Implausible and painful to watch

Rating: 2/10 (8 May 2005)

I didn't grow up in LA, so maybe I don't know exactly how easy it is to have the same small group of people run into one another over and over again. And, since I didn't grow up in LA, the up-close footage of a police officer feeling up the Asian-American wife of a black television producer was rather more shocking than it seemed to be to the people I was seeing the film with.
Perhaps the movie was meant to make viewers uncomfortable--confronting racist stereotypes (and class difference) is not something Americans are good at. The uniformly white audience I saw the film with, however, LAUGHED through the majority of the film, in particular a tense dialogue between the same black TV producer and the police. Something tells me that they were not experiencing a dramatic revision of their previously held beliefs about black people. Nor did they seem to be planning to go out and love their Persian neighbors as they discussed the 'lunatic' shop owner and his 'hot' daughter and whether or not convenience stores were breeding grounds for Al Qaeda.
If you want to see a movie that confirms your belief that Americans are racist pigs, this is your film. If you want to see a movie that makes you loathe LA, this is also your film. If you want to see a movie that maybe says something a little more complicated about power and race in the US, do NOT see Crash.