Ararat

With ARARAT, Atom Egoyan applies his considerable skills to the Armenian Genocide, an issue that's clearly of profound importance to him. He weaves together multiple storylines and timelines (a technique that seemed revolutionary with his first film and now feels pedestrian) to generate dramatic tension while he builds a two-hour long testament to a war crime committed long ago and far away.

It's an artfully made film, and I cared for its characters, many of whom are longstanding members of Agoyan's repertory company. But here's the problem, articulated by Elias Koteas (he plays an actor who lands the role of Jevdet Bey, a major player in the genocide) in conversation with a young man of Armenian descent:

Koteas: Look, I was born here. So were you, right?
Young man: Yeah.
Koteas: This is a new country. So let's just drop the f^cking history
and get on with it.

The young man feels the pain of the genocide like it happened yesterday. He carries that pain like Serbs carry the pain of their defeat at the Field of Blackbirds in 1389, transmuting into a kind of impotent rage. In fact, most of the ethnically Armenian characters in the film carry that rage, and I can't help but think that that rage is precisely the kind of thing that keeps cultures locked in cycles of retribution.

How much better a place might the world be if we could just drop the f^cking history and get on with it?

Memories of Murder

MEMORIES OF MURDER, set in the mid-eighties, follows a pair of detectives as they try to figure out who is behind a series of grisly killings.

It's a police procedural, pure and simple, though it comes with a twist unlike any I've seen before. It's a solid picture, but it didn't blow me away.

Just a datapoint for your decisionmaking.

Crash

I finally saw CRASH last night, and I'll add my voice to the general chorus of disdain.

I don't require that the films I see have people like those I know in real life. I don't require that they have characters who speak like those I know in real life. I do, however, require that, unless the movies feature balrogs or wookies or toupeed actors screaming "Khaaaaaann!", they have people that could, conceivably, walk the earth.

I'm sure Paul Haggis is a nice man, but his film feels like something written by a guy who never leaves his gated community. People just don't talk about race the way these people talk about race. White politicos don't complain about "these friggin' black people;" they simply forget to plan for their evacuation. Coincidence does not, in fact, pile on coincidence like a poorly constructed Jenga stack. CRASH does not take place in a world I recognize.