Molly: Crash

So, I watched this about two weeks ago, but I've been stewing on how to write about it. I decided to write my review tonight, but first I had a few things to do. First, I had to call my HOA to complain about the greasy spics who are supposed to shovel my sidewalk, but clearly had too much cervesa last night and could only muster up energy to do half of it, and then I ordered chinese food and the stupid chinks couldn't bring my food fast enough, and then I got distracted watching the faggoty Russian figure skaters on the Olympics tonight.

Yeah. That was as hard for me to write as it was for you to read it. Crash is built on the conceit that people actually talk like that.

I certainly don't. And I don't think like that either. As Peggy noted below, the comment most heard about this movie was, "it really made me think..." What Crash made me think, however, was, "is this really how Americans think, and if so, why?" This movie tries so hard to be provocative, but I think it truly and deeply failed in offering any reason why there is the divide between the people who share the cities we live in. How and why did LA come to this culture that Paul Haggis has characterized?

I'm not saying in any way that racism doesn't exist. But I do think that what is truly at issue with race in this country is truly much more insidious than the racial slurs we can hoist on to one another. It is institutional, it is bureaucratic. It was personified with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Really devisive racism in this country is not the words we forcibly use, but in the things we don't say, and in the people we let fall through the cracks.

I finished Crash thinking of all of the ways it let the real root causes and issues of race and racism fall through the cracks. I found it profoundly disappointing. Considering that, I don't see the point of having this movie made.

So, yeah. That was a really harsh review. I must say that I found the performances to be really exemplary, and there were story lines that I thought were starting to go somewhere, but they never really realized what I had hoped they would. Again, I am guilty of thinking too hard.

This movie was just so "in your face" with its controversality, that I'm feeling a little weary in having to see the remaining three "controversial" Oscar pics this year. Anyway, more on that later...