Nearly complete failure

Rating: 1/10 (25 September 2006)

I just watched Crash. This movie was way over the top and let me know almost right away it was not deserving of best picture. I was engladdened at first because it seemed like it might be another Magnolia type movie, but in the end the only comparison to Magnolia was the neat hippie music and the lack of resolution in many (try every one) of the story lines. Racism was a central theme, but as it pertained to this story it was a seemingly desultory, random element that was artificially injected at random points. The racism was extremely unnatural and forced and out of place in many instances. The result was that the movie came across not as being edgy and truthful like people are pretending this movie is, but rather ignorant and contrived at best. For example, the crack by Cheadle about "all those cultures getting together and deciding to park their cars on their lawns" was from left field and artificially inflammatory coming from a character who previously and thereafter gave us no racist indicators at all. There were no clues up to that point or after that he was racist or capable of such a statement (it was out of place in the conversation too), and the line had no place in his character or in the movie. And no, saying "everyone is racist and that's why he said it" is not true and not acceptable. The line was out of character, out of place, and therefore without taste. Some of the stories were good, but only up until race was artificially inseminated all over the screen. Additionally the whole movie was highly predictable. The scenes with the shopkeeper, the gun, the dead kid at the beginning of the movie, etc. - all predicted easily by me (and if I can predict events in a movie that is not a good thing at all). The clincher though that was the bizarre late night country music "I feel like picking up a random black youth in an apparent act of kindness and then ignorantly and confrontationally stereotyping him to his face even though it is out of my character and it was in fact my partner who was the racist one, not me" scene with Ryan Pillippie's character (who also presented no pre or post incident racist tendencies). What the heck was that? That should have been a deleted scene. On top of all this, the movie needed another 30 minutes at least to at least bring one or two more stories to conclusion. The Phillippe thing and the Cheadle Latino crack really bothered me the most though. I mean, I could buy the Sandra Bullock snooty rich white lady thing, but the rest was way too much. I think the fact that someone wrote a movie that says all people are racist says quite a lot about the writers and all the people involved, but says nothing about society as the movie had no realism whatsoever. The movie was almost complete in it's failure, but for Hollywood to admit that would mean so much more than just pretending it makes some kind of awe-inspiring statement about race. I hate to tell them and all of Hollywood that hailed this movie, but this has already been done and with more success (although still flawed) in the movie Grand Canyon. It is a far superior movie with race as the central theme. It was challenging and in your face and honest in the way Crash wishes it was, but with an inferior cast and far far less hype. If Hollywood really wanted to embrace racism being pushed to the forefront and being examined, then Bamboozled would have won best picture the year it came out (or at least been nominated).