It’s a word that flies out of our mouths in a jillion different ways: CRAZY. There’s restraining-order crazy, elaborate-prom-posals crazy, a-trillion-views-on-Facebook crazy, grandma-just-got-a-sleeve-tattoo crazy, etc. In today’s vernacular it’s kind of the everyword and it’s often used to describe women, as the residue of ancient gender stereotypes still prevail in modern culture. Men should be the risk-takers, while women idly stand by and take care of a man should he fail. When a woman steps outside of these boundaries, it’s easy (and lazy) to label her as one of the “crazy” ones. In the case of this week’s Staff Pick Premiere “Good Crazy,” the behavior that a boyfriend perceives as exhaustingly excessive is his girlfriend’s perceived duty as a law-abiding, public-space-respecting, animal-loving human.
While partaking in very normal weekend activities with her average (read: vanilla/nice but boring) partner, Rosa goes above and beyond to make any disconcerting circumstance better — even if she may appear to be outdoing herself. Ultimately, this Sundance 2017 short is about considering the intentions of those who go out of their way to turn a negative into a positive, no matter the results. About the main character’s particular brand of crazy in “Good Crazy,” director, writer, and star Rosa Salazar explains: “It’s about being a person who has an interesting code, if you will. You see, there’s CRAZY crazy — someone who is completely irrational and lacks the awareness to be a functional member of society. And then there’s GOOD crazy — a person who fights the everyday injustices, a social crusader, often misunderstood and thus intimidating to others due to a severe case of ‘wokeness.’ Because women are by nature intuitive creatures, we possess that ‘wokeness’ and are unfortunately susceptible to being lumped in with the crazy crazies.”
I’m sure you’ve been there before — standing on one end of the crazy spectrum, while, oblivious to you, a witness to your behavior thinks you’ve taken a one-way ticket to crazytown. If so, you may identify with the sweet, harmless motives of Rosa in “Good Crazy,” and the comical trainwreck that ensues.
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