last night was a double feature of sorts. i turned the tv on to the independant film channel as i fired up the laptop to work on my little project. the movie that started about 20 minutes earlier was david cronenberg's crash. i was astonished by this film. i'd heard of it before, in fact a good friend told me she thought it was the most erotic movie of all time. my friend, who i lost track of thru the years, was at the time single and used movies to sublimate her own desires. and crash did the trick for her.

i watched it half with an eye to the television and half to my computer screen. the movie requires one's full attention. based on j.g. ballard's novel of the same title the flick stars james spader as a tv exec who gets into a horrendous car accident. at the scene he notices a couple fucking in the middle-distance and as spader's recovery progresses he finds himself fetishizing the automobile and car accidents. it becomes the antidote to he and his wife's boring love-life. he then later finds that couple who were fucking and discovers that there is a small subculture of like-minded individuals who are aroused, nay they get high, from car accidents.

cronenberg's eye is lush and detached from the principals, nearly clinical in his depiction of people transfixed by speed, metal, impact and elemental squishy human bodies that become so much blood and meat. it is an astonishing work. the characters are hyper-sexual beings that get off on watching crash test videos as pornography. i don't know how much cronenberg strayed or remained faithful to the source material having never read the book. i can say that the movie is haunting and i've been thinking about it all day.

of course i need to watch the movie again and give it all my attention to write fully on it. the second film last night was amores perros which is a triptych set in mexico city of three strangers who are connected only by their love of dogs and a single fatal car crash. again i need to watch it again from start to finish in order to write about it. it is also a beautiful, hyper-violent story reminiscent i think of tarantino's early work. that is not a flaw at all. the film is, in a word, incredible.

anyway, today i told a friend my impressions of crash. she said, oh wasn't that a good movie! especially with matt dillon as. . . i said, matt dillon wasn't in it. the movie starred james spader, holly hunter and rosanna arquette. what?

she thought i was talking about this crash which is a movie that i hadn't bothered to see. then she told me she hadn't heard of cronenberg's film. when i said the plot involved people who sexualized car crashes she gave me this look and said, oh.