Crash - The Director's Cut (2005)

Don't buy the hype, and don't buy this film!

By almost every metric Crash defies classification as a bad film. The acting is excellent all around, the production is clearly big-budget, and the theme, racism, is anything but trivial. The fact that it IS a terrible movie despite all it seems to have going for it makes the disappointment that much more acute.

Watching Crash is like getting smashed on the head repeatedly with a mallet while someone shouts "RACISM IS BAD! EVERYONE IS A RACIST! YOU ARE SOMEONE SO YOU MUST BE A RACIST! YOU ARE BAD!". This goes on for about two hours.

If that weren't bad enough someone else is repeatedly kicking you in the groin while shouting "THIS FILM IS OSCAR WORTHY! IT REALLY IS! THE ACADEMY SAYS SO!"

I don't want to trash the Oscar process here, but suffice it to say that Crash was well served by an intensive (and expensive) Oscar campaign, so don't let the best-picture award fool you. Crash is actually just a formulaic drama that handles a delicate topic with less skill than a drunken Irishman handles sentence structure. In Swedish.

The heavy-handed treatment of racism means that you'll see the protagonists, who are essentially one-dimensional racial stereotypes, thrown into absurd situations that force them to confront the reality of their own racist attitudes. While this goes on a subtle soundtrack emphasizes the emotional detachment of the characters, rising to a crescendo only in scenes that might look good as sound-bytes for the Oscar Ceremony. As a viewer you're supposed to understand that this is all very sad and serious, but you're really just being manipulated into opening your mouth so they can shovel more bull**** down your throat.

What Crash does best is to employ cool artistic and narrative styles it filched from far better films. You have the split storyline covering 3 or 4 independent narratives simultaneously , the tangential associations between characters that tie the narratives to each other, and the frequent use of filters to alter colors to parallel the emotional context of the scene.

If the narrative itself had been handled with any sort of nuance then the stylistic imitations could be easily forgiven, but the focus of this film was never to tell a good story, but to wrap it in an Oscar worthy package. They succeeded in pushing this past the judges, but that doesn't mean you have to waste your money on it too. Don't buy the hype, and don't buy this film!




September 17, 2008

Great film, will challenge your views on a variety of hot topics!

Now, this is one helluva movie! I watched 'Crash' again this weekend and I was as compelled now as when I first saw it. This film challenges you, especially if you grew up in the U.S. You know the movies that have you guessing until the end? Think you got it all figured out, only to find out you were way off base? This is 'Crash'! But even moreso, what are your views regarding prejudice, racism, stereotyping, sexism? I am sure you will be tested and forced to rethink your stance once you see this. There's an A-List group of actors in this film. The cast performs splendidly, each actor sharing an equal presence, no one star appearing larger than the other. Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton, Ludacris, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Jennifer Esposito, just to name a few. The movie takes the viewer through a series twists and turns, from regualar situations from traffic accidents to the unimaginable car jacking! Not willing to give any part of this flick away, the scene in which a little girl's life is threatened still causes the tears to pour from my eyes. 'Crash' is excellent but it can easily be misinterpreted too. Watch this with an open mind or risk missing the true meaning of message it intends to deliver.

DJ COA
September 17, 2008

Believe the hype - it's overrated.

Before the Oscar hype, I saw Crash during it's theatrical run and wasn't all that impressed. It's a visual mess and is full of hammy stereotypes. Performances are actually good, but a bad script is a bad script. It all seems so thrown together. Worst of all, it's one of the preachiest movies I've ever seen. Instead of allowing the audience to react based on their own individual perceptions, 'Crash' TELLS you how to feel. This is the kind of movie that one expects to break even and eventually be forgotten as there's much better (and more intelligent) material out there that deals with these issues and doesn't insult the intelligence of it's audience in doing so.

I was shocked when it got the nomination and you could have knocked me over with a feather when it won Best Picture.

Watch 'Do The Right Thing' instead, a great movie with wonderful characters that actually lets you draw your own conclusions. September 14, 2008

Ugh

Just when I think that the Right Wing mullahs that run this nation could not possibly be smarter than any other sort of human beings, I am proved wrong. The Los Angeles Guilty White Liberal has got to be the dumbest form of humanity going, even moreso than the inbred hillbilly. You know who I mean: the latte sipping crowd that brought you such critically lauded trash as The Hours, which plumbed every arts cliché imaginable; Monster, which revealed Feminazism's worst side (i.e.- murdering men is ok if the murderer disingenuously claims all men are bad rapists); or Million Dollar Baby, which proved that white trash are probably the only social group still open for out and out mockery. That last piece of tripe, incidentally, was penned by Paul Haggis, the man who wrote and directed this past year's Academy Award winning film of the year, Crash.... Perhaps the most ridiculous, and humorous, moment comes in a cameo where television actor Tony Danza plays a tv star who wants his black costars to sound more `black', so tells the black tv director to reshoot a scene. No one, in this day and age, is so clueless as to risk a lawsuit by speaking that way in public, yet the trio of fawning Left Wing dimwits comment on Danza's `subtle villainy', as if needing to display not a one of them has a clue as to the word's actual definition. Yet, cluelessly written scenes like that abound, and the fact that everyone associated with this film is clueless of them is telegraphed in the film's very first scene, where Cheadle ludicrously intones that people `crash into each other' just to feel something. Wow! Great concept for a title. Here's a better one: The Idiots Guide To Racism. Oh, wait, trademark infringement.
The fact is, although most human beings are idiots, in relation to their emotions, their idiocy is born of complexity, which only makes real world idiocy as racism so vexing and puzzling. But, instead of focusing on the vexing motives of people's bigotry, Haggis shows the shallowness of his understanding of bigotry, not the shallowness of bigotry itself, as well as his utter lack of ambiguity and realism in portraying his characters, their actions, and motivations. This film was two hours of pure movie hell, and one of the worst films ever made; and not in that schlocky Robot Monster nor Plan 9 From Outer Space way that can endear as years pass. It's especially so, considering that a bumper sticker would have sufficed to convey its trite message. I could literally go on for several more pages, detailing every ridiculous and phony thing in this film, and still not fully convey how truly atrocious watching this film was. It should be reviled as being every bit as bigoted and truly `full of hatred' for humanity, as anything Rush Limbaugh, or his ilk, ever uttered. That no one in Hollywood recognized this real `truth' unfortunately explains why this country is where it is right now, and why racism is not the problem, merely a symptom of the real ill.
September 10, 2008

The Most Thought-Provoking Movie

I would rank this movie as one of the very best that I've seen in years. How many movies present BOTH sides of a story in such a manner that it makes you wonder about your own perceptions? It seems to me that people who scored the movie very low are either extremely stubborn and don't want to "walk a mile in some else's shoes", just don't like to think while watching a movie, or living in a fantasy world where there are no problems. The whole point of the movie is that we stereotype cultures other than our own...so, of course, the characterizations are stereotypical! August 13, 2008

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