Word: pileups
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Butterfly fiction is not necessarily political. But when it is, it has an affinity with liberalism, perhaps because of its focus on how individuals can be shaped--or ruined--by social systems. Crash was a 10-car pileup of pieties about race relations. Emilio Estevez's hyperearnest film Bobby (opening later this month) juxtaposes the 1968 assassination of progressive martyr Robert F. Kennedy--portrayed messianically as the last, best hope for the race- and war-torn U.S.--with the imbricated stories of 22 characters. (One of whom is played by ... Ashton Kutcher. Coincidence? I think...
...fallen to the bottom five and is on the way out. Lamb and veal might appeal to critics, but "we just can't sell it," Overton says. Special interests, like vegetarians, get a few concessions. And as in any democracy, sometimes the voters surprise you. Thai lettuce wraps--a pileup of satay chicken, coconut curry noodles, sprouts and vegetables--are among the top-three appetizers in every city the Cheesecake Factory serves...
Babel Another chance-is-destiny parable from Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams), the drama stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as a couple tested by near tragedy. The film's ambition is imposing, the acting often illuminating, the pileup of coincidences finally exasperating. Marie Antoinette Sofia Coppola reimagines the court of Louis XVI as a gossip party for rich, vapid teenagers. The film, starring Kirsten Dunst as the Queen, above, got a few raucous boos, sending many critics to the defense of this lame satire, which may mean to make fun of emptiness but actually...
...Another is that Brokeback is one of those movies whose word-of-mouth makes a lot of people reluctant to see it. And not just right-wing commentators. The notion of a couple of cowpokes playing the two-backed beast is too... icky for some folks. Not that the pileup of animosities and implausibilities in Crash is easy to take, but that movie?s excesses got audiences, whether they liked it or hated it, talking far into the night. That gave the film the patina of Importance, another preferred word around Oscar time. Is Crash provocative, reckless, incendiary? So were...
...film's title announces its intentions. It's a collision, an L.A. pileup, of people and prejudices. The dozen-plus major characters include cops, thugs, politicians, strugglers and stragglers, the rich and the poor of all ethnicities--the melting pot that bubbles over in the film's schematic, 36-hour story line. The viewpoint is Manichaean--black and white, if you will--but with a twist. Haggis says not that there are good people and bad people, but that we are all capable of being both. A racist cop (Oscar nominee Matt Dillon) can rudely grope a terrified black woman...