The other message of "Crash."

Rating: 2/10 (16 August 2009)

Writer/Director Paul Haggis is well-named. The definition of "haggis": the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal. In other words, he's an offal filmmaker (sorry).
His screenplay is heavy-handed, melodramatic, and loaded with implausible coincidences that cause the characters to collide (crash!). The ultimate message: racism is bad, and cars and cellphones and TV-- all of which make L.A. tick-- make it worse because they're tools of alienation. Not exactly fresh ground.
But here's the other message, one everybody seems to miss: Women are bitches.
Nearly all the female characters are mean, strident, unreasonable shrews. Sandra Bullock: rich white bitch. Thandie Newton: rich black bitch. Loretta Devine: working-class black bitch. Jennifer Esposito: working-class Latina bitch.
I could probably name more of these one-dimensional female viragos, but for that I'd have to see it again. Not in this lifetime. I'd rather be mistakenly shot by Ryan Philippe for laughing.