Unbelievably overrated film

Rating: 1/10 (12 March 2006)

Crash is the most contrived film I've seen in years. Set in the backdrop of a chilly, snow-forecasted Los Angeles, this movie follows twenty or so people in their everyday lives being miserable to one another and spewing racially-tinged hate at every stressed-out opportunity they have. From the moment Don Cheadle's character tells us that we're all so distant from each other we can only get close if we "crashed," I felt preached to, had my intelligence insulted, and had my suspicions reaffirmed about what's acceptable for Hollywood's Oscar: a "feel-good" movie about racism that lets virtually all the characters off the hook, because somehow it's in their nature they will act this way and then another. What a load of baloney.
A basic plot element in film storytelling is that you have a character acting a certain way in act one, a traumatic experience in act two which causes a change in the character in act three. That's standard, expected and completely acceptable. What is not acceptable is repeating this about a dozen times in the same movie with characters who have the depth of a layer of new fallen snow in L.A. It's amazing how shameless this film is in exploiting this point. I found myself laughing derisively through a great deal of this film when characters spout off racial epithets and attitudes at the moment they encounter any amount of stress. And can someone tell me how this film is supposed to be a serious comment on race when the Asian characters are all horribly stereotyped? Dillon's SECOND meeting with the woman he molested and Phillipe's SECOND meeting with her husband both had me howling in laughter (man, they get around. Has L.A. become a small town suddenly?). The sequence with Phillipe's and Tate's characters was the most contrived of all the scenes, contorting itself like a Cirque de Soleil performer to create a tragedy that completely makes no sense except to create the completion of a plot arc that I saw coming from the beginning of the movie. And what is with middle-class Howard's character finding his inner gangsta in an unintentionally hilarious final scene with him? A truly, unbelievably pathetic choice for Best Picture--it doesn't beat the other nominees and doesn't even deserve the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for its Creative Screen writing 101 paper that is its script. No wonder most Hollywood movie writing is sub-par. It's undeserved wins like Crash for Best Picture that are the real reasons why Hollywood is out of touch with mainstream America, not the sex and violence factor.