Over at Salon, Andrew O'Hehir introduces The Guilties, his lovingly dead-on awards season swipe at the Oscar nominated films this year and their heavy dosage of Liberal Guilt. What he says about Crash pretty much sums up my opinion perfectly:
"Look, it's not like Crash is a war crime or something. A lot of the acting is quite good, and the honorable intentions of this achingly earnest sermon ("Racial Pain: Los Angeles, America, the World?") are obvious. But it's exactly the kind of portentous, piss-elegant middlebrow trash that many critics (and, unhappily, many viewers) see as Important Cinema. The only difficult part about identifying the preaching and speech-making in Crash is finding the places when it stops. No one in this movie ever talks like an identifiable human being, starting with the notorious early scene where two young African-American men who are about to carjack the L.A. district attorney get into a philosophical argument about the prevalence of white racism. (I had high hopes for that scene when it appeared they might have to shoot Sandra Bullock's eterna-whiny rich-bitch character. After that, it was all downhill.) This entire film is a spinach-flavored schematic, going from one overloaded symbolic encounter between angst-ridden people of different ethnicities to another. We've got a little girl in a bad neighborhood who is magically saved from death by a fairy cape, and the one decent, non-racist white cop in all of L.A., who ends up shooting a black kid for no reason. You could say that Crash is aware of the ironies and contradictions of race in America, but that's literally the only thing it's aware of. It's grasping you by the lapels, like that uncle you generally avoid at family gatherings, and screaming into your face: "My God! The contradictions!" It virtually throbs with meaning, and it's the kind of migraine throb that approaches meaninglessness."
I just do not get why Roger Ebert is on such a war path above this movie.
Read the article, it's funny and quite astute (course, he's awfully kind to Brokeback, which may account for my positive opinion).
"Look, it's not like Crash is a war crime or something. A lot of the acting is quite good, and the honorable intentions of this achingly earnest sermon ("Racial Pain: Los Angeles, America, the World?") are obvious. But it's exactly the kind of portentous, piss-elegant middlebrow trash that many critics (and, unhappily, many viewers) see as Important Cinema. The only difficult part about identifying the preaching and speech-making in Crash is finding the places when it stops. No one in this movie ever talks like an identifiable human being, starting with the notorious early scene where two young African-American men who are about to carjack the L.A. district attorney get into a philosophical argument about the prevalence of white racism. (I had high hopes for that scene when it appeared they might have to shoot Sandra Bullock's eterna-whiny rich-bitch character. After that, it was all downhill.) This entire film is a spinach-flavored schematic, going from one overloaded symbolic encounter between angst-ridden people of different ethnicities to another. We've got a little girl in a bad neighborhood who is magically saved from death by a fairy cape, and the one decent, non-racist white cop in all of L.A., who ends up shooting a black kid for no reason. You could say that Crash is aware of the ironies and contradictions of race in America, but that's literally the only thing it's aware of. It's grasping you by the lapels, like that uncle you generally avoid at family gatherings, and screaming into your face: "My God! The contradictions!" It virtually throbs with meaning, and it's the kind of migraine throb that approaches meaninglessness."
I just do not get why Roger Ebert is on such a war path above this movie.
Read the article, it's funny and quite astute (course, he's awfully kind to Brokeback, which may account for my positive opinion).
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