Number 61 on the top 250 of all time? No way...

Rating: 8/10 (3 December 2005)

I rented Crash last week because my girlfriend had to watch it for a project, but I had really been wanting to see it anyway with all the great things that I had heard about it.
Crash is a film that is wonderfully shot, directed, acted, produced, etc. The problem that comes with Crash is Paul Haggis's idea of stringing all the characters in the movie together. This is very effective at times, and really gets to Don Cheadles line at the beginning (which I will paraphrase poorly because I don't remember it clearly) when he says "maybe why we crash is to connect." But also it feels like sometimes that he was just trying to think about ways he could connect the stories to each other.
Haggis wrote a compelling and moving story about racial relations to an extent, but this is also taken too far sometimes. Literally every character in this movie, with the exception of Ryan Phillipe, is a racist or at the very least says a derogatory comment about another race. There are some truly powerful points in the film in which racism in LA is shown at it's grittiest, which are the best parts of the movie. But the fact that almost every single character in the movie says something racist felt very unrealistic to me and like Haggis was trying to over accomplish his goal.
A quick side note, music is used very very well throughout the film. Not just the song chosen, but also the score. It seemed to be more of a thriller score at that kept me and girlfriend both on our toes throughout the whole movie, just waiting for something terrible to happen.
In the end, Crash is all about how we change each others lives. In that regard it succeeds. But for the reasons above, it just seemed to be trying too hard and took me out of the movie. Crash is a good movie with solid writing, direction, and you really couldn't have asked for a better cast, but it is definitely not, in my mind, number sixty one on the two hundred and fifty greatest movies of all time.