Over the years, automobile crashes have become apt symbols in movies attempting to make big statements about society. Perhaps the most profound was Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” that featured a long tracking shot of a traffic jam on a French country road that culminated in a shocking car wreck with mangled bodies lying across the road. That pivotal scene was an introduction to the remainder of the film that depicted a France descending into barbarism.
Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, there’s Paul Haggis’s “Crash”, a movie that preaches “understanding” as a way for the races to reconcile. Orchestrated over a series of fender benders, the film exhibits Hollywood liberalism at its most meretricious. Apparently, Haggis just resigned from Scientology after 35 years in protest over the cult’s opposition to gay marriage. Now that would be a plot for a movie I’d much prefer to see. The most recent entrant into the field is “Carancho”, an Argentine film directed by Pablo Trapero that opens at the Angelica Film Center in NY tomorrow. I have seen Trapero’s Crane World, a powerful neorealist study of a crane operator, as well as El Bonaerense, a documentary-like feature about police corruption in Buenos Aires. Crane World is available from Netflix and I recommend it highly. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/carancho/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
