television and journalism: All the President's Men, Quiz Show, The Insider and now Good Night, and Good Luck."
Why not add to the list, His Girl Friday? Gentleman's Agreement? Roman Holiday? While the City Sleeps? And other masterpieces...
3. Peter Travers, Rolling Stone:
Just pick a quote off any ad in any newspaper.
2. Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun:
"Just when you might give up on young American film directors making art the way Bergman and Kurosawa did, along comes Bennett Miller's quiet, tumultuous Capote."
Let's leave aside whether or not Capote is a good movie - what does Bennett Miller have anything to do with Bergman and Kurosawa?? What do Bergman and Kurosawa even have to do with one another??? - aside from the fact that they were contemporaries who are stock examples of directors from the past who we like. And of all the directors to bestow this upon. Christ.
1. David Denby, The New Yorker
"Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, though it's not for the fainthearted."
HAHAHA. He goes on...
"'We're always behind this metal and glass,' a melancholy police detective, Graham (Don Cheadle), says as he sits in his car with his partner and girlfriend, Ria (Jennifer Esposito). 'It's the sense of touch. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.' This may seem a fancy conceit until one realizes that Haggis is pushing the word 'crash' beyond the literal: he means any kind of rough contact between folks from different ethnic groups."
Oh, so that's what he means.
"Apart from a few brave scenes in Spike Lee's work, Crash is the first movie I know of to acknowledge not only that the intolerant are also human but, further, that something like white fear of black street crime, or black fear of white cops, isn't always irrational."
Well, it's appropriate that the stupidest quote from a film critic in 2005 was said about the tritest film of the same year. Of course, I'm glad David Denby finally explained to me the meaning of Paul Haggis's metaphor. I was wondering about that. Also curious is why it took a white filmmaker to finally point out that racists are good people too... Hmmmm.
