A Review of the Movie "Crash".

Disclaimer: I am tired and may not have written too coherently.

I have not been having too much luck with movies this year. I tried to watch "300" and turned it off after the rather risqué scene in the Persian Headquarters. Tonight I attempted to watch "Crash." For those of you who don't know, "Crash" was the Oscar winner of a few years back. I remember there was big stink because everyone thought it would be "Brokeback Mountain," but it was "Crash" which is just as awful I can assume.*

The forty minutes I saw of "Crash" (and I know it was forty minutes because watching my DVD player's numbers tick up was more enjoyable than the movie on the screen) were filled with the un-artful dialogue I had grown accustomed to hearing while I was working as a ramp agent for the airlines. The main difference was that there was more cohesion in the sentence structure of people who had never graduated from college than there was in this script from allegedly educated people.

Anyway, ignoring dialogue (the apparently lost art of screenwriting), "Crash" follows the exploits of a city of angry stupid people. They say angry stupid things, get into angry stupid fights, and in the end it is a dystopian "Pay It Forward." The problem with many such dystopian ideas is that they can have very flat characters in the face of such an horrendous monolithic evil. It can sometimes work. But, it especially won't work if you take dystopian characters and put them in the middle of a freakin' character driven movie. That is just asking for trouble.

The movie was also filled with the characters that Hollywood considers avant-garde, but the rest of the United States calls cliché. You have the racist little trophy wife, the African American thugs, the racist cops, the good black man, and a myriad of other characters who are defined by the color of their skin first and their character second. I understand that Paul Haggis was attempting to show us how racism exists in all of us and we must something something something. You know how if you hear something enough times, it becomes just background noise. Yeah, that is "Crash" for you.

We hear the same shrill pseudo-psychology that passes for great insight in Tinsel Town. Nothing changes here in America, no one learns anything, and we all go home and feel better about ourselves for watching a movie about racism. (Guilt atoned by a few dollars at the movie store.)

It is a movie of the typical formulaic anger put forth as genius by Hollywood. Many movies in Hollywood work of a perverse interpretation of postmodern existentialism (trust me I have studied real postmodern existentialism for my major in philosophy). Here is how it goes, your subconscious is your real self. Your desires and appetites are what make you who you are, and your poor little beaten up rational self is just cleaning up after it all day long.

This of course is what Hollywood wants you to believe so that you will do things based on emotion (i.e. buy stuff you don't need). However, if we have learned anything from history people rise above their surroundings usually because of rationally pursuing an intellectual course of action. The lies we tell others are many times more real than the person we are. We just don't tell lies to fit in or not to be thought bigots. Many good people tell lies because they know the lie they are telling is more true than what they believe. They want to believe in what they do not believe because they know it is true.

We all have bad experiences with certain groups. A man may have a bad relationship with a woman. A person of one religious persuasion may have have a bad incident with another. Perhaps we have dealt with one person from a certain race that didn't treat us well. It doesn't matter. We have to keep certain things secret and we have to believe what is beyond our own experience, because we believe that there are deeper truths than our own experience leads us to believe. And human beings are not strong enough to believe right off the bat, but rather have to believe things that they don't understand by themselves. In other words, people have to fake 'til they make it.

Hollywood has a nasty habit of being self-congradulatory. It talks about how it has been edgy and forward thinking, but it can do this because it is also the industry that controls the information of its own history.

Watching this movie reminded me of a quote my parents are fond of repeating, "There is nothing worse than a stupid mean person." If that is true, than perhaps the only possible thing worse than that, is a movie of a bunch of stupid mean people.

* I should say that I never saw Brokeback Mountain. It just didn't appeal to me to watch it.