Better Late Then Never

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Don't expect a classic, just a good comedy/drama with a good ensemble cast. This movie about a writer who gets thrown out by his wife gets taken in by two female students after lecturing their class and winds up getting the inspiration for his new novel (after a severe case of writer's block) by snooping around in their email accounts and apartment. The fantasy scenes were hilarious, and I loved the opening parts where he learns he's been kicked out and the next scene with the class. The writer and two ladies work well together, and it's a movie about getting inspiration off each other, as he inspires them to write, too. Not a bad movie if you have time to kill. I liked it and you might too.*** out of ****

Crashing has to be one of the best movies ever made about writing. Not about being a writer, but about the act and even compulsion of writing itself. It wraps you up in the creative process and drenches you in the inspiration and perspiration of success. Anchored by the slyly ingratiating performance of Campbell Scott, this is a gossamer delight.Richard McMurray (Campbell Scott) is a writer. As he was entering middle age, he wrote a commercial and critical smash hit called "The Trouble With Dick". Now about to leave middle age, Richard has been struggling with his second book for years. It's not that he's blocked and can't write, it's that every word he puts on the page sucks. Richard might have stewed in his stagnant juices forever but his Hollywood actress locks him out of their Malibu home, something he assumes is her way of asking for a divorce.Seemingly unfazed by it all, Richard walks away with nothing but a suitcase. The unfinished second novel remains behind on the computer in his now former home. He goes directly to keep a promise to speak to a college writing class taught by his old flame Diane (Alex Kingston), where Richard promptly spills his guts to the students about being tossed out with no where to sleep that night. A beautiful young student named Kristen (Izabella Miko) offers to let Richard crash on the couch in the apartment she shares with her roommate Jacqueline (Lizzy Caplan). As a lark, Richard accepts their offer. Once he's ensconced on their living room couch, though, something happens. Richard watches the girls, he looks at the evidence of their lives, and his smothered creative spark starts to smolder again. He asks the girls if he can stay and they agree, as long as Richard helps them with their own writing. What follows that is a marvelous, smart and funny weave of the girls' stories brought to life, Richard's life in the girls apartment and Richard's version of the girls and his life in their apartment that he's writing down on a yellow legal pad.This charming mix of fantasy, reality and fantasy modeled after reality is held together by Scott's exquisitely subdued and detached acting. He presents us with a writer who's a bit different than what we usually encounter in fiction. He's committed but not tormented by writing. Richard has given himself over so completely to his art that almost everything he thinks and feels is in service to it. He's not filled with self-pity or self-loathing or anger or frustration, just a quiet determination to get the word right. Richard takes everything that exists between him and the girls and focuses it not on them or himself but on the writing. Richard McMurray is a guy who writes because he can't do anything else and doesn't want to.This film is also a great introduction to the craft of storytelling. First in the way Richard critiques the girls' writing, identifying the fundamental issues within and pushing them to improve, and then in the way we see Richard writing the story of his time with the girls, imagining it one way and then the other, always looking for the best and truest fiction he can conjure. If you've ever tried to be or thought about being a writer, watching Crashing will make you want to pick up the pen or sit down at the keyboard and try again.Now, the whole mixing of real and pretend and the pretend version of what's real gets slightly precious toward the end of the movie, but it ends before it gets that bad. And this is not a film with a lot of plot or big emotional scenes. What Crashing does is take you into the life of another person and make you understand why he lives that way, while simultaneously giving you a taste of the trial and challenge a writer faces trying to create new worlds out of thin air. I had a really good time watching this movie and I think a lot of other people would too.

A down-on-his-luck novelist, Richard McMurray(Campbell Scott, ROGER DODGER; THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS)is kicked out of his house and needs a place to crash, and two young lovelies—college students who admire his work and want to be writers in their own right—offer him the coach in their apartment. Soon he's sleeping with both of them, and finds a muse for his new novel idea—they will furnish the details he needs, and Dick will become inspired by their daily activities, creating characters and scenarios based somewhat closely related to them. The ultimate male-fantasy of being middle-aged and having 20 year old sexpot admirers adoring you, wanting you to help them grow as authors, critiquing their stories in exchange for a roof over his head—and a little extra something-something, as well—is elaborated, while CRASHING also works as a satire on one man's resurgence creatively thanks to two girls who open that locked mental gate that needed a special key they had in their possession. The two girls are played by Izabella Miko (THE FORSAKEN) & Lizzy Caplan (THE HOUSE BUNNY) who fit the perfect profile of the kind of girls who would spark a zing and a zang in an older man needing desperately to recover from a creative quagmire which has his imagination muzzled. Caplan has a little more zest and snap than Miko(as Kristen) who is basic surface sensuality, her Jacqueline more unpredictable, egotistical, and empowered(Caplan's Jacqueline also has more of an writer's voice, and artistic language than her roommate and best friend). I still felt the three play off each other well, although I imagine the thought of two twenty-somethings rolling around in the bed and talking all sexy-sexy to a much older man might give some viewers the willies. I do think this is definitely a movie about the writing process, recovering what you lost, your creative energies jumpstarted thanks to unusual events such as sleeping on the couch of two college girls' apartment, ultimately revived by them.

Geez it's been a while since I've written a review but I've been in a rut seeing action-prison-bad-guy-does-good genre flicks that usually end up boring me after 20 minutes. The last film that actually amused me was the latest Star Trek (2009). It's been a dry spell when it comes to movies that go beyond face value - I kid you not...Crashing (2007) had me interested from the starting credit music - a quirky, sparse little woodwind theme that would be repeated throughout the film.The film is about a the travails of a writer, Richard McMurray (Campbell Scott) stumbling over himself and the roadblock of first novel success. Comfortable, complacent and frustrated by eternally trying to repeat the formula of his first book.Richard's life gets ripped apart when his wife kicks him out of the house and freezes his bank accounts. At a creative writing presentation he tells of his writer's block and new sense of heady liberation due to circumstances beyond his control, and gets invited to crash at the apartment of a female student. And so Richard ends up sleeping on the couch of coeds Kristen and Jacqueline, provided that he critiques their own writing endeavors.Much credit to Izabella Miko and Lizzy Caplan, who nicely contrast each other as the muse twins of dark and light. I've been a fan of Campbell Scott since Roger Dodger (2002) and here he is just as amusingly self-deprecating.It's an engrossing movie that will pull you in as the author and two young girls intertwine in life and in fiction.