CRASH (1996) - Movie Review
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- čas přidán 3. 07. 2022
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#crash #cronenberg #moviereview - Krátké a kreslené filmy
I lived in Europe at the time it came out and saw it in a theater on opening night, a pregnant woman literally puked on the seats in front of me, on the heads of 2 young men, certainly something to remember.
What scene in particular set her off?
This was such a great discussion of the David Cronenberg film Crash!! My friend and CZcamsr Daisuke Beppu has been doing a series of discussions on the works of David Cronenberg in chronological order and this film has very much been on my mind once again. You raise so many point about this film that make it great in my eyes. David Cronenberg is the master of blending his heady idea's with the cinematic art-form. Someone suggested you and Daisuke collaborate in a discussion about different films and if you have not heard of his channel where he talks about film to a masterful degree, then I cannot recommend it enough. Take care and keep watching a lot of great movies!
I find that weaved into Crash there is also the Director's obsession for reconstructing something for the cameras. Koteas' character goes to extreme lengths to reconstruct famous car crashes but, no matter how meticulous you are, it will never be the real thing. I remember how those scenes reminded me of Stanley Kubrick and the insane lengths he went to recreate a certain "reality" in his movies (I was thinking about "Full Metal Jacket") but, at the end, you turn around and you are on a movie set. Maybe what Cronenberg wanted to say is how even an escape through creativity is illusory. Only the real thing can give you satisfaction.
Thanks for reviewing this remarkable unjustly neglected film. I hope no one watches that dismal Sandra Bullock "Crash" by mistake.
I'll admit to having been a little bemused when I heard of mainstream praise for a movie called "Crash" after that other one came out.
I think the only way to view Crash is through DVD, like several subversive 90s films--Solondz's "Happiness" being another. So if a novice viewer searches for this film, they may end up clicking on the garbage "Crash"...unfortunately.
Whenever I bring up this movie without fail whoever I'm speaking to automatically thinks I'm talking about the 2004 one. It's shitty
I recommended the film Control (about the late Ian Curtis of Joy Division) to a few people and a couple of them viewed the pathetic version of the same name, with Ray Liotta.
That 2004 turd that won an Oscar you mean?!?! ;)
I actually saw this movie opening weekend, with my best friend at the time. And it was an awkward experience. All the same, being the nerd that I was, I bought various magazines with David Cronenberg interviews. They were certainly fascinating. Cronenberg actually admitted that the movie was not supposed to be taken "literally". It was a metaphorical thing. And he was genuinely surprised that so many critics took CRASH literally. But that's life, I suppose.
Purchased this from Criterion last week when the sale started at B&N. Saw it a few months ago and was blown away by how well the themes of this movie were told. How we get a high from the thought of our own mortality, and Cromenberg pushes that to the point where these characters get sexually eroused by it. Then, they find someone who is like them, enter an open relationship, then are forced deal with how unhinged Vaughn is. Brilliant. Probably my 2nd favorite Cronenberg at the moment.
A small detail I appreciated was the use of sterile, textbook-like language during foreplay and sex. Something so hot and passionate becomes cold when sexual organs are said so properly, like reading it from a anatomy textbook. It's done so mechanically.
I also appreciate James Spader being in this movie. On the surface, his weird sexual kinks can be compared to Robert California. Hahaha
Great review and analysis of a fantastic film. I think Cronenberg's detachment is like the detachment of a surgeon - a surgeon of the psyche. A surgeon isn't emotionally involved when he's cutting through the patient's flesh, removing organs or doing whatever surgical task he has to do to get at the heart of the matter - he's clinically aware of what he's doing but not overwhelmed by it. Cronenberg sees the connection between the creative and the destructive, between flesh and machine. I think Vaughn's great charisma comes from the fact that he's completely unrepressed. Cronenberg is very Freudian in his dissection of Civilization and its Discontents. Also, Howard Shore's twangy guitar score is perfect - Bartok meets Duane Eddy.
love how you talk about this movie and the concepts it brings up! Crash made me think about the extreme things trauma can do to a persons sexuality, the escalation of unhealthy coping mechanisms etc. with a fetish like this it can only end in fatal injury, these people never left the scene of their car accidents
A film easy to admire, hard to like, brilliantly directed but seems to miss the more satirical aspects of Ballard's novel including the bizarre assassination attempt against Elizabeth Taylor
the criterion edition has a great essay that explains the context of this subplot’s omission
@Rune Kristensen True. They would have had to substitute a more modern (at the time) icon like, say, Madonna.
So happy to see a review of the 1996 film Crash. Pretty rare to find this one being mentioned rather than the other
Haven't seen this channel in my feed in a long time, hope you're well! Great analysis.
@10:05 I have to contest that point as a general fact based first on personal experience, I had an accident that for several minutes the prospect was that I would be dead, well I did survive, but that experience drained any sort of vitality for many years. More generally, life-threatening experiences can go either way, from what I understand (without being a psychologist or anything remotely close to the that field), people that do not enjoy their lives and are faced with life-threatening situations, begin to do so and get their shit together, while those that have fulfilling lives, realise how fleeting and pointless they are, reevaluating them, but (again from personal experience) it is very long and painful... 2c on that particular point... other than that, I nearly got my dad arrested for accompanying me to the theatre, as a 15YO for a 18+ film that the ultra-conservative majority despised.
Ive been waiting for you to review this!
I love this film and the novel too. As a big fan of Ballard I am very happy that Cronenberg got to make the film as he does a great job. Crash and Videodrome are my 2 favourite Cronenberg films, and I also really like Maps to the Stars which is another classic in my opinion.
Love this film, but it's not the kind of film that I can watch over and over again. It does feel deeply erotic and sensual, but it also leaves you feeling unclean and like you've just seen something you shouldn't have. What I really love about it is how Cronenberg's removed, chilly style allows us to observe these characters wholly without judgement. It would be easy to kink shame these characters and moralize things and make this a film about their depravity, but instead it's far more objective, and as a result, it's more empathic and gives the audience a justifiable reason to enjoy the dangerous acts they participate in.
🤺☦🇷🇺Despite being another piece of perverted garbage by Cronenberg's (except from Videodrome which has some meaning at least lol), the fact that Coppola hated it is so funny, because even THAT dumb boring film is a masterpiece compared to the pretentious stuff by Coppola wtf🤦♂️😅😂
Keep the Cronenberg coming! He was such a great choice to adapt JG Ballard (would have loved to see his versions of high rise or concrete island).
Fingers crossed you review The Dead Zone (my fave cronenberg and king adaption) and Dead Ringers at some point.
I don't recall if I made it all the way through the film adaption of High Rise that was made. Concrete Island I think would be a very good choice, out of his novels, for adaption, being pretty stripped down in terms of the setting and number of characters. Some of his more sci-fi leaning suspense/dystopian/apocalyptic short stories might work very well as a miniseries.
@@Misericorde9 whealey just didnt have enough imagination to make high rise into a great film imo. and im shocked no ones adapted concrete island for those reasons-hell i remember thinking it could have been a perfect project to make during the covid lockdowns
@@robertgoyette5863 It would possibly be the easiest thing ever to get away with filming guerilla style.
the joke is there is a city near where the film was shot called Vaughn. It may just be a coincidence, but I suspect that's his inside joke for people from the GTA.
Nice catch, I'm from Markham and didn't pick that up.
@@pointysidedown Vaughn in that movie is so Vaughn
I didn’t get the movie when I first saw it. But the images were burned into my brain and I couldn’t stop obsessing over it. Then I watched it again and again and it has a hypnotic effect on me. It’s now one of my favorites of all time
If you read J.G. Ballard you will discover that he always has some other variation of Vaughn in many of his novels!
I literally watched this last night for the first time! So glad you reviewed this, keep up the great work ~
How do I watch this? Doesn't look like it's streaming and Blockbuster doesn't exist (sadly). I've been on a Cronenberg kick and I loved his most recent film
@@ktrak222 not sure how into physical media you are (I'm very into it myself) but I recently bought the Criterion edition and it's excellent. The supplements were also wonderful! I also have the Criterion editions of Scanners and Videodrome, again they're superb.
Right now Barnes and Noble is doing a 50% off sale for all Criterion blu-rays, so now is def the time to buy it if you were interested.
So many moments I wish I could pause and question phrasings. Good video & review, ill have to dig this dvd out of my physical media and rewatch it
There's a 1971 BBC short film "Crash" written by and starring J.G. Ballard (a video essay) that covers the same issues (without the sex, alas).
What a great review! It's definitely one of my favourite movies. It's refreshing that your focus wasn't entirely on the sex because those that focus too much on it are certainly missing out on something that goes much deeper.
Great analysis and review. I think the reason this film can be hard to properly digest first time is that it's exclusively poplulated by these very detached human beings whose aberrant sexuality we will likely find hard to understand and it can act as a barrier to us relating to them. Also the fact there really isn't any audience surrogate to guide us through this world and act as some sort of baseline for normalcy means we really have to adjust quickly. I think this is a barrier that naturally erodes upon repeated viewings.
Really made me a Elias Koteas fan , so good in everything , this movie needs a rewatch from myself, saw it after it came out but I believe my more mature mind would “get it” and appreciate it , thanks again M, just finished mowing the yard it’s like 200 degrees here in north Texas or feels like it ha!
I’ve always loved Koteas since the original TMNT and it’s amazing to see just how much range he has.
@@JorgeTorres-tl7vo you guys ever see Defendor? Elias is great in it. I've been a fan since TMNT too
The Concrete Island deserves a movie adaptation
had no idea this movie is so highly regarded now!
I saw it once in a theater on its release in 1996 and was kind of not sure, as you say. i had loved Naked Lunch and it felt like audiences were looking for more prosthetics and phantasm at the time.
fwiw I saw Big Lebowski during the first few weeks of its theatrical run. No one knew what to make of that either… almost no laughter in the audience.
I really loved the movie, the atmosphere was so well achieved! A side note, watching this movie, occasionally I couldn't help having flashbacks of James Spader playing in Seinfeld in the "Apology" episode.
It’s about how fetishes are developed.
There are so many fetishes in the world and this movie shows one example of how events can shape your sexuality.
Love this film a ton. It reminds me of Oshima’s in the realm of the senses a little bit but I think I still prefer it over that film. However this is not my favorite cronenberg without a doubt it’s dead ringers.
I hope you’ve seen Haneke’s The Piano Teacher! I love Crash
You are doing these for years..
It's really cool..
Awesome. Curious as to your review on this one.
Can you please please do a review of the Fly and explain the special practical effects? Thank you i love your channel.
Also ĺ forgot to mention thank you so much for this review. I was waiting for it. Just sitting there, scratching and fiddling. Long story short I started developing a rage so intense it changed me on a genetic cellular level and I began giving birth to goblin monster midgets that murdered a bunch of people but as soon as this review dropped they all simultaneously died. What a relief
Great review!
Can you review Eastern Promises by Cronenberg?
Great movie
Your critique is too esoteric for me, but I appreciate the forum. This movie has haunted me for many years. I bought the CD many years ago and now bought the movie again from Google.
To me movies can be character driven or location driven or star driven to name just a few categories'.
I think this movies main character is the city of LA itself.
I love this movie.
You’re thinking about the wrong Crash, buddy. The Cronenberg one takes place in Canada.
Love this movie, and your review as usual
Shoutout JG Ballard, the most prophetic writer of the 20th century in my opinion
been waiting for this one!
I wish this was available on streaming. It's been forever since I've seen it.
love j.g. ballard and i think this movie captured the cool/odd and yes dystopian feel of his books. also it uses and maybe originated that cool blue color palate cinematography that was trendy in the late 1990s like the matrix, chungking express, et al. that really dates in time movies of that era.
great review!
Haven't re-watched it since it came out, despite being a big Cronenberg fan. I really wonder how I will feel about it, if I sit down and watch it now.
I love the way you describe the balcony scene. It´s so excuisitely done and has sealed itself into my memory when I saw the film in 1996. It feels like they are cave-dwellers suspended and detached from the world. And what happened to Deborah Kara Unger? She was such a strong presence in the 90s and then she somehow vanished.
Did you see the other adaptations of Ballard novels? Spielberg`s Empire Of The Sun and Ben Wheatley`s High RIse (which is thematically linked to Crash)?
Oh, and I love your reviews!
kind of in a similar vein~the adjuster & fearless(peter weir) are worth watching too.
Happy 4th of July! Question. Do you have a favorite movie that requires a viewing each Independence Day?
Good stuff, thanks for the video 😊
Toronto was a good location for this film. Loved the scene where James & Catherine are on their highrise apartment balcony, with the massive 401churning below them. The 401 must be a sort of deity to someone with a car crash fetish.
Great review. So you would have been 3 years of age when it came out in the cinemas. I can tell you the reaction on opening night was half the crowd walked out. the others complained loudly during the film and the Asian couple that were sitting next to me said. I can't believe this movie was even made. So yeh different time of the world pre 9-11 world where it was easier to shock people and well now we live David Cronenberg's videodrome world where shock and horror is basically the internet and your choice of screen. David's use of trauma, the love of driving machines in western obsession and American sexuality was a stroke of genius in creating the animus of feminine emotions in the conceptual artistic representations, His use of the Bleach bypass colourisation in the more industrial scenes was a stroke of genius. The exploration of American modern art through each crash scene like a Jeff Koons sculpture that was popular at that time, like a Francis bacon stylisation. The monologues are perfect especially the James Dean recreation, that display of the canon in 'americana' and their love of the tragic rise and fall of beauty. Gaspar Noe is more interested in the jarring of a persons mind rather than the poetry of knitting a complex set of human interactions... Cronenburg could see the post human crispr world of genetics and Virtual reality was the topic he mostly explored. Especially the use of scars as beauty where we live in a world of hypermodificaiion to the body and beauty has a blurry line.
Happy 🇱🇷 perfect analysis of this movie.
I was 16 when I first saw it- was like a fever dream ✨️
Will you be reviewing Elvis?
I have always "enjoyed" this film. It is very important in terms of the eccentricities of the human experience. Maybe "admired" is a better word than enjoyed haha.
One my favorites from Cronenberg
My wife & I actually fell asleep while watching this movie then woke up to the ending scene like you said 😂 we will have to give it another watch
Crash gives a whole new meaning to the term autogynephilia.
Highly encourage everyone to read the novel by JG Ballard.. it’s pretty incredible!!!!
I read it recently and i gotta admit i found it pretty silly. I thought about all the themes mentioned above but the book seemed to just be endless descriptions of cars while the author tried desperately to convince me it had sex appeal. It was all so preposterous i felt i projected all the metaphorical depth on it myself. Like you have all these insane unbelievable characters and then you’re asked what this says about humanity-idk i didnt see any humans in it.
@@leedurbin4419 Ballard's wife died young. He's described Crash as a 'psychopathic hymm' where he tried to make 2 and 2 make 5 and somehow make sense of her death. It's partially about fetish as mind virus, partially about moving through a heavily signalled landscape, and also about the death of affect. It's also about obsession, which is one of the reasons it doesn't deviate from its specific tone. The lack of human characteristics is by design, but is an extreme exame of a certain type. Its a book built to retire your subconscious, to give you an idea of the same process the characters are going through. I did struggle quite it in places, but I'm glad I peresevered.
There’s only one Cronenberg film i’d ever rewatch and this is it. Doesn’t even feel like something he’d make up to that point.
Still don't see it Yet, happy to know i have this future pleasure to come .
It’s funny every time I’m channel surfing and “Crash” comes up I have hope which is quickly dashed because it’s always that other crash movie I don’t watch
Iain Sinclair's book about Crash is really really good.
An interesting perspective.
Hm this sounds good I might see it even though I’ve never heard of it before
I struggled with Crash, it definitely didn’t offend me, but I felt it difficult to connect to. However, if we’re talking about a film from the 90s that is voyeuristic, sexual, dealing with the darkness within, Lynch’s Lost Highway is the one that clicks with me the most.
Ya crash took itself too seriously, the sex scenes came off as cheesy. Lost highway is a much better film.
Hi, I liked your review. i could not have described it that well, even though that is exactly what i got out of it, and yes the more i watched it ,i enjoyed it. i have it in my collection. it is so different, and you can take away from it what you will. i plan on showing it to a girlfriend. hey she got a dvd.the human centipede, so i figured if she liked that ,then.....
I love that top!
Curious what you think about cronenberg's movie history of violence
I thought it was boring, couldn't get through it. What did you think?
@@pointysidedown I liked it.
@@roberthall6975 I was just expecting more action and violence, because if the title. Maybe I should try watching it again. What did you like about it?
@@pointysidedown the way Joey came to life. He had been buried in his subconscious for so long, and now he was wide awake.
@@pointysidedown you didn't watch the entire film... the ending has the most action and violence lols
Cute shirt
Can you review good will hunting?
Masterpiece! Cronenberg always makes you think
I enjoyed “Crash” a lot, and didn’t understand the criticism at the time.
In the current internet free for all era this movie seems very tame. Thank god.
I remember this when I was at school.... I was the only one of my friends that liked it...
Thanks..
I like it now but thought it was icy cold when I first saw it
You’d make a great actress 👍
This movie was wild.
I Have seen this Movie 🎥 but I will definitely check it out that is so True And I don’t even have a car 🚘
Despite the strangely compelling premise, and the participation of decadent thespians, the film starts to spin its wheels very early on and eventually drives off into nowheresville. It might have been truly interesting if another director had tackled it. Spader came very close to becoming the Dirk Bogarde of his generation.
I wasn't offended, but I was extremely bored by the end. The movie starts out very compelling and atmospheric (the score is the best part), but then it just shows the same thing over and over
What about the creepy score by Howard Shore?
i listen to that all the time. my favorite is “accident accident”.
dam you look good. i like your fashion style
then BAM. car crash
Absolutely love this movie.
Lived up to my expectations in 4k.
dead ringers (1988) when?
Agony gives so much.
Ballard, like Herbert, is a damned if you do, damned if you don't author to translate into film, on account of how much of the meat of his works takes place inside the minds of his characters. Try to portray all that and it's too easy to wind up with something weird and dull to most audiences. Leave most of that out and those familiar with the original work are likely to be left unsatisfied.
PS- If you haven't already seen Ballard's own short from decades ago:
czcams.com/video/5cqn6zA1sMg/video.html
Happy independenc Day
Put me in the camp of this controversial and provocative film that appreciates it. I know many are put off by it..
I never saw this movie and I don’t want to.
the characters in it are very toronto
The driving for sure
You can tow the wreck if you gotz ze godzilla fF
Crash and burn "Robot Jox" F
Great review. I honestly didn’t love this movie the first time. But, like you said, multiple views made me at least respect it. Most directors wouldn’t even attempt something like this. Props to Cronenberg for tackling something this unique
I thought a very good movie.
Oud ila
I watched it. The guy, the director dude is a high IQ atheist machine, and it shows. I'd sooner watch paint dry
Damn... you look... ffff... sizzling... uh. I mean great review. Hope you do Licence to Kill one day.
The book is waaaaay better.
@Maiahi Ballard was just modest and very generous (no egocentric asshole). Of course, the film is good mainly because of the book. Cronenberg did a lot of great(!!) work here, but the man behind the Crash is Ballard.