Short Cuts vs. Crash: a Cinematic Smackdown in Three Parts

Last night I couldn't sleep, and ended up watching all 187 minutes of Robert Altman's indie actor wet-dream Short Cuts on HBO. This is a film I've been meaning to see for years now, but as with most of the Altman oeuvre, I can never find the time or the patience to sit through three and a half hours of long takes and wide shots of five conversations going on at the same fucking time. Though in this case I'm glad I did.

While it's a pretty typical Altman film for the most part (ensemble cast, interconnected multi-thread story, and characters that walk that fine line between neurotic and straight-up crazy), it's also possibly one of the best nuggets of pop-culture trivia I've ever seen. I mean, the whole thing plays out like a time capsule of bad taste in the early nineties, from the oversized t-shirts and short shorts (on dudes) to the pastel-colored art-deco fish tanks and white-trash kids watching marathons of Captain Planet (by the way, if anybody ever asks me why people of my generation are so fucked-up, I'll just show them this and remind them that this what I had to grew up with). Plus, the cast is like an off-beat character-actor cluster-fuck the likes of which has still never been seen. Altman should have gotten the Oscar just for having the insight to cast Lily Tomlin as Lili Taylor's mom. . . and Tom Waits as her dad. . . and Robert Downey Jr. as her boyfriend. Though the whole time I was watching this movie I just couldn't stop thinking to myself: my god, Crash is a terrible fucking movie.







































Of course, I know that Crash is a terrible fucking movie, but given that it won three Oscars (including best picture) and Short Cuts barely eked out the obligatory directing nod for Altman (one of the seven he didn't win), and that these are both ensemble films with byzantine narratives set in LA, I think it's worth doing a side-by side comparison three areas in which the films seem similar. . .

1) Sexually Inappropriate Cop Character
























Matt Dillon has always had a knack for playing a slimeball that doesn't know how to keep his dick in his pants. His best performance as this type is probably in There's Something About Mary (where he ironically plays a private dick), though Crash fails to exploit this side of him by trying to make his character halfway sympathetic. He still likes to grope black chicks in front of their husbands, but he'll also pull them out of flaming wreckage to save their life if the situation calls for it. Tim Robbins aggressively adulterous motorcycle cop in Short Cuts, on the other hand, is sleazy to the core. As his political writings will attest, few people can play a self-absorbed douchebag as well as Tim Robbins. His character has no shame. He cheats on his wife and then unsuccessfully tries to cheat on the woman he's cheating on his wife with. He'll pull over a women in clown makeup on her way to a child's birthday party just to hit on her. The only redemption he gets in the end is when he decides that he actually wants to fuck his wife as well.

2) Popular Musicians cum Actors

























This category is perhaps a bit unevenly stacked. I mean, it's a bit like asking the kids from Little Giants to play '84 Chicago Bears. Ludacis's street-smart loudmouth character in Crash gets so far trumped by Short Cuts powerhouse trifecta of Tom Waits, Lyle Lovett, and Huey Lewis that I could probably just declare it a TKO without much argument. Granted, Tom Waits basically just plays up his established musical persona the same way Luda does in Crash, but Huey Lewis peeing in a river on a camping trip and realizing that there's a dead body in the water is pretty much the definition of perfect dark comedy.

3) Violent Catharsis




















While the car accident at the titular accident at the end of Crash is certainly well shot and acted, it still, like the rest of the film, just feels sort of manipulative. For all the dramatic weight that Paul Haggis thrusts onto Matt Dillon's character in this scene, you'd swear he was the second coming of Christ (if Jesus had a thing for ethnic girls). Paul Haggis wouldn't know understatement if it hit him in his bald, scientologist head. Altman, on the other hand, knows how to make a point without being completely patronizing to his audience, and knows not to linger on any one scene long enough that it feels like melodrama. Sort of like in Do The Right Thing when things get too tense and Samuel L. Jackson's radio DJ character pipes in, "I'm tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" (or something to that effect), the earthquake scene at the end of Short Cuts serves as a cold reminder to all the self-involved nut-jobs in the movie that they're not alone in the world. Never mind the fact the this film predicted the Northridge quake by at least a year.


I'm only disappointed that in 2006, when Crash was sweeping the Oscars and the Academy was giving him the "give it up old man" lifetime achievement award, Altman didn't get up on stage, bitch-slap Paul Haggis, and take his awards.

Neon Bible

Today the Arcade Fire finally released their follow-up to the debut album and my favorite album since Radiohead was putting out music that mattered, Funeral, which is to say I've been listening to the album for the last three weeks and have just today had the ability to actually purchase it. Despite the fact that the band is far and away the most hyped band in the world right now, it's difficult to fault them for much. As a follow-up to my last post, the band recently became my heroes after they refused to license "Rebellion (Lies)" to douchebag extrordinaire (and scientologist, did I mention he's a scientologist) Paul Haggis for the pilot of The Black Donnelys. And, as much as I've come to expect luke-warm follow-ups to promising debut albums as of recently (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah anyone?), the new Arcade Fire record doesn't disappoint. There's perhaps no band that can match this degree of grandiosity with equal parts good taste (give or take the tendency of Win Butler's lyrics to err on the side of melodrama). For any other group, the idea of an album recorded almost entirely in a church, using a full-scale pipe organ, Hungarian orchestras, and military choirs might seem like pompous rock star bullshit, but luckily the members of the Arcade Fire are far too earnest (and unattractive) to qualify as rock stars. I just hope that this time around I can actually get a ticket to see them.

Seeing Double.

Though the Academy somewhat made up for last year's travesty of an Awards show by at least giving every award to a defensible candidate, and in most cases actually giving it to the most deserving film, the world is still feeling the shockwaves of last year's Oscar fiasco. I'm referring of course to the triple Oscar victory for Paul Haggis's overwrought crapfest Crash. For those that are unfamiliar with Paul Haggis and his long tradition of hackneyed, melodramatic schlock, I'll give you a little primer. Haggis got his start writing genre television for shows like The Love Boat, Diff'rent Strokes and thirtysomething. Then he became a hero to middle-aged rednecks everywhere when he created Walker, Texas Ranger. His debut film Crash shocked critics everywhere by becoming perhaps the most widely panned film to ever win a Best Picture Oscar. He then tried his hand at doing quarter-life crisis film (a la Garden State) and put out Last Kiss (the fact that he's well into his 50s and still feels the need to make this sort of crap speaks volumes about the maturity level we're dealing with here).

The most recent fallout from Haggis's inexplicable success comes in the form of NBC's recent attempt to find a one-hour drama to bump Studio 60 out of it's time slot while they decide whether or not to axe it for good. The show is called The Black Donnelys and it's everything we've come to expect from the master dramatist, with its erraticly-behaving, one-dimensional characters (which is not to be confused for genuine depth or complexity), whole plot lines that manage to build and resolve themselves in less than three scenes, and redundant voice-over narration that wants you to believe that it's much wittier than it actually is. Though the most annoying feature of the show, for me, is the way it grossly misrepresents the City of New York. The show is ostensibly set in Hell's Kitchen, which contrary to it's title is now a fairly tame, heavily gentrified neighborhood, so the idea that Hell's Kitchen is affordable real estate to a family of working-class orphans is just absurd. It's a show that desperately wants to exist in the hard, gritty version of New York that Scorsese made famous in the 70s, but in the Disneyfied post-Giuliani New York just rings disingenuous. The Irish economy is booming, and Little Italy only exists as a tourist attraction at this point, so why does Paul Haggis insist on trying to make me care about a family of whiny, self-entitled brats still clinging to ethnic conflicts that sputtered out decades ago. I don't have the energy to explain all of the ways in which this is the most obnoxious show on television, but if you're interested, this review spells it out pretty well.