Let's do this...
Crash - Let's get one thing straight right here at the top: Crash is not the worst movie ever made. Its undeserved Best Picture win has caused many to veer into hyperbole, but its win doesn't make it an incompetent pile of crap. It is well-made and well-acted, yet it is also unfocused, off-target, pretentious, insufferable, and self-important, which makes it a
competent pile of crap. It hits an occasional mark, but most often whacks you over the head with its message, you know, in case you didn't get it the first dozen times. The message, of course, is racism and how we all got some prejudice in us. Anyone here not already know this about themselves? Nigga please.
We get off to a roaring start as the movie opens on a small fender bender which sends everyone flying into fits of racial tourette's. The Asian woman actually says "clash" instead of crash which displays the level of depth we're going to plum here. Roll your pants up, boys. We may get into waters up to our ankles this time. Then we meet some black dudes who bitch that everyone is scared of a couple black dudes. They then whip out their guns and jack an SUV proving everyone was in their perfectly right minds when they were scared of these black dudes. Sandra Bullock gets home and yells about the Mexicanness of the locksmith within earshot of the guy, much in the same way that no one ever does. So early on, the movie establishes a bullshit behavioral pattern from its characters and doing so sets up some nice straw men it can knock down. No one is sensitive to anyone else. It's so convenient that everyone here has no problem being an insensitive prick to the person standing in front of them. And it does this over and over and over again. About 45 minutes in, something weird happened. Tony Danza (WTF?) became the umpteenth insensitive prick in the movie. I was watching the movie alone and I made a noise other than a fart. I audibly groaned. If you groan during a movie, you've had enough. And the movie had hammered its point so incessantly that I was sick of hearing it. We get it already, folks, now do something with it.
So our characters are assholes, but what about their individual stories? Plenty of good movies have been made about jerks, so what's the problem here? Well, they all keep running into each other and it's not believable because the movie doesn't establish a sense of time and place when all these people can converge. Think of a movie like Short Cuts, Nashville, or Magnolia where the area is completely established and the events within all make sense. L.A. is a big place. I cannot believe for a second would be running into each other in all these different places, or more importantly that all these people would have life-changing events together at random locations covering a friggin huge area. It worked in Short Cuts because the characters had brief encounters, sometimes not even being aware of each other's presence. It works in Magnolia because the takes a looooong time establishing that these people are to experience an event together. Crash just has its way because it wants and needs things to be that way. Again, not believable. The centerpiece of the movie is Matt Dillon's rescue of the black chick from the burning car. He just molested her during a routine stop the night before. This little tale of redemption could work if we believed it, but we're lost when, of course, he stumbles upon her overturned car the very next day during a completely random drive-by. Maybe if it were a different black woman, we'd believe it. Maybe if they established how these two could be in the same place at the same time, we'd believe it. But hell, I even have trouble believing that this one woman could have two traumatic events happen to her within a 24 hour period, so maybe someone can explain that first.
I said it does a few things right, but those are small moments. The best is a simple one after Ludacris's failed attempt to jack Terence Howard's car. After all the cops are revealed to secret Klan members, everyone calms down and Ludacris gets a lift out of the neighborhood. He is told from one successful negro to hoodlum, "You embarrass me." It's a nice, quiet, subtle moment. More moments like that and fewer "We're not Arab, we're Persian" speeches would've been a lot better. I also always thought the parts with the Mexican locksmith and his daughter were nice. Too bad they had to screw it up with the whole "there were blanks in the gun" bit. Really creative. Brought to you by the same folks who made the Asian lady say "clash".
Ultimately, the movie is a failure because it tells us nothing new about ourselves that we didn't already know, and it creates a false reality to illustrate its point. Some of its individual stories may have worked as their own movies if they were fleshed out and set in a realistic world. But that's not what we got, and I didn't buy its bullshit.
Did it deserve to win?: If you don't know the answer to that question, you haven't posted here that long. It was a weak year, but that's no excuse. Everyone has their own choice for best of the year, and they're all better than Crash. My choice would've been The Constant Gardener, or maybe Syriana. Brokeback Mountain was the frontrunner during the whole awards season, and it was better than Crash. The ironic thing about its win is that Crash is about prejudice and it beat Brokeback because a good chunk of the voters were prejudiced against gays.
(out of 5)
Up next: The Departed