What's All the Fuss About?

Rating: 6/10 (6 March 2006)

After more than the usual hype surrounding a film and after wondering what was so good about this film after it won a few awards I finally broke down and rented it the night before the Academy Awards. I had to rent it because it never aired in theaters in the town where I live. That's not surprising in a place that seems to try and show only kiddie movies. In any event I carried it home with the hope of finding a real gem, after all I had the read the hype.
I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed. I saw nothing at all new here and nothing that was even all that well done with the exception of the construct of coincidence carried to ridiculous levels. The film is a collection of overlapping vignettes (but lacking the requisite subtlety) that purport to describe the condition of racial injustice in society. Instead it comes across like being assaulted by some crazy person getting too close and mumbling tired old clichés at you when you leave a restaurant after a good meal; the delivery is more disturbing than the message. There is nothing here to me that wasn't already old and overwrought in the 1970's.
More unsettling may even be the ineptitude and prejudice of the film-makers. They seem to have one theme in mind and don't mind portraying it even if it's wrong or a bad idea. Take for example the piece concerning the Persian shopkeeper. It begins by showing him illegally buying a firearm in a shop but doesn't expand on his illegality or that of the seller in the manner of the sale. Instead, in a trite twist it later reveals that his daughter bought him a box of blanks for ammunition to go with it. That happens when he tries to shoot a man with it but nothing happens when his daughter accidentally gets in the way. This is just plain irresponsible. Any firearm shooting blanks does in fact expel very dangerous substances from the muzzle at short ranges, enough so to cause serious injury and even death. But they depict it as having no effect whatsoever. That is a great way to mislead naive young people in audiences into believing it and maybe reenacting it with serious injury or death as a result. If you don't think that's true try asking Jon-Erik Hexum, who found out the hard way in 1984. This is just irresponsible to show this in this way.
The rest of the film eschews a muddle of trite old racist stereotypes and shows us examples of what the film makers think are examples of this. The thing was in all the writing I encountered before seeing the film the only place I saw a reference to "racist" with regard to the film were references to the Matt Dillon character. As expected, the Matt Dillon character was overtly racist - although it did give some insight to what may have propelled him in that direction. But at least he was openly and unashamedly so. The rest of the characters were more objectionable examples of it. I almost laughed at many of the characters because almost every character in the film was either a ridiculous one-dimensional stereotype or a blatantly one-dimensional racist. For example, the Don Cheadle character was perhaps the worst in the film as he wasn't only racist, but a cop who broke serious laws in accepting bribery from a corrupt city official, who worked for the passively racist Brendan Fraser character - that constituted a conspiracy based on racism; theirs.
No, come to think of it, the most vile character in the film was the Asian man who was buying and selling other Asians. That has to be about as bad as it can get. Those were followed closely by racists such as the characters played by Loretta Devine and Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges. One of the few characters who were close to "normal" was Cameron, played by Terrence Howard, whose performance was worth the rental price along with that of Dillon. Howard even manages to extract a degree of sympathy in a film overflowing with unsympathetic characters.
As for remainder of the film, the overall production quality was better than I expected from a "low budget" film. In retrospect I think it was worth the rental price but not the Academy Awards it seemed to steal from a group of much better quality films.