It's nicer than the other poster

It really is. The other poster's depressing.

Crash (2005)

iMDB would have me believe 2004, but I disagree.

Sum: Although much of what you may have read suggests that this film revolves around differing lives in Los Angeles intersecting at a car crash, that's misleading. There are, in fact, numerous car crashes, and many of lives never intersect or involve car crashes. Instead, it sort of goes like this: The young DA (Brendan Fraser) and his wife, Jean (Sandra Bullock), are car-jacked by Anthony (Ludacris) and Peter (Larenz Tate), right after Anthony finishes a diatribe about how whites are unjustly afraid of blacks. Jean takes out her anger on her non-white maid, Maria (Yomi Perry), and the locksmith, Daniel (Michael Pena), the film's sole saint. Meanwhile, Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon) pulls over an affluent black couple and molests the wife, Christine (Thandie Newton), while is partner, Officer Hanson (Ryan Phillippe), and her husband, Cameron (Terrence Howard), do nothing but look on in horror. Also, Farhad (Shaun Toub) takes his daughter, Dorri (Bahar Soomekh), to buy a gun to protect their store with a faulty back door/lock. And Graham (Don Cheadle) and his partner, Ria (Jennifer Esposito), investigate a corrupt cop while Graham deals with his smack addict mom.

It's difficult to say what I have to say about this movie. See, there is all this praise out there for the characters saying that which is never said in American movies. True enough. Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco's screenplay has people saying things you've quite likely never heard in a movie before.

But do you really need to hear such things?

I'd like to like this movie. I'd like to say that it was powerful and moving and unlike anything I've ever seen before. And it was. It was all those things. It was also something so much worse.

Apparently, Los Angeles is the city where everyone goes to no longer conceal their racism. I believe that everyone is, in one way or another, racist. People who care about their racism, who recognize it as a problem, identify certain feelings, sayings, ideas as racist and work to stop their minds from going in that direction. In Haggis' Los Angeles (he also directed), though, everyone just says exactly what's on their minds about race relations, beshrew the consequences! Of course, this does not include Pena, what with him being Crash's patron saint and all.

And that's the problem. What is this movie about? RACISM. What is everyone? RACIST. In fact, Haggis wants us to know that we are all mean, hating racists out to destroy each other, and nothing can stop us. That's why this movie isn't powerful and moving and unlike anything else I've ever seen. Unfortunately, I've seen plenty of manipulative, melodramatic, and moralizing movies. As much as each and every player tries to rise above the material, there really is no escaping Haggis' vision.

So, Haggis, what shall we do with you? Here's what I want you to do. Grab your Oscar of its shelf, dust it off, and give it a long hard look in the face. Then, rent Million Dollar Baby, and consider your elegant, delicate treatment of an equally sensitive issue. Maybe Clint Eastwood's gentle touch helped more than your hamfists, but you may have something to you yet.

Even so, a movie seeking to bludgeon its audience with their own RACISM isn't worth your $9.95. Wait for the DVD. It is worth that much. C+