What the Flick

Let's start with CRASH, which opened earlier this summer. It's still playing here and there in LA, but that could be related not so much to its quality, which is high, but the self-absorption of my fellow citizens, who love to see a movie about LA, even one that basically rips its social culture to shreds. CRASH is a dark but not unrealistic look at how the various communities of Los Angeles slip and slide past each other like so many tectonic plates, with the inevitable damage released when those forces collide. It is shocking to see a movie that so truthfully portrays the petty hatreds and prejudices that people of all backgrounds bring to their daily activities; it is rare, and refreshing, to see one that gives each of its characters a mostly 3-dimensional life that all together explains, refutes, and allows them occasionally to overcome those prejudices. CRASH is distinguished by excellent performances from its ensemble cast, including Sandra Bullock as a frightened and seemingly unreasonable upper-middle class wife; Matt Dillon as a committed cop nudged by circumstance to deriving validation from humiliating unwary citizens; and Don Cheadle as an LAPD detective still trying to win his addict mother's love while all she worries about is her "baby boy," his n'eer-do-well brother. As is too often true in LA, it's the organizing principle of law enforcement -- its necessity, its abuses, and its failures -- that ties the disparate characters' lives together. Not to get all Mike Davis ECOLOGY OF FEAR or anything, but once again, LA provides the setting for a movie illustrating its tenuous grasp on civilization, where citizens live in fear of each other and the cops and vice versa. Where are the movies that celebrate LA, where the city is a living, breathing, lovable character, like New York in any Woody Allen movie, and not a backdrop for crazies, creeps, or corruption? Admittedly, this is a city where street life takes place at 40 miles an hour by cell phone, with frustrations bred by lack of understanding and a feeling that the California good life is somehow slipping away, or perhaps just being reserved for fewer and fewer of our citizens. Does it make people edgy in the bright sunshine? If you believe CRASH, it sure does. I choose to believe a little more in the good in people, but maybe the sun's gone to my head.

Ah, then there's the earthy world of HUSTLE & FLOW, if by earthy you mean vulgar, slightly skanky, and peopled by citizens who use 'ho as a noun AND a verb. And they do. In a 180-degree turn from his character in CRASH, Howard here plays D-Jay, a good-natured, fair-minded pimp (as pimps go) who dreams of better things for himself and his girls. The story is charming by its own internal logic; in the way that people on society's edges often do, D-Jay and his two 'hos, Shug (Taraji P. Hensen), who is on "family leave" because she's pregnant by an unknown "trick," and Nola (Taryn Manning) form a slightly unstable nuclear family. This being an M-TV Movie production, music is D-Jay's dream way of escaping the wrong side of Beale Street, and the movie's best scenes are set in the makeshift studio where D-Jay and his hodgepodge crew work to create a demo. The songs D-Jay writes are powerful (if, do I have to say it again, vulgar and not for children) and their creation empowers each of the crew in different ways that are uplifting, if not so probable. Despite its liberal use of F-, N-, and other words, HUSTLE & FLOW has a feel-good vibe, and the characters are endearing in their quirks and occasional displays of strength. Notably good is Taryn Manning, playing poor-white-trash-hooker Nola, the girl who takes D-Jay's message to "be in charge" to heart in a surprising way.