Thread: Crossing Over Movie Gets Bad Reviews! Bye bye Harrison Ford

And Ford's career will end with a whimper instead of a bang for agreeing to participate in this pro amnesty propaganda film.

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Review: `Crossing Over' a contrived tale

By CHRISTY LEMIRE – 1 day ago

The best we can say is that writer-director Wayne Kramer means well with "Crossing Over" — he means to put a human face on the unwieldy and divisive topic of illegal immigration.

Trouble is, he puts a lot of faces on it. Too many, actually; we rarely get a feeling for who Kramer's many characters really are. And the way he weaves their stories together is so heavy-handed, absurdly contrived and, sometimes, unintentionally hilarious that he repeatedly undermines his intentions.

His tone shifts uncomfortably from earnest to didactic to incendiary and back again as he tells the tales of various immigrants trying to forge new lives in Los Angeles, as well as the federal employees who may determine their fates. Comparisons to "Crash" are inevitable, especially given Kramer's fondness for overhead shots of the city's sprawling freeways. (Ooh, we're all so different and disconnected, yet we share the same space!) There's also a literal car crash that sets off one of the movie's subplots. But while some critics may have viewed that best-picture winner as overrated, "Crossing Over" plays like a watered-down copycat.

Among the ensemble cast, Harrison Ford stars as veteran Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Max Brogan. The main thing we know about him is that he's burned out, which Ford conveys with his typical curmudgeonly understatement. He also has a 27-year-old daughter from whom he's estranged, which is mentioned once and then dropped.

Max and his Iranian-born partner, Hamid (Cliff Curtis), are raiding a sweat shop at the film's start, where they arrest Mexican worker Mireya (Alice Braga), who's here illegally with her young son. Hamid's father, a wealthy businessman who fled Iran in the 1979 revolution, is about to become a naturalized citizen himself.

There's also British musician Gavin (Jim Sturgess), who pretends to observe his long-neglected Jewish faith for admission to the country, which leads to an amusing scene in which he stumbles his way through a Hebrew prayer in front of a rabbi. Gavin's Australian girlfriend, Claire (Alice Eve), has her own dreams of stardom: She wants to be the next Nicole Kidman or Naomi Watts and will do whatever it takes to get there. This brings us the freakiest story line, in which Claire agrees to have sex in seedy motels with paunchy bureaucrat Cole (Ray Liotta), who will arrange a green card for her in return. Oddly compelling, but it feels like it belongs in a different movie.

A subplot involving Bangladeshi teenager Taslima (Summer Bishil), who writes an essay about trying to understand the mind-set of the 9/11 attackers, probably aimed to offer thoughtful discourse on an emotional subject but instead comes out as noise. Bishil, the poised young star of "Towelhead," has some strong moments here, too, though.

But then Ashley Judd barely gets anything to do as the immigration attorney who defends Taslima (she also happens to be Cole's wife), and a subplot about a Korean teenager (Justin Chon) who's forced into crime as a gang initiation feels like an inferior version of "Gran Torino."

Oh, and his dad happens to be Max's dry cleaner. What are the odds?

"Crossing Over," a Weinstein Co. release, is rated R for pervasive language, some strong violence and sexuality/nudity. Running time: 113 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... wD96JFHT82

Review: 'Crossing Over'
Harrison Ford plays a burned-out immigration officer in a film that puts plot complexity in a new league.
By Peter Rainer | Film critic

from the February 27, 2009 edition

It's a powerful opening to a movie that rapidly fractures into a hodgepodge of interlocking subplots showcasing immigration woes. The film's structure is similar to that of "Crash," another overweening, high-style melodrama that reeked with self-importance.

You practically need a flow chart to keep all the players straight. Max's ICE partner, Hamid (Cliff Curtis), of Iranian descent, has a wealthy father who fled the 1979 revolution and is about to become a naturalized US citizen. His Goth-like daughter Zahra (Melody Khazae), however, has adopted what he views as loose Western ways – a real no-no.

A young Bangladeshi teenager, Taslima (Summer Bishil, from "Towelhead"), reads aloud to her class an essay sympathizing with the 9/11 attackers – another big no-no. Enter the FBI. Gavin (Jim Sturgess), a British illegal and nonpracticing Jew, gets a job at a Jewish day school on the condition that he not reveal his immigration status to anybody. His aspiring Aussie actress girlfriend Claire (Alice Eve) prostitutes herself with Cole (Ray Liotta), a green card application adjudicator, whose wife (Ashley Judd), is an immigration defense attorney battling for the rights of a young African girl.

Kramer somehow manages to connect all these dots, but the achievement is largely technical. It's like watching the working out of a theorem. He might have done better if he had focused on a single story – like, say, the Harrison Ford one, which at times resembles, to its disadvantage, the underrated "The Border" (1982), where Jack Nicholson played a border guard who becomes involved with a young Mexican mother.

But clearly Kramer, who is himself a naturalized US immigrant from South Africa, felt that more was better here. Each narrative is pitched for maximum emotional effect, but this tactic soon becomes exhausting. When a story line threatens to become powerful, such as the ones involving Taslima or Claire, Kramer invariably cuts away to more mundane melodramatics, especially those involving a Korean teenager (Justin Chon) pressured into joining a gang.

Harrison Ford is the only marquee name here, and his tiredness as the ICE agent seems bone-deep. His performance might seem more impressive if his snarly world-weariness were not already familiar to us from his last 20 movies. Ford hasn't been terribly astute in his choice of roles: You can't blame him, I suppose, for reprising Indiana Jones, but what about "Firewall," "Hollywood Homicide," "Random Hearts," and "K-19: The Widowmaker," where he played a Russian naval officer with an authenticity as light as his accent was thick?

The best thing you can say about "Crossing Over" is that, unlike most movies set in Los Angeles, it features working-class districts that do not often make it to the screen. This is the mundane, multiracial workaday world in which most Angelenos, as opposed to most movie stars, live their lives. "Crossing Over" is not a success but make no mistake: There is great drama to be found in these streets. (Rated R for pervasive language, some strong violence, and sexuality/nudity.) Grade: C+.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0228/p25s01-almo.html

Citizen's Arrest for Wayne Kramer's Tasteless Immigrant Drama Crossing Over

By Scott Foundas
Tuesday, February 24th 2009 at 3:55pm

Details:
Crossing Over
Directed by Wayne Kramer
The Weinstein Company
Opens February 27


Haven't we been here before? The inbred mutant offspring of Crash and Babel, writer-director Wayne Kramer's Crossing Over treats the subject of illegal immigrants coming to (and from) Los Angeles with the same vulgarity that Kramer brought to his 2006 children-in-peril thriller Running Scared, this time (barely) concealed under a paper-thin plaster of Oscar-worthy self-importance.

Like the fictional New Jersey town that served as the backdrop for Kramer's previous film, Angel City is, for the filmmaker, yet another disenchanted urban forest filled with innocent maidens (Alice Eve as an Australian actress trying to make it in Hollywood), big, bad wolves (Ray Liotta as the INS honcho who offers the Aussie a green card in exchange for daily b(MOD EDIT)), and world-weary armored knights (Harrison Ford as the Immigration and Customs agent who never met a pretty illegal he didn't want to save). Similarly traveling along their own breadcrumb trails are a baker's dozen of black-, brown-, and yellow-skinned unfortunates on hand mainly to be crushed by the might of La Migra or squished under the steel-capped boot of post-9/11 racial profiling—which may nonetheless be preferable to getting (MOD EDIT)

Crossing Over begins earnestly enough as an old-fashioned exercise in Stanley Kramerish consciousness-raising, with Ford wearing existential angst on his sleeve as a callous colleague reprimands him: "Jesus Christ, Brogan! Everything is a Goddamn humanitarian crisis with you!" From there, solemn overhead shots of freeways and skyscrapers serve as the Scotch tape crudely holding together the movie's myriad storylines. Lest we forget that white people suffer, too, an atheistic British singer-songwriter (Jim Sturgess) masquerades as an observant Jew in order to obtain his much-coveted "status." Meanwhile, a Muslim teen (Summer Bishil) gives a class report in defense of the 9/11 hijackers, then appears surprised to discover Homeland Security agents ransacking her bedroom. And an about-to-be-naturalized Korean youth (Justin Chon) resists indoctrination into the very street gang one was certain Clint Eastwood had already run out of town.

But by the time we arrive at the serendipitous meet-cute-by-car-wreck of Liotta's green-card gatekeeper and Eve's Kidman/Watts aspirant (who, by the way, happens to be the girlfriend of the counterfeit Semite), it's clear that we're firmly in the hands of the lurid Kramer we know, if don't necessarily love. Wouldn't she rather steal away with him for an afternoon quickie, he proposes, rather than end up in a San Pedro detention center where "some mamma Latina makes you her bitch for a couple of nights"? Well, now that you put it that way. . . .

Never does Kramer encounter a cultural stereotype he can't repurpose. For most of Crossing Over, Ford's Iranian partner (played in a triumph of affirmative-action casting by New Zealander Cliff Curtis) glowers so contemptuously at his cleavage-bearing sister that when the girl turns up with a bullet in her head, the only surprise is that the movie thinks it's a mystery. Meanwhile, when Ford travels south of the border in search of the deported sweatshop worker (Alice Braga) who's captured his heart, I could all but swear that Kramer and cinematographer James Whitaker slapped a brown filter on the camera, the better to emphasize the developing world's pervasive filth.

And so it goes, with Kramer—who doesn't really seem to like people very much—failing to muster even the superficial empathy the makers of the similarly programmatic The Visitor and Rendition showed toward their own cardboard-cutout imperiled illegals. Eventually, all points converge on a finale draped in patriotic imagery employed for maximum irony, as Kramer haphazardly cross-cuts between a naturalization ceremony and a deportation—not exactly The Godfather's baptism by gunfire, in case you had any doubts.

There might be no more to say, were it not for the fact that Crossing Over once counted that paragon of liberal virtue, Sean Penn, among its ensemble, before either poor test screenings or Penn's own request to be cut out of the film—depending on which rumor mill you believe—saw him excised. Reportedly, Penn's storyline involved a border patrol agent who crashes his car and subsequently "crosses over"—not from one country to another, but from this world to the next. Minus him, Kramer's film at least manages to clock in just under the two-hour mark. Praise Allah for that.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-25/ ... sing-over/

Crossing Over a Supersober Multiculti Mess

Review in a Hurry: This oppressively earnest piece of Oscar bait—with Harrison Ford as an immigration officer conveniently at the center of every ethnic drama in L.A.—was rightfully left to thrash around on the hook.

The Bigger Picture: Writer-director Wayne Kramer struggles to depict all sides of the immigration issue in this sprawling Los Angeles-based melodrama. The topic is fraught with ethical dilemmas—the tension between opportunity and resources, assimilation, cultural clashes...oh, I could go on! But Kramer avoids zeroing in on any single controversy and opts for the scattershot approach.

Crossing Over zips among every ethnic group with a representation in the U.N. You got the Persians, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the Arabs, the Bangladeshis—hell, even the Aussies make an appearance. Having this multiculti kaleidoscope of traumas is a sympathetic idea, but the reliance on laughably two-dimensional characters makes the execution embarrassing.

Now, all these different ethnic clans tangentially intersect with Max Brogen (Ford), a Scotch-swilling grizzled immigration officer with a frosty demeanor but a warm spot for migrant women. Max and his partner—a well-to-do Americanized Iranian immigrant—hunt and help (in their own questionable ways) different characters desperate to stay in the U.S.

Their tribulations crisscross with those of a dedicated immigration lawyer (Ashley Judd) and a brutish naturalization bureaucrat (Ray Liotta). And true to the current trend (Traffic, Crash, Babel) all these disparate stories merge together in a final scene! What a refreshing dynamic!

Ford's wooden style feels disengaged, while the ensemble cast of unknowns go at their parts with high-decibel veracity. The fresh-faced supporting players do a fair amount of scenery chewing, but they give the film an authentic and poignant tone. It's a shame their efforts will be eclipsed by this ham-handed fiasco.

The 180—a Second Opinion: Crossing Over follows in the same tradition of Crash and Traffic, and though it's a fatally flawed movie, it has more heart and complexity than those other Important Films.

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/movie_r ... _mess.html

eb 27 2009 10:40 AM EST
'Crossing Over': Hard Traveling, By Kurt Loder
Harrison Ford barely registers in a misconceived immigration drama.


Americans who gnash their teeth over what they see as the tide of street gangs, drug thugs and international terrorists pouring across the country's southwestern border are hereby advised to chill. The solution to the problem of illegal immigration is simple, if only we can overcome a general lack of national niceness and open ourselves up to the healing power of hugs.

Such, anyway, is the message of the new movie "Crossing Over," in which illegal immigrants are seen to be, not scheming outlanders looking to game the system in order to get into the country by any means necessary, but instead an under-the-radar community of hardworking cabbies, cute-as-a-button kids and, in the picture's most alarming instance, a beautiful Australian TV actress yearning to be free (and famous). The movie is a shameless onslaught of special pleading, even more overdetermined than the similarly fatuous Mexican section of "Babel," and the fact that it was shot nearly two years ago but is only now being ushered into theaters will come as no surprise to anyone with the unlikely determination to sit through it.

The story is the usual ensemble stew of instructive character plights. Harrison Ford, in a mode of mumbling glumness that betokens a star being shoehorned into a part that's well outside his natural range, plays Max Brogan, a Los Angeles-based Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. Max and his partner, a naturalized Iranian immigrant named Hamid (brooding Cliff Curtis) spend their days rousting illegal immigrants out of local factories and dispatching them back across the border. Max is burned out on this endless exercise, and he frets about the people he's uprooting — the old man with the heart condition, the pleading young Mexican woman (Alice Braga) who's being loaded onto a bus for a one-way trip to San Diego while her little boy waits for her at home, alone.

Meanwhile, a militant Muslim girl named Taslima (Summer Bishil, of "Towelhead"), who has lived in the U.S. with her illegal-immigrant Bangladeshi parents since she was three years old, has drawn the disapproving attention of the FBI after reading an essay in a high school class urging sympathetic understanding of the 9/11 hijackers. ("I thought there was something called free speech," she tells the Feds — who apparently think there's also something called legal residence.) Taslima is being defended by Denise Frankel (Ashley Judd), a warm-hearted immigration attorney who, oddly and in fact unbelievably, is married to the scummy Cole Frankel (Ray Liotta), whose government job approving green cards for aspiring immigrants allows him to extort sex from the delectably desperate Australian actress, Claire (Alice Eve). Claire, in turn, is withholding sex from her English boyfriend, Gavin (Jim Sturgess), a musician whose heartbreaking lot it is, as another illegal immigrant, to find only fitful employment in the L.A. indie-rock scene. Determined to score a green card, Gavin has suddenly discovered his Jewish roots and is attempting to gain entry as a "religious worker," despite the fact that he can't speak Hebrew. (This is not a role that the emphatically goyish Sturgess was born to play.)

The large contribution made by enterprising immigrants in building this country is well-known; and the fact that many such people are today being chewed up and spit out by the immigration system is no longer news — it's a torturous problem that cries out for a solution. This picture's South African director, Wayne Kramer, a naturalized U.S. citizen himself, is no doubt well-intentioned. But to suggest, as his movie does, that good people are the only ones being denied residence in a nation that admits more legal immigrants than any other country in the world subverts the film's goal — who will be swayed by a movie with such a cockeyed premise? "Crossing Over" is also mopily paced, and hobbled by clanky dialogue ("You doubt the veracity of my heart") and wildly implausible situations. (The scene set in the bloody wreckage of a convenience-store robbery, in which an ICE agent gives a pass to a gun-wielding kid because tomorrow is the day he's due to be naturalized, elicited hoots of derision at the screening I attended.) Meanwhile, the long and seemingly insoluble immigration crisis continues.

http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles ... tory.jhtml

Hmmmm........and the pro-illegal advocacy was predicting huge turnouts and overwhelming praise for this movie.

Yep.....this was "the one thing" which was going to really wake up the American public to the sympathetic nature of "immigrants", garner a new found support and appreciation for illegal aliens, and finally take the wind out of the sails of the "xenophobic, racist" anti-illegal immigration crowd getting in the way of amnesty.

I've got news for 'em......when even MTV and The Village Voice is grinding your propaganda under their heel, your support in the public arena is sorely lacking

I knew and was waiting for this movie to bomb. The idea was not to create any controversy that would help the film, then slam it once it failed.

We know how Americans feel about immigration issues and that allowed us to know that Ford's latest flick was going to bomb because it is a propoganda film pointed in the opposite direction most Americans are feeling on these issues.

Check Rotten Tomatos! That have this movie scored as a rotten tomato with only 15% of the reveiws so far marking it as "Fresh" with 85% marking it at "Rotten"!

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/crossing_over/

On Monday, I plan to do a release about this slamming the movie, but first we need to see and document the movie's financials for weekend of first release.

W

Originally Posted by ALIPAC

I knew and was waiting for this movie to bomb. The idea was not to create any controversy that would help the film, then slam it once it failed.

We know how Americans feel about immigration issues and that allowed us to know that Ford's latest flick was going to bomb because it is a propoganda film pointed in the opposite direction most Americans are feeling on these issues.

Check Rotten Tomatos! That have this movie scored as a rotten tomato with only 15% of the reveiws so far marking it as "Fresh" with 85% marking it at "Rotten"!

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/crossing_over/

On Monday, I plan to do a release about this slamming the movie, but first we need to see and document the movie's financials for weekend of first release.

W

Can't wait to read your release William. Will keep my eye out for info to gether on it.

I suspected all along that the pro-illegal advocacy knew this wouldn't play well with the American public and that's why Clooney was tapped as the lead.

Usually, all it takes is the name to draw people to the picture. I guess more Americans than they thought are thoroughly fed up.....not even George could pull them in

Looks like a belly flop.

nydailynews.com
Harrison Ford immigration film 'Crossing Over' borders on absurd
Thursday, February 26th 2009, 5:05 PM

Multi-character drama about the illegal immigrant experience in Los Angeles. With Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd, Ray Liotta. (1:53) R: Nudity, sexuality, violence, language. At area theaters.

The over-earnest approach and tin-ear dialogue of "Crossing Over" makes this drama feel less like a thoughtful exploration of the plight of illegal immigrants and more like a feature-length Public Service Announcement.

Writer-director Wayne Kramer adds what could be called mainstream threads to his messy script, but the result is simplistic across the board.

The multiple stories begin with Max Brogan (Harrison Ford), a weary Immigration and Custom Enforcement officer who's developed a conscience about the sweatshop workers he routinely rounds up.

As Grogan looks after the son of a young Mexican woman he detains, we see Claire (Alice Eve), a pretty Australian actress, struggling to get cast on a TV show due her visitor's status not allowing her to work; Gavin (Jim Sturgess), a British Jew hoping to use religion as a way to stay in America; and Taslima (Summer Bishil), a Bangladeshi teen facing deportation because she wrote a "nuanced" high school paper about 9/11.

There's also a young Korean (Justin Chon) who risks his naturalization by participating in a robbery, and Brogan's partner (Cliff Curtis), an Iranian-American whose father is about to become a U.S. citizen.

Like "Crash" or "Traffic," the movies it desperately wants to be, "Crossing Over" suffers, ironically, from a narrow point of view; every scene is focused on its Issue-with-a-capital-"I," with characters never allowed to become anything other than symbols.

And when Claire, to secure her green card, grants sexual favors to a slimy official (Ray Liotta) whose immigration-attorney wife (Ashley Judd) wants to adopt an Ugandan orphan, the movie spills into soap opera.

Kramer, who made the overpraised gambling drama "The Cooler," uses shots of L.A.'s cloverleaf highways as visual echoes of the city's tangled lives, yet the well-meaning obviousness of it all hits you like a Mack truck.

And though Eve and Sturgess are appealingly fresh performers, Ford seems lost without his usual blockbuster machinery around him, and Liotta's lipless seething is cliché.

Judd de-glams for the first time in a while, but is only given righteous crusading to play. And though the real-life human tragedy the movie tries to dramatize isn't taken lightly, there's a ridiculous moment when the Internet Movie Data Base is used as part of police procedure ("You have no credits in Australia!"), which follows hoary lines like "Don't play coy with me, counselor!" and "That's only true when looked at through the distorted mirror of your own paranoia!"

The issue of illegal immigration deserves a thoughtful movie.

This isn't it.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... sing_.html