CRASH

This is the movie that's been bugging me all year. I saw the trailers and to me it looked like some really treacly morality play where people scream and cry a lot. Then it got all this press about how good it was. Then I got some friends' reactions on both sides of the fence, some saying it was good, some saying it was garbage. My feeling was that something that polarizing had to have some merit, so I finally watched it this morning. It's New Years Eve day, it's pouring rain out, seemed like a good a time as any.

When the movie started, the cynic in me immediately hated it. Don Cheadle sits in a car and stares out the window, talking about how people in LA never bump into each other on the streets, and sometimes we need to crash into each other just to "feel something". Then we see a Middle Eastern man trying to buy a gun at a shop, but the counter clerk gets into a fight with him about 9/11. "Oh, Christ," I thought, "this is corny as hell."

But after a while, I got into it. The movie has about a dozen main characters, whose lives intersect with each other at various points, and we see the reactions and consequences each meeting results in. Two young black men wax poetic about racism while going on carjacking sprees. A racist white cop pulls over an innocent black couple. A Mexican locksmith gets into a fight with a Persian store owner. And so on and so on. Basically, you get people from all sorts of ethnicities mixing it up and talking about the problems with other ethnicities.

The problem a lot of people seem to have with the movie is that it's very blunt about its mission, which is RACISM IS BAD. Characters will be in the middle of a conversation about something and then someone will say something like, "It's because I'm black, isn't it?!" Every little thing becomes a race issue. It's a bit heavy-handed and it just force feeds you all these morals.

I definitely had a problem with this, but in the end, I actually liked the movie. What I loved about it was the structure of the narrative and the interaction of all these different stories. There'll be, like, a 20 minute gap before you see a character on screen again, but you never get lost. It's never confusing. And it doesn't end with all the characters giving each other a group hug and smiling at being better people. Sure, they're all pretty much one-note characters, but you get all the information about them that you need and it's enough to tell the story.

And, in the end, it's a really good subject to tackle. It's pretty ballsy. I can totally see why people would not like this movie, and I'm sure I'll get shit for it from my friends, but whatever. I thought it was good.