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Past Entertainment Articles. Article for the week of 3/14/06 Really Pathetic Movie Review Crash By, Cozmic So, this week we decided to take a look at the latest winner of an Oscar for Best Motion Picture of the year. Now, the way I see it, there are two kinds of movie. The ones that win Oscars and are actually good, and the ones that are just plain unimaginably boring (the movie just doesn't float.. yet it sinks too slowly). Crash, rated R (and, strangely enough, from age seven and up in the cold harsh north of yours truly), definitely falls into the first category, but pinpointing why is the really tricky part. It might be the rather interesting questions the movie brings up, the acting, or the fact that the multiple storylines manage to keep me focused on the stories at hand. Alright, so just what is Crash about? As I've said, it has multiple storylines,
all dealing with racial issues in Los Angeles, from various perspectives.
There's the rather prejudiced Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon), there's the
rich and privileged couple who gets carjacked (Sandra Bullock and Brendan
Fraser), the carjackers Anthony and Peter (Ludacris and Larenz Tate),
and the one who strikes me as the only really nice guy in the entire movie,
the locksmith Daniel (Michael Peña), to name a few. Now, as it
should be in all these movies, all stories interlock in one way or the
other, and I'm not going to say how, but it is always done with a lot
of skill. As far as acting and directing goes, I cannot say much besides that all actors deliver. There really is nothing to complain about, no incredible foul-up in the casting, and Matt Dillon was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting act, something he deserved. To be honest, nobody really stands out as a brilliant actor or actress in the movie, in my opinion, very likely because these are all believable and well-portrayed characters. As for directing, Paul Haggis definitely did his job correctly, and just as well as he wrote the script together with Robert Moresco. That a man who has created Walker: Texas Ranger would be able to do something this well thought-out I would never have guess, if I hadn't also seen Million Dollar Baby. Crash isn't the best movie I've ever seen. It isn't the funniest, it isn't the coolest, it isn't the most gripping, or the scariest. It's just terribly well-done, and more than deserving of a rather ugly gold-statue handed out by people who don't know good from incredibly boring half the time. Sometimes, however, they do get things right.
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