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 for the stories themselves, it's hard not to find yourself hating the stupidity of some people, feeling bad for others, and generally get drawn in by them…whether it's Daniel trying to be respected as an honest worker, made hard only because of the fact that he's Hispanic and comes from a bad neighbourhood, or detective Graham(Don Cheadle’s)'s attempt to find right and wrong in a case about a dead cop. There's also a lot of warmth and a bit of humour to some of these stories, such as Anthony constantly explaining to Peter how the entire world is against black people and, for instance, buses have large windows so everyone can see the black people that are forced to ride them. Crash is filled with all these things that don't make you laugh out loud, but do make you smile, as well as a myriad of sad moments, where you feel that if it gets any worse you'll turn it off. Yet you want to see it until the end. Crash is never a boring movie to watch.

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.