Movie: Crash. The overworked metaphor, that Los Angeles is so alienating that crash their cars, or really more than their cars, just for human contact. The instant identification that race provides is every bit as distancing as driving in metalloid shells, and the inevitable crashes there at least as damaging. As a piece of writing, this impresses: a set of arbitrarily interrelated characters, more than a dozen in combos of two to four, crash, regroup, then crash again. Each gets a shot of humiliation, and a shot at redemption, but not necessarily in that order. As withering as the denouements are the grace is gratifying, proving not merely that what goes around comes around, but that it doesn't necessarily have to. But as a movie this isn't especially sharp or slick -- to dark, the lights too bleary, the cold and snow unconvincing. But that doesn't ruin the movie -- any writing that sticks so closely in mind can't be dismissed so easily. A-

Movie: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Afterwards I went back and started to reread the book, just to refresh myself on what came from where, and what got left out. Since this only covers one of the five books, and since they no doubt mean to leave room for the rest of the franchise, the movie leaves out much, but since the books as a whole are so jumbled most of what it leaves out wasn't there in the first place. Actually, the movie cheats and borrows ahead, which is part of why it makes more sense than the first book, and also why it flows better. This helps -- at least it helps make up for the inevitable loss of the unvisual conceptualizing that was the main charm of the books. Aside from the matter of Zaphod Beeblebrox's two heads the visualizations are marvelous -- especially the planet factory, which gives a new and even more disturbing meaning to creationism. If it seems odd that I can't get away from the subject of the books here, it's partly because these are damn near the only novels I've ever read -- it's an angle I never have the opportunity to explore -- but more so because the books were signposts for how I learned to think about life, the universe, and everything: only a small matter of faith prevents me from elevating them to biblical status, but then the main point of them is that even a small matter of faith is a terrible thing to indulge oneself in. A

Movie: Kingdom of God. This one sent me back to the books too -- the encyclopedia, at least. Most of what I knew about the Crusades was Geoffrey Barraclough's theory that the Pope pushed them to try to divert the Normans away from wrecking Europe. But that would have been more like the First Crusade, which wasn't a pretty picture no matter what angle you viewed it from. What Ridley Scott actually focuses on is the fall of Jerusalem before the start of the Third Crusade, roughly 100 years after the Crusaders' initial triumph. That gives us a more moderate, more enlightened Crusader kingdom which is ultimately lost due to the arrogance of incoming Europeans -- I guess you could call them the neocons, the guys who think the enemy is evil and compromise is shameful. Various pieces of history get knocked around to clean up the story -- princess Sibylla makes out the best for the rewrite -- which unsurprisingly doesn't help clarify things. Some prominence is given to Saladin, who evidently has his own neocons to deal with, but that mostly underscores the commercial impossibility of trying to tell this or any story from the other side. Still, it's an awkward story, and the frequent bloodbaths just make it all the drearier. B