Crash

Excellent new film. that I saw last night. And it's relevant for our times, and certainly for my mood at the moment.

It looks at racial tensions in LA during one single day, when the lives of a dozen are so people crash together in a variety of ways. Very powerful, and for once it's a Hollywood film that doesn't have good or bad guys, but recognises the good and bad behaviours in all the characters.

This is something very dear to me, in a lot of ways, not just to see actors performing rounded characters, but also in the way I am in public.

I'm very aware of my sometimes explosive and contradictory behaviour, of my anger, sometimes craziness, and the jumble of people who make up me. But that's the way human beings are. I don't pretend that I have moments when I hate, moments when I'm irrational, fucking pissed off with people, or just irritated beyond belief. But that's what it is to be a human being.

The really fucked up people are the ones who don't express themelves, or don't know how to let off steam in healthy ways. The unhealthy ones, too, are the ones who don't know how to defend themselves, or give back what's given them. It's the people pleasers that get messed up. That much I found out myself.

In the movie, we see a bunch of people who'd be very nice, reasonable people in most circumstances behave really out of character due to pressures that build and build until they snap.

I really think that the London bombings have made people far more tense than many of us have realised. The war, even though it's not really come to The West the way it has in Iraq and Afghanistan, has crept up on us in ways that we haven't realised. The animosity between people is almost palpable. There's a great deal of fear and hatred, and I think that many people are now divided about issues such as the war in ways that they wouldn't have been a few years ago.

Feelings are high, at least subconsiously, and tempers are on a knife edge. Things are, as they say, very interesting at the moment.

"Crash" really looks at this phenomenon.