Paging all Racists...

Sorry for the long "hiatus." This past week or so has been what my friend Erin named "the week your whole life exploded and was then quickly put back together." Not a bad description.

Anyway, I started this review pre-Oscars, and I'm finishing it now... not that my opinion of it has changed. I saw all the nominees for Best Picture this year, with Crash coming in just under the wire as my Saturday night viewing choice. Honestly...I can't understand people's fascination with this film and I certainly don't understand the Best Picture nod. There were definitely some worthwhile performances...Don Cheadle and Terrence Howard stood out to me particularly. But as I said to friends of mine watching it with me, it played like a character study in racist douchebags. Just a parade of them...one after the other. Most of them weren't even complicated racists...just your garden variety insulated-from-humanity jerks.

Perhaps that's the point. But ugh. That's the overriding feeling I got from the movie. I had my first "ugh moment" when Don Cheadle said his bit about all of us crashing into one another to truly feel something. Can someone say "pretensious philosophy major poetry assignment?" Ugh. It was then that I realized that I wasn't going to like this movie. It's pretty easy for me to take a judgemental view early in the viewing of a movie, but it's also pretty easy for a movie to change my mind. This one didn't.

I agree with other reviewers who have said that there were just simply too many characters for many of them to be developed really fully. Perhaps that's why Don Cheadle and Terrence Howard stood out...I think they had the most meat on their bones of any of the characters in the film. I also agree with reviewers who didn't appreciate the point of the movie being bludgeoned into them over and over, particularly when the bludgeoning was being done care of completely over-the-top characters. I'm looking at you, traffic stop fondling Matt Dillon.

Additionally, I didn't feel like some of the "redemption" scenes played well either, at least not for me. Sandra Bullock's character is an angry, bitchy racist hag and her friends are too. She falls down the stairs, only to find that the only person willing to help her is her hispanic maid. She hugs her, they share a moment, *tear.* The end. Your friends are horrible and self-centered and you don't realize it AT ALL until one of them won't interrupt their MASSAGE to come and get your hurt ass off the floor? Bludgeoning accomplished.

Althogether, I think the film took a really simplistic view of a really complicated topic and made their VIEW complicated by throwing every ethnicity, stereotype and character actor in Hollywood into the movie. I just didn't think the flick was nearly as deep and meaningful as it clearly wanted to be...which led me to view it as a trite "ensemble piece." Again, ugh.