Bug

A boy steps on a bug on the pavement. A man who sees it gets out of his car and tells him off. The chain of events that follows ties together a crowd of people in the Silverlake neighbourhood of Los Angeles who do not know one another: a missed restaurant reservation, a small traffic accident, an interrupted cable feed, relationships coming apart. One person's disaster becomes another's luck, and the other way round as well. The film is a joint directing job by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, the two of whom became known later for their screenplays. The mould is the multi-strand narrative that was much attempted at the time, but here the links are made by cause and effect rather than by fate, and every step is shown. John Carroll Lynch, Brian Cox and a then unknown Sarah Paulson are in the cast. With this many characters passing through in eighty-six minutes nobody is given depth; the film's interest was never in the people but in the mechanism.