Word: crashing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cars and sex do have things in common: acceleration, aggression, contact, combustion. Cinema, eternal celebrant of the stupid-funny car crash, is the ideal medium to anatomize America's fetishizing of the automobile. And Cronenberg is the very guy for the job. His first commercial film, Fast Company, was about stock-car racing; his brilliant remake of The Fly was a parable of love, decay and death, of man misguidedly using machinery to transform himself...
...November it nabbed five Genies (Canada's Oscar equivalent), including one for director David Cronenberg. It also earned a chilling blast of invective from Ted Turner, boss of bosses of the film's U.S. distributor, Fine Line Features (and vice chairman of Time Warner, parent of TIME). Now Crash--from J.G. Ballard's notorious 1973 novel, and with an NC-17 warning sticker affixed--finally opens in the country that invented car culture...
...intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work. Sexual without being sexy, the film moves smoothly but slowly, like a Caddy on a revolving showroom platform. Dialogue scenes are conducted in a reverent whisper; only the brakes screech, just after a climax or before a death. Even the carnographic love play--in which each character has predictably weird sex with most of the others--is too studied. The fine actors disport themselves solemnly, like giant...
Maybe a little careering delirium would have helped. It may seem perverse to demand that an outrageous film go still further, faster, wilder. But if it had, Crash wouldn't be the honorable chore it finally is--less a joyride than an endless traffic...
...NASA administrator Dan Goldin yesterday told the Aero Club of Washington that the current aircraft crash rate is unacceptably high, citing predictions that the number of flying aircraft will triple in 20 years...