May 10, 2005

[friendster: the movie] ^{7:54 PM}

One of my favorite movies in the world is Playing by Heart. In this movie, a large ensamble cast (made up celebrities I love) goes through life in a short amount of time, and we slowly begin to realize how they are interconnected. 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon movies. Love Actually. I like these kinds of movies. Some could argue they're predictable, but I don't care. Law & Order is predictable, and we all know how much I'm obsessed with it. It's a comforting predictability.

I keep waiting for my next one of these movies to steal my heart, and this summer there are two contenders: Crash (set in LA) and Heights (set in NYC).

I saw Crash today at the Grove. Heavy. Very heavy, and at times very unsettling. I wasn't expecting the film to deal so much with race relations (which upon reading some reviews after the fact, was kinda the point of the film). At times it was handled very deftly, and at times I felt like I was sitting in church being preached at. While I enjoy the cast, it's unweildy — Brenden Fraser and Sandra Bullock don't do much but act like deer in headlights, Ryan Phillippe, through no fault of his own, is given one note to play, and Matt Dillon does what he can to wring some sympathy for his character (a man so corrupt and flawed it's almost impossible to give him any).

I'm sure someone from the cast will get some sort of nomination out of it, and I do think it's worth seeing, but it didn't blow me away. If anything, Michael Pena is the real star of this film, so it's fitting he's prominent on the poster.

It's pretty obvious there's 45 minutes on the cutting room floor, and I think if it gets reinstated on the dvd I'll be crying while watching real people, instead of watching some good actors trying to shine.

I saw Heights at Sundance this year. It's also flawed, but more engaging. Like Playing by Heart, Heights's network of relationships is bound tighter, something that (to me) hindered Crash (which the more I think about could be a poorman's Boomtown: The Movie).

A very valid point could be made that I prefer Heights because it deals with homosexuality and has Glenn Close, which might be true, and maybe today I wanted to be uplifted and intrigued, and instead I was brought down and beaten by Crash. Could be. But I still think Heights is the better film, something I'll pay to see again come June 10th.

I've been having a lot of dreams about New York lately, and quite a few disucssions about it with a few friends. The opening line of Crash is also the opening of the trailer: Don Cheadle's Detective saying, "It's the sense of touch, in real cities you walk, y'know? You brush past people, people bump into you, in LA nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass...it's that sense of touch. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so that we can feel something."

Those lines alone got me into the theatre today, because that's how I feel. LA is a really fucked up place — a city that isn't a city at all. I miss the city. DC, New York, any of them. You can go for a walk in a real city and never truely feel alone, but LA can make you feel like you're a ghost.

I don't feel that way when I go into the hills, because the isolation is of my choice, and my encounters with people up there are always pleasant. You can climb all the way to the top, to the highest point in the city and look out and see it stretched out for miles, how vast it is, how large. Thousands of people moving about their lives, but moving about them differently than I've ever known it — so compartmentalized and seperated, that you have to make meetings and set times and dates to see people.

One day a few weeks ago I ran into someone I know, Sal, at Chipotle. I'd just moved here from DC, but Sal's been here for quite a while, and all we could talk about was how wonderful it was to run into someone we knew — how that never happens here.

I miss the way it used to be with people. In Houston. In Dallas, and in DC. Those relationships and interactions don't exist here, it's my cheif and I think only complaint about LA. I miss my friends, and having people down the street. I miss spur-of-the-moment coffees and happenstance excursions. The random encounters and the walk-and-talks.

Now, after seeing someone, I'm almost deperessed.

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