Not even bad in a good way

hyped garbage

Absolutely brilliant

The first must-see film of the year.

Bad direction, poor writing, over-the-top acting, this movies doesn't get anything right on all counts. The main character is supposed to be gay, but this is gay as seen by a homophobic straight male. The so- called eccentric characters are just two dimensional stereotypes. I find it difficult to believe this got such a high rating as there is little of any interest about it. Maybe the raters were all Canadians. But if I were, I'd be ashamed at producing such a product. But then there are no American films I could recommend either in the current cinema. The last great American film was made about 20 years ago. And speaking as a gay man, I was seriously offended by the film's attitudes towards gay people in general. About the only thing I can recommend about this film is a cute lead who looks good in his underwear.

An epic drama of the story of a young man questioning his sexuality, growing up through the sixties and seventies in Quebec, born into a strictly catholic family of five brothers, each crazier than the last. C.R.A.Z.Y is a really affective film as it was one of the only films I've ever seen to make me really think about my own crazy existence and what life really means. Life is too love and to celebrate our indifferences. The outfits and nostalgic soundtrack are all exceedingly impressive, as are the performances and sequences set to music. Sometimes C.R.A.Z.Y is tongue-in-cheek, sometimes its heartbreaking and sometimes its surrealistic, however what can't be denied is this relatively unknown and genre-less epic is quite fantastic.

C.R.A.Z.Y. has got to be one of the best films I have seen in a while, let alone one of the best gay films! It had the epic feel of Scorsese in the sense that so much time had been covered, such as "Goodfellas" or "Casino", yet you never felt that anything had been rushed to get from one time period to the next. It had the flair of Guy Ritchie with a lot of the editing and whiz-bang camera work. It was AMAZING!!! I read on IMDb that it took the director ten years to finish writing it and he cut his own salary in order to secure the music rights. How is it that a film from 2005, that is this good, didn't even make a blip on the cinema radar. I looked up what had been nominated that year as best foreign film and as best picture. "The Sea Inside" won for best foreign film, but "C.R.A.Z.Y." wasn't even nominated, even though it was entered for a chance to be nominated. What a crock!!! The American film that won for best picture that year was "Million Dollar Baby"!!! F**king Eastwood and his right-to-die piece of s**t film couldn't even measure up to the beauty and heart of "C.R.A.Z.Y."!!!!

"As far as I can remember, I've hated Christmas," recalls Zachary Beaulieu (Grondin) in voice-over, and at its most superficial C.R.A.Z.Y. is how 'The Wonder Years' might have played out if Kevin had grown up gay and French-Canadian Catholic.A real family movie (even the title is derived from the initials of five brothers), C.R.A.Z.Y. charts the tricky trajectory of closeted gay adolescence, although it's chiefly concerned with inter-generational ding-dongs, wearing its sexuality beneath its crushed velvet sleeve. As director Jean-Marc Vallée stresses, "the theme of the film is personal acceptance... about the struggle to express yourself and being honest in the moment", and such soft-soaping is probably one of the reasons it's cleaned up back home in Quebec.At the time of writing, it's grossed over US$5 million in a province of 6.5 million people; as the producers remind us, "nearly everyone in Quebec has seen this movie". On the other hand, their cousins across the border have all but ignored it, and it's tempting to see in C.R.A.ZY. parallels between the two territories' relationship, in the film's themes of 'otherness' and awkward isolationism.Emphasising Zac's 'otherness', his initial entry into the world on 25 December 1960 owes more to the horror genre, with the emphasis on bloody birthing tables and foreboding incubators; a beast is born (and he will indeed end up slouching toward Bethlehem in the film's third act). Furthering the anti-Christ imagery, he's also comes furnished with a strange birthmark on his scalp, which his mother Laurianne (Proulx), with whom he shares a strange psychic bond, believes denotes the gift of healing - a blessing, "for good or ill".Almost immediately, however, he's dropped on his head by his resentful brothers (the "Three Morons"), heralding the movie's tragi-comic tone, and foreshadowing two decades of spills, thrills and hard knocks. Most all these ensuing scenes will be filtered through family life or Zac's inner life (we never see him in class or at work). If his brothers - sporty, rebellious and egg-headed - share little in common with their sensitive sibling, their bullish patriarch, the Charles Aznavour-crooning Gervais (Cote), initially takes a shine to his youngest son, taking him out on secret French fry-guzzling expeditions and attempting to curb his doting wife's cooing indulgences.Gervais puts his foot down when she buys Zac a doll's pram, determined his son won't grow up to be anything less than a man's man. "I knew very well what a fairy was," says Zac. "I especially knew I didn't want to be one." Understandable, really; this is a man whose homophobia extends even to the gospels: "Sometimes I wonder why we pray to a long-haired guy who hangs out with a bunch of guys in robes", grumps papa. Nevertheless, Zac prays to Jesus every night to make him less "soft".Predictably enough, everything goes awry after Zac accidentally smashes his father's rare Patsy Cline import - and especially when he's caught trying on his mother's dresses and pearls. "I can still remember the snow melting on his face; I had just turned seven, and had unwittingly declared war on my father." Zac is sent to a psychiatrist after Gervais spies him apparently making out with another boy and, succumbing to parental peer-pressure, he beds his best friend Michelle (Thompson). He also beats up a 'gay' stalker in a misplaced display of machismo. Offsetting the hardships, temporary salvation comes in the form of David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and the Rolling Stones. Trying to find himself, Zac eventually winds up in Jerusalem, where he takes a lover (a man this time) and nearly dies in the desert, before returning home to make peace with his father, prompted by his offering of a replacement Patsy Cline LP he's coincidentally found at an Israeli market stall.There's a lot to like about C.R.A.Z.Y., in its soapy way. The soundtrack for one thing: during one glorious scene, Zac imagines himself levitating above a church pulpit, as the congregation sings joyously to 'Sympathy For The Devil'. It's like Todd Haynes meets Dennis Potter. But it's during these fantastical musical interludes that the film really soars.The hairstyles, fashions, décor are what you'd expect from a 1970s-set drama though interestingly, nestling among the Bruce Lee posters and period LPs in Zachary's bedroom is Pink Floyd's 'Animals' - released two years after the scene is set, in 1975. It could be an honest oversight, of course, but it's possible to ascribe a more timeless tale taking precedence over historical verisimilitude. As Morrissey once lamented, "this story is old, but it goes on," and C.R.A.Z.Y., featuring much Bowie-worship, inter-generational conflict and agonised self-discovery, could be set pretty much anywhere, at any time in the Western world during the past 30 years.Grondin as the teenage Zac ably conveys his anguished plight and, though mostly ciphers, the supporting cast also put in decent performances, Côté and Pierre-Luc Brilliant (elder brother Raymond) in particular. However, at two hours-plus, C.R.A.Z.Y's in danger of overstaying its welcome, while the ending is one of the few bum notes in an otherwise well plotted movie; homophobia vanquished in one fell swoop by a Patsy Cline record? Oh, the irony.