CRASH CRITICAL

 

Crash

Starring: Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton, Terrence Howard, Ryan Philipe, Brendan Fraser, Michael Pena and Shaun Taub
Directed by: Paul Haggis
Witten by: Bobby Moresco and Paul Haggis

 

Shock Corridors
by Chris Knipp

Screenwriter Paul Haggis' American directorial debut, Crash, is over-ambitious, but so are Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Robert Altman's Short Cuts, two films Crash resembles in being set in L.A. and spinning out multiple story lines interwoven in a complex and thought-provoking way over the course of a few intense days of screen action. Haggis's ambition isn't limited to his involving us in a couple dozen characters. It's also seen in the way he tackles the topics of identity, alienation and racism in American cities (or is it just L.A.?).

Where Short Cuts was based on the quirky, specific short stories of Raymond Carver and Magnolia goes into rich emotional depth in exploring its main characters (even the shallow ones like Tom Cruise's Frank T.J. Mackey are devastatingly laid bare), Haggis' characters in Crash tend to be generic and two-dimensional. The two dimensions do, however, provide the rounding effect of contrast. As one character's remark suggests, these people don't know who they are; they have to "crash" to be jolted into knowing, and the movie shocks and jolts us too with opposing qualities that are schematic, but also quite thought-provoking.

The inhabitants of Haggis' L.A. are both racists and victims of racism, and most of them have some other major opposing aspect. The racist Officer Ryan--Matt Dillon, for once using his Irishness in a blunt, unflattering way -- humiliates and abuses a well-off, accomplished black man and his wife, Cameron and Christine (Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton), but he tenderly cares for his ailing father at night, and later rescues a black woman in mortal danger. Graham (Don Cheadle), the bookend and stage manager of the movie, is quick to spot the racism of others, yet crudely stereotypes his Latina girlfriend. Another character is first pathetically self abasing, then later suicidally aggressive. Ryan's unwilling partner, Officer Hanson (Ryan Phillippe), gets reassigned to avoid the racism, but himself commits an act of racist violence. A young black man with corn rows named Anthony (Ludacris) chatters on perceptively with his pal Peter (Larenz Tate) about how they're stereotyped as ghetto toughs when they really look like UCLA students; but in fact they're car-jackers. And so on. However simplistically, the characters are all given dimensionality through having opposing characteristics. Even the endlessly bitchy wife Jean (Sandra
Bullock) of D.A. Rick (Brendan Fraser), who seems without a single redeeming feature, is finally jolted into the arms of her Latina housekeeper and thereby gains an air of humanity.

None of this has the depth of Magnolia or the specificity of Short Cuts, but it has undeniable power. Crash is relentless in pouring out calamity after calamity and isn't much fun to watch. The racist clashes, the slurs, the name-calling, the hostility are in your face from the first scene, where Graham and his girlfriend Ria (Jennifer Esposito) are rear-ended on a highway by a car full of Asians, and Ria and an Asian lady immediately get out and start yelling epithets at each other. Oddly, since he seems to be both a peacemaker and a cop, Graham does nothing to mitigate this disaster and merely wanders off to examine a crime scene by the side of the road, which perhaps is what they're there for. From here the movie goes back over the events that led up to this moment.

Crash's stereotypes can be grating, particularly a mean Iranian man called Farhad (Shaun Toub) with a pathetic little convenience store who is bent on shooting somebody and calls everybody he meets up with a "cheater." He isn't any better than the prejudiced (and probably frightened) gun shop owner who calls him "Osama" and throws 9/11 in his face, unaware that an Iranian isn't an Arab.

One of the most appealing characters is the Mexican-American repairman Daniel (Michael Peña) who's called in to fix the Iranian's door. He points out that the new lock won't provide any protection till the whole door is replaced, whereupon the shopkeeper calls him a "cheater." The Iranian's mistrust leads to his shop being broken into and trashed, and when the insurers won't pay, he tries to take out his revenge on the repairman. The resulting shock sequence has been condemned by viewers and critics for being tricky and exploitive. It is, but an earlier scene between Daniel and his little daughter is the movie's sweetest moment and the only time when a resonant metaphor is born.

There are other good things. Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton are fine together as the affluent black couple, even if their action seems pushed to the breaking point. Ludacris and Larenz Tate have a good rhythm as the young, not-really-ghetto carjackers. In fact the black actors are more convincing and rich in their portrayals than the white ones. Maybe that's because they're the ones who know best what racism is all about. You can argue endlessly about whether Haggis' screenplay is too schematic or doctrinaire. He obviously is not the filmmaking talent Altman and Anderson are. But Crash is a pretty original, striking piece of work nonetheless. It's provocative and causes extreme reactions, so people tend to say it's a masterpiece or pure junk, but the fact is that it's simply a good, but imperfect movie.

world cup

Archive for 2006 FIFA World Cup™

 

Washington | U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently embarked on a mission of soccer diplomacy (see Apr 4). Now President George Bush has shared his own views in an interview with German tabloid Bild am Sonntag, timed to the Washington visit of Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor

The last question from Bild editor Kai Diekmann on May 5 concerned the coming World Cup finals. Diekmann asked about the tournament’s importance and Bush’s prediction on a victor. Wisely, the president declined to answer the second half, but he gave a personal account of his own relationship to the sport

[M]ost Americans, up until recently, didn’t understand how big the World Cup is. And we’re beginning to understand. And the reason why is, a lot of us grew up not knowing anything about soccer, like me. I never saw soccer as a young boy. We didn’t play it where I was from. It just didn’t exist. I can’t even—I’m thinking about all the—between age six, when I can remember sports, and 12 or 13, I just never saw soccer being played.

Grahame Jones, soccer writer for the Los Angeles Times, does a blistering job deconstructing the president’s reply, which likely would mirror that of many from his generation. Jones observes that Bush remains blissfully ignorant of the rich soccer traditions of New Haven, Connecticut, where Bush the Younger was born, as well as the similarly rich heritage of Texas, where Bush was governor. “[I]t is not, as Bush told Bild am Sonntag, that ‘the sport just didn’t exist,’ ” Jones writes. “It is simply that, like so many other Americans brought up on a diet of football, baseball and basketball, he has opted to ignore it

While Bush said he was “confident that the German people will do a magnificent job of welcoming people from around the world,” lawmakers on Capitol Hill used Merkel’s visit to air fears that Germany would be too welcoming. Members of the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations on May 4 heard testimony from six advocates for victims of human trafficking. They focused on reports that between 30,000 and 60,000 women, primarily from Eastern Europe, would be exploited as sex workers during the monthlong tournament (view the webcast). Prostitution is legal in Germany, which authorities claim make it easier to control

Juliette Engel, director of the MiraMed Institute in Moscow, said the charity had received more than 500 calls in the past few months

from young women and their concerned families about various offers to work as waitresses, hostesses, advertising models, cooks and cleaning personnel at the World Cup. … [T]hat expenses for travel and housing in Germany will be deducted from the women’s earnings as well as … that the jobs are offered without work permits are clear indicators that the activity going on before our eyes is trafficking of Russian women and girls to serve in the World Cup brothels

In a rhetorical flourish, Engel charged the German government with acting “as an official ‘pimp’ ” for the tournament; the event, she added, “is a human rights disaster in the making.” Subcommittee chairman Chris Smith (R–New Jersey) said Bush would raise the issue with the German chancellor

We have not yet read an official German response, but there must be some irritation at this meddling from abroad. German media noted the hearing’s provocative title—“Germany’s World Cup Brothels.” With Bush’s comments that “some of us older guys are now beginning to understand the significance of the World Cup,” the sudden American concern, while justified, seems prurient

Some of the subjects of Soccerhead. Left to right, Thomas “The Hammer” Waring, Ben Haner, Shelby Hammond, Kevin Guerrero and Bryan Basdeo of the College Park (Maryland) Hornets. (Copyright © Nick Waring)

We are not sure we subscribe to such generalities, but Haner’s anecdotal evidence amuses. Weekend Financial Times columnist Gary Silverman offered a similar take on May 6, writing that Americans remain fascinated with sports in which balls fly into the air; soccer, he says, is more earthbound. Soccer deals with limitations and is “rooted in reality,” while most Americans want “more home runs, more touchdown passes, more slam dunks—more images of flight, if not outright transcendence” (article not available online

Americans are not the only ones interested in examining soccer’s fit in national culture. U.K. football magazine When Saturday Comes this week releases its own book, Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America’s Forgotten Game. Author David Wangerin indulges in some of the recently generated nostalgia for the North American Soccer League by combing for details from the league’s past. An excerpt appears in the magazine’s May issue. The worst NASL nickname? Perhaps the Jaws of San Diego. More important, though, Wangerin writes that the NASL had cultural influence in that “newspapers across the country … carried NASL results and wrote features on college and high-school teams, printing photos invariably captioned with a reference to players ‘getting their kicks ”

To George Bush’s surprise, he can read that Connecticut had a team, based at his alma mater, Yale, following a move from Hartford. Their nickname? The Bicentennials. Texas had the Dallas Tornado and Houston Hurricane. As the Los Angeles Times’s Jones writes of Bush’s deficient soccer memory, though, “no blame attaches” to having forgotten those names

 

http://www.theglobalgame.com/blog/?cat=2 

Picture

picture of week

Scape to Paradise

LCI

Description of LCI

The UCSB English Department encourages upper-division students with particular literary/critical interests to pursue them formally by selecting one of the new specializations in the major. The specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information (supervised by the department's Transcriptions Project) brings the perspective of the humanities to the concept of "information" that many students will engage with professionally and personally all their lives. In particular, Literature and the Culture of Information compares the forms, media, institutions, and aesthetics of the "information revolution" to similar revolutions in the past—e.g., the print revolution. The goal is to ask what the "well-read" have to offer the "well-informed," and vice versa. What was beautiful, enlightening, or cruel in the project of orality or literacy and their literatures? How does the project of information compare? And how might the insights of past ages of language be used to improve our contemporary age? Courses offered by the specialization in Literature and the Culture of Information hybridize the theory, practice, and literature of contemporary information culture with studies of the earlier information media of oral discourse, manuscripts, and print and the literature they embodied.

http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/curriculum/lci/

American Dream

Soft power is the ability to get what we want by attracting others, by getting them to want the things we want

Joseph Nye

 

                                                                          American dream

US popular culture – from blue jeans and popular music to Hollywood movies – has taken the world by storm. American education and research is much valued around the world. All of these factors are elements in America’s “soft power". Virtually all of the films on offer in the Leicester Square cinemas were American. Hollywood makes some great movies and some very bad ones as well. But Hollywood is also an instrument of American soft power; a phenomenon which, though poorly understood, has a dramatic impact in shaping perceptions of America and American society.

Through American eyes

Take the film that I saw - The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise. It is set in 19th entury Japan. It is a story based on a real-life rebellion by a Samurai warlord, against a western-backed - in this case a US-backed - government, intent on modernizing the country.

 

In showing the last gasp of the old Samurai warrior-caste it lets the Americans have their cake and eat it. They are both the villains - the suppliers of the modern weaponry to the government, but an American, Tom Cruise of course, is also the hero. He is a US soldier who respects the warrior traditions of the Samurai and sides with them. America's dominance of the movie industry across much of the world is not just a matter of money and big business. Popular culture celebrates American values and, as in this case, it presents a particular American view of the past. The Bush administration is eager to use soft power to change its image in the Middle East. But it wants to go much further to transform the region as a whole. The US goal is to bring democracy to the Arab world, starting with Iraq. Cynics see such claims as just window-dressing. Critics have argued that the whole grand plan is over-ambitious at best, and plain crazy at worst. Richard Haas agreed that America's great project in the Middle East was the work of a generation. But the real question is whether successive US administrations will have the staying power to see the job through, assuming of course that it is feasible in the first place.

The Age of Empire series is broadcast on Mondays at 09:05GMT on BBC World Service Radio. (24 may 2004)

 

soft power

The ’Soft Power’ Of Broadcasting

Al-Alam is an official Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting channel that went on the air in March 2003. It portrays US-led coalition forces and their activities in a negative light, comparing them to Israeli activities in Palestine. It is an important means by which Iranian views are conveyed to the Iraqi people. Al-Kawthar

 is the new name for Al-Sahar, another official Iranian station that went on the air in 1997. Al-Kawthar’s news reporting is fairly neutral on Iraqi affairs, but it is as hostile to Israel as Al-Alam is, referring to Israel as "the usurping entity" and discussing "the Palestinians’ usurped rights." Al-Kawthar’s programming on the United States is negative, too, and it is supportive of Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.

 

 

GLOBALIZATION OF POWER: THE PROBLEM OF TODAY'S  WORLD

An interview with John Saxe

 

The world's central problem today is power, although we must pay attention to globalization, saidJohn Saxe Fernandez, one of Mexico's most lucid intellectuals, who for years has kept up an active and persistent survey of contemporary problems. Power and contradictions of capital –that's what's important; Saxe replied to a question about globalization as a current phenomenon.

Saxe, who has studied in the universities of Massachusetts, Washington, and Mexico City, has been a professor in New York's Hofstra University and Los Angeles’ California State University. Of course globalization should worry us, –he insisted- because it's an important issue in the international situation and it has come out in the open in the last few years as a phenomenon that we have also had for five centise. But, -he explained- globalization doesn't take place in a power vacuum; it develops in a context of power and that's why we should study it in depth.

The professor from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has a strong opinion regarding the relationship between these two phenomenons. “I'm mainly referring to economic globalization”, he added. “That is, the increase in trade flows, the increase in the flows of technology and capital. That doesn't take place in a market context; instead, it arises in a context of international power relations and these are the international relations that throughout the last five centuries have been biased, the Mexican intellectual stressed. There are winners and losers in these relations”, Saxe said. “For us Latin Americans, for instance, it's a matter of great importance.

It's what" scientific literature calls Imperialism, and Imperialism is the context in which this phenomenon that we call globalization takes place.''

It's a big mistake to take globalization out of the context of power and place it as the frame of reference in which all the rest takes place, he explained. It's like proposing that the market be the frame of reference in which history takes place and it's not that way. Questioned regarding if globalization is a way of existence of contemporary transnational capital, John Saxe brandished his new thesis on this matter: “Taken from this point of view, we could reply affirmatively regarding globalization, but the main thing is to see both its dimensions: globalization as a historic phenomenon, and globalization as the power speech of capital. I insist, the central thing is the context of power in which it takes place”. Regarding Iraq , he said: “We're at a deadlock. Resistance is being made with a quality and a level that has surprised the whole world; it took Europeans years to achieve the kind of resistance we saw in the first week of war in Iraq , according to military studies.

The US isn't capable of controlling the situation, not even with its power trump card –its military- when there are politically and militarily organized resistances. Asked about the current validity of concepts such as imperialism, class, hegemony, dependency, and domination, Saxe answered: “Those concepts are completely in force, they are very relevant. A concept such as Imperialism is completely crucial today to understand what happens in this stage in process of gaining control over the world. Concepts such as that of Imperial Presidency, in addition to those already mentioned, are central.

 

Globalization

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نگاهی به کتاب جدید دکتر آزاد

پاتوق و مدرنيته ايراني

كتابي است از دكتر تقي آزاد ارمكي(استاد گروه جامعه شناسي دانشگاه تهران)

این کتاب اگرچه در زمستان 1384 به چاپ رسيده اما به تازگي وارد بازار كتاب گرديده است.نویسنده در مقدمه ،كتاب را به كنشگران عرصه آزادي و رهايي ملت ايران از قيد استبداد و استعمار تقديم كرده است و در ضمن ياد پاتوق نشينان راستين را پاس داشته است،همين مقدمه ناخود آگاه

كنجكاوي مخاطب را  براي دنبال كردن مطلب بر مي انگيزدو شايد عنوان كتاب اولين پرسش خواننده باشد َ

ارتباط  پاتوق و مدرنيته؟

همين عنوان و مضامين كتاب بي شك مي  تواند نگاهي جامعه شناختي را نسبت به پاتوق در ايران ايجاد كند موضوعي كه شايد تا كنون بدين گونه به آن  پرداخته نشده است.پاتوق محصول مدرنيته ايراني است و شناسايي مدرنيته ايراني از شناسايي پاتوق منفك نيست.از آنجايي كه جامعه ايراني از نوع جوامعي است كه در جريات تغيير و تحولات اساسي و سريع قرار دارد، بدين لحاظ تعهد كتاب حاضر شناسايي نوع تغييرات اجتماعي در دوره معاصر جامعه ايراني با تكيه بر سهم و نقش آفريني پاتوق هاي فرهنگي و اجتماعي است.اين پاتوق ها به واسطه مقاومت فرهنگي نسبت به فرهنگ مسلط به توليد خرده فرهنگ جديد اقدام مي كنند.

قطعا ساختن فرهنگ مدرن در ايران و ايجاد آنچه كه تا بدين روز براي آن تلاش هاي زيادي صورت گرفته و افراد آزاد انديش بيشماري در طول تاريخ اين مرز و بوم جان خود را براي تحققش فدا كرده اند يعني ايجاد دموكراسي اجتماعي تلاش ها و تحقيقات  ريشه اي و فراگير تري بايد صورت گيرد و يكي از مكان هايي كه شايد تا به امروز از توجه و نظر بسياري از منتقدان اجتماعي دور مانده ، نويسنده پاتوق را از ابعاد گوناگون مورد بررسي قرار داده و  با بررسي تاريخي شكل گيري پاتوق ها به طريقه اي زيركانه آن را با ساير تحولات اجتماعي و فرهنگي ايران كه خود در نهايت منجر به موج جديدي در ايران تحت عنوان مدرنيته گرديده و آغازش را ازدوره صفويه مي داند، مرتبط ساخته است. اين كتاب نگاهي نو به مفهوم مدرنيته ايراني دارد و از زاويه اي جديد به پاتوق مي نگرد. قطعا مطالعه اين كتاب براي علاقمندان به مفاهيم اجتماعي ايران و درك تحولات فرهنگي جامعه معاصر ايراني خالي از لطف نيست.

اين كتاب  در سه فصل به بازگويي مطالب پرداخته واز انتشارات لوح فكر مي باشد.

 

HIP HOP MUSIC GROUP

Globalization  Culture

Laurie Taylor explores the culture of hip hop, an art form which began in the Bronx in New York in the 1970s and has since seeded itself around the world, translating with ease across cultural and ethnic boundaries.  But is rapping in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne or Frankfurt or Tokyo the real thing?  Academics disagree. Some maintain it is only authentic when it is by and about the experience of African Americans.  Others argue that this ignores hip hop’s attraction for young people from very diverse socio-cultural backgrounds and want to celebrate an instance of black culture becoming global culture.  Laurie meets two students of what has been called ‘an aesthetic of the insult’.  Andy Bennett is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey and has worked with Turkish-Moroccan rappers in Germany and a home-grown variety in Newcastle.  Kodwo Eshun is a Cultural critic and author of ‘More Brilliant than the Sun’ who believes that unlike punk, hip hop not only has a future but is the future of music.