I had never heard of this before, but man, was I ever impressed.

We've got a $25 Million production from the Weinstein Brothers, an all star cast, headed by an aging Harrison Ford, that was never released wide screen, and had a WWBO of less than $4 Million.  Really?  What went so wrong?

Hard to say, really, but after doing a little research I see this was filmed in 2007 and because of the "nature" of the film/script, some peeps were disturbed, including Sean Penn, who demanded his small role removed from the film, etc, etc, etc.  Hey, fuck 'em, because this is an excellent, strong film that makes you think, makes you rethink your position on the controversial immigration laws, and comments on very controversial subject matter.

What we have here is 5 (or so) separate character driven stories that are interwoven together, quite mastefully, IMO.  It takes awhile for things to get interesting, but once that hgappens, this thing hits like a speeding brick shit house and had me tearing up several times.

My hat is off to Writer/Directer Wayne Kramer.  I can see why this didn't attract movie goers, but it's their loss, as this thing is so impressive on so many different fronts.

There's alot going on and it all seems so non connected...until, it all gets connected.

Great performances from all, including some foreign actors who really deliver here.

This is hard R rated, which may be another reason why the masses were turned off.  Rather graphic nudity from the beautiful Alice Eve and Melody Zara.  Heavy profanity throughout.  Strong violence at times.

As it wraps up, a number of things hit me, quite hard, and I found myself thinking about various topics the rest of the day, which I rarely do.  This is a story about people and what they have to do in a very cold and evil world.  These are both good people and bad people who make poor decisions for a variety of different reasons and the prices they have to pay for those decisions.

The film is not without any flaws, of course.  There are a few tangents that didn't quite work and another few things that could have been clearer or just done better, but in the end, this is a movie that will stay with me, maybe forever.  It's strong, it's ballsy, and it's thought provoking.  It works on so many different levels.

Grade A

Ray Liotta  

Spoilers ahead. Great acting by everyone. A brave but very flawed film. I had a few major problems that I'll try and outline.

There were two scenes which I absolutely despised. The first being the crying scene with the brothers and sisters. Oh, man, did that make me cringe. Now, it wasn't all that bad but... We got it after the first minute but it still dragged on for another 8 hours. Totally ruined the whole mood of the story for me, really took me out.

The second one was the friggin flashback to the brother murdering the sister. Definitely didn't know I was watching NCIS there. Poorly shown exposition which I'd never recommend to any writer ever. Just bad all together.

I suppose the biggest problem I had though was that the story just feel on itself towards the end. The thing with these intersecting dramas is that you should rarely go over 3 storylines unless you want to extend the script's length. And for some reason, we had I think 7 crammed into a 100 or so page script. That's around 14 pages for each character, which I'll be honest, unless they're separate storylines not related to each other, you can't make an all rounded story here. And that was really the problem. The setup was great, I loved it, thought everything clashed really well. But then beats started coming in a flurry of nonsense where everything just felt rushed. You go the extra timelines, you add extra pages or your script suffers. I can really go on about every character's ending here, but that'd have me whining forever. Every ending was poorly implemented except the Korean kid, which really hit me the hardest. I just can't think why they wouldn't add an extra half hour to ease everything in, the thing was R already so its not like they're losing any big bucks.

Screw it. Beating a dead horse here again but in my humble opinion, the script should have ended in a way worse position for all of them, except the Korean kid of course. Harrison Ford should have somehow overcame his doubts about the system, and actually helped somebody at the end, risking everything for it. Cliff Curtis' sister should have been dead way way earlier and the focus should have been on his family troubles, which were poorly established. Alice Eve's (nailed the accent btw) career should have gone further and then plummeted with the fraud charges. The Jewish guy's biggest problem was that the story swayed to his advantage, which is one of the biggest no nos in any story. Ray Liotta shouldn't have been labelled as a bad guy, since, let's be honest, he wasn't. Summer Bishil's story needed an extra 10 pages to make the ending smoother. I didn't even know what the hell happened with the little African girl and the Liotta's wife.

It's just the last 40 minutes that screwed up a potentially great movie, kind of like Trance. I love complex structure in movies, especially in scripts and the harder a writer tries to achieve that, the more applaud I give them. 21 Grams' writer Guillermo Arriaga said it took him three years to piece together his script into a backwards narrative after he'd written it. And the Nolan brothers said it took them two years to write The Prestige, a script that also features a similar intersecting narrative. But this took 3 weeks without any development process. And I probably shouldn't be complaining since it takes me that long to write mine. I suppose if Kramer would've gave this script to a mate to read, this could've been really special. Although the film's inspired me to write this mobster drama I've always wanted to work on that deals with a similar narrative. I'd still watch this movie, then maybe turn it off after the citizenship ceremony.

I'm now convinced Wayne Kramer, the director, is going to be (if he already isn't) one of those recent crop of filmmakers who make quality work but the films go nowhere for varied reasons (or, in layman terms, "underrated"). I liked the insanity of Running Scared, and Tstella Warren in the (false) baby oven. But Crossing Over was a slight departure and more of a dramatic-serious toine. I saw this a few years ago on DVD and also wondered why it didn't get to many theatres. I chalked it up at the time to Harrison Ford withdrawal, which seems to have ended it's bad streak.  (For now anyway) But man, Cliff Curtis was awesome in this fiilm!

I didn't know about the Sean penn thing (lemme check- he'll want his scenes out because he has a political slant, but he still signed on top do the picture in the first place?) but maybe that wasn't a bad thing. There was more than enough characters and threads, and with one character gone, that's more attention to theother characters and/or more screen time for other characters. I think the Penn stuff wasn't included w/ deleted scenes, although it might have been nice to see them.

Yes, folks, go see Crossing Over if you haven't don't so!