Candidate for Most Overrated Movie in History

Rating: 5/10 (7 March 2006)

First, I had no problem watching Crash, didn't take a bathroom break and forget to first turn off the DVD player (a sure sign I'm not enjoying the feature presentation). I was very impressed with Sandra Bullock's performance especially. Don Cheadle, as always, was also excellent. No actor's performance in Crash, in fact, can be faulted. The problem is: poor "STORY". No critic I know of has looked at Crash from the perspective of STORY.
The multiple vignette concept, as seen in Magnolia, Short Cuts, Happiness, and various other efforts, is a way of using, and maximizing fallow fiction material without having to properly develop any single story. As a substitute for a single well-developed story and its appropriate "subplots", the vignette movie-writer attempts to "unify" the vignettes--for example, the players are all people living in the SAME city, which isn't quite enough, is it? but that's Crash--and this "unity" is extremely difficult for the writer to effect without resorting to puerile contrivances, and forced drama -- drama which seems to be controlled, not by the characters' choices, but from "above", by a "deus ex machina", the Greeks called it, whether it's a chorus of chanting Fates, or splatting frogs, or a writer pushing an agenda and using puppets (characters) to speak for him, the contrivance explains "everything". No "plot", that is, no story, is necessary.
The various vignettes in Magnolia are "unified", finally, when frogs rain down on everyone, no exceptions, in the stories. There's William Macy sitting in his car while frogs splat on the windshield. No absurdist philosophy can justify this BS, this, to quote myself, "puerile contrivance" of an "ending", which demeaned the rest of the movie. As other posters said, the actors in Magnolia --Cruise, and Phil S-Hoffman--were excellent, and it was just as worthy of winning an award as Crash was, which is to say, neither was.
The "unifier" in Crash was ... well, everyone lives in the same city. And, oh yeah, people will sometimes CRASH into one another to get a little "contact". That's the Crash agenda. The internal "logic" of one vignette, Matt Dillon's, is shoddy, garbage writing, false. It "just so happens" the only cop on hand to rescue a woman in her burning SUV is, guess who?--the cop who just "molested" her. What a coincidence. Let's teach everybody a lesson in ... melodrama. Set-ups and (moralistic) "punch-lines" passed off as plot. Pick any story-line in Crash, Sandra Bullock's, for example, or Matt Dillon's,and imagine it fully developed into one great STORY.
To all but worship Crash as some sort of paean to racial "truths", should be a felony. Crash looks and talks "funky" enough, but it's loaded with a "politically correct" subtext. Speaking of which, I've had my fill of that sanctimonious monomaniac, Oprah, going goo-goo over this movie and the players, read: black players, in it. Gimme a STORY already!