Crash
Just like to warm up the crowd (?) with this one. Three months after 9/11, George Clooney was asked what he wanted for Christmas. "I want," he said, "one day when nobody is getting shot at. Call a truce for a day." Jay Nordlinger writing in the National Review remarked at the time that this was "a child's response", noting "the implied moral randomness... People are just shooting at each other, you know, and shooting at each other is bad." That's Hollywood, folks. Liberal to the point of parody, just like the The Independent newspaper. Which brings us to Crash.
Given that the film centres on lots of coincidental path crossings, it must have some significance that the DVD came our way last night, a few hours before the Oscars show kicked off in Los Angeles. Crash, which is set in LA (another meaningful coincidence?) opens well, loses the plot in the middle and finishes with a saccharine flourish. And if that isn't the daddy of one-line reviews, my name's Matt Dillon. Interestingly, a first cousin of mine is married to a lad called Dillon over near the Galtees…
Enough of this rambling. Another Matt, Matt Zoller Seitz, our very favourite flick critic, has the ultimate post on "Crash". It's devastating: "In the name of Big Drama, it ignores the chilling effect of political correctness, which compels everyone who's not a fringe-dwelling hatemonger or a person pushed to the edge of his or her rope to express racist thoughts in code." The comments are equally insightful.
Comments
I beg to disagree and I am backed up by none other than David Denby of the New Yorker, the best critic in the business, imho. He said, “Crash” is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it’s easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” though it is not for the fainthearted. In the first twenty minutes or so, the racial comments are so blunt and the dialogue so incisive that you may want to shield yourself from the daggers flying across the screen by getting up and leaving. That would be a mistake. “Crash” stretches the boundaries: after the cantankerous early scenes, it pulls us into the multiple stories it has to tell and becomes intensely moving.
I found very moving too.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/050502crci_cinema
Posted by: Samantha Wallace | March 7, 2006 4:34 PM