Crash (Paul Haggis 2004)
Posted on November 30 at 0.00, 2004 by Eric Mahleb
This is the film that made me come out of the lethargic writing state i have been in for the past few months. I became so enraged halfway through viewing Crash that i decided i had to write something about it. Why Crash you may ask and not some other bad movie that i have watched (and there are plenty)?
Because few bad movies are as pretentious and as overbearing as this one is. Crash has the arrogance and audacity of trying to make us believe that it is deep, that it offers a fresh look at racial relations in the 21st century, and that it has a point. But there is no point, at least not one that hasn’t been made a hundred times before. Crash is a succession of cliches, of implausible coincidences that fail to result in a coherent and successful narrative, and what results is a constant sense of preachiness and of cheap and superficial emotional brainwashing. It feels like a film made for an Emotion in Film 101 course and it assumes that the audience is not intelligent enough to deal with emotions on a deeper and more realistic level. This is consumerism emotion, feelings bought from the shelves of a 24-hours supermarket. At various moments in the film, a music with religious undertones assaults the image and completely takes over the narrative. It is blatantly and cheaply screaming at us: ‘I am this extremely emotional music. You must be moved, now!’ In all respects, Crash treats us like children, while pretending to be mature and to deal with a sensitive subject matter in an adult manner. As far as i am concerned, it fails miserably. Even a couple of solid performances can’t rescue this film from its own arrogance .
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5 Responses to “Crash”
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Letters from Iwo Jima - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
April 24, 2007 at 12.15[...] The problem I have with Letters from Iwo Jima is the same I had with Million Dollar Baby or Mystic River and with Haggis’s Crash. These films are only a semblance of what they claim to be. They pretend to depict a reality that in fact can only exist in a romanticized view of life. They pretend to deal with a certain harshness of life but can’t help burying this harshness under a pile of motivational speaker-type messages. They want to talk about the evil in the world but spend more time talking about the good. They are afraid to contemplate imperfection and only imperfection. They want to depict the average person’s suffering but only succeed in describing stereotypes and people whose personalities and actions make them stand outside of the norm. [...]
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Vantage Point - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
April 24, 2008 at 7.24[...] Vantage Point starts intelligently enough, with the attempted assassination of the US president during a speech in Spain, being shown from different points of view. Every 10 minutes or so, we are offered a new perspective on the events, through the eyes of a new character. And each time, we seem to be getting closer to finding out what really happened. Except that after slowly raising the tension and having us fairly attentive, Travis decides, mysteriously and shamefully, to throw it all away and to turn his film into some kind of ridiculous over the top action flick. And to make things worse, Travis has the audacity to still pretend that it is intelligent by merging all the different stories into a silly denouement that reminded me of the terrible Crash (2004) in its mediocrity and pretentiousness. Rashomon (1950), this film isn’t. Imagine a scene where for ten minutes we follow a little girl as she runs looking for her mother, and we can feel from the selection of shots and from the editing that the director is leading her towards a busy road with lots of incoming traffic. At that point, the only thought that logically must enter our mind is: no, the director cannot possibly be aiming for such a cliché scene. Something new and unexpected is going to happen, right? Well, no. Travis does indeed lead the little girl to a busy road in the middle of which she suddenly freezes and stays there screaming, waiting for a car to hit her. Didn’t Travis watch Austin Powers (1997)? Didn’t he get Mike Myers’s joke as Austin Power spends several minutes warning some guy that he is about to run him over with a bulldozer? [...]
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Bobby - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
May 5, 2008 at 9.34[...] One of the early problems with the film is that this dozen or so of lead characters are all played by more or less well-known stars, and one can’t help but to start wondering who else is going to pop up next. The viewer becomes trapped in this overabundance of celebrities and begins to watch the stars themselves rather than the characters they portray. In addition, some of these familiar and pretty faces (my god, they were all so pretty in 1968!) happen to be very average actors and actresses, resulting in characters that are simply tedious to watch and enjoy, and in scenes that simply feel too much like they were built for a celebrity to fly in for the day and recite a few lines and express their liberal penchant by simply being there and by appearing in a film about Robert F. Kennedy. Using so many stars effectively is a difficult undertaking and intertwining their stories in a way that is compelling is even more complex. One can’t blame Estevez for trying to be Robert Altman (or to a lesser extent, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) but one can certainly fault him for failing and for only being able to come up with a result that is as mediocre as Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004). [...]
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Info-pleaser.com » Bobby Says:
October 3, 2008 at 20.50[...] One of the early problems with the film is that this dozen or so of lead characters are all played by more or less well-known stars, and one can’t help but to start wondering who else is going to pop up next. The viewer becomes trapped in this overabundance of celebrities and begins to watch the stars themselves rather than the characters they portray. In addition, some of these familiar and pretty faces (my god, they were all so pretty in 1968!) happen to be very average actors and actresses, resulting in characters that are simply tedious to watch and enjoy, and in scenes that simply feel too much like they were built for a celebrity to fly in for the day and recite a few lines and express their liberal penchant by simply being there and by appearing in a film about Robert F. Kennedy. Using so many stars effectively is a difficult undertaking and intertwining their stories in a way that is compelling is even more complex. One can’t blame Estevez for trying to be Robert Altman (or to a lesser extent, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) but one can certainly fault him for failing and for only being able to come up with a result that is as mediocre as Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004). [...]
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Brokeback Mountain - Quiet Please - Cinema Futures by Eric Mahleb Says:
October 24, 2008 at 13.51[...] We watch and observe with serene sadness as the tragedy of two humans beings whose love can not be comsummated, unfolds. Their gender, while helping us to place the impossibility of their love, becomes quickly irrelevant and secondary to their love and to their search for happiness. The acting is splendid, the cinematography ravishing in its majesty but also in its ability to convey the irony of homosexuals finding love in an environment normally associated with traditional male conservatism. There is absolutely no way Crash (2004) should have won best film at the Oscars, not only because Crash is not a very good film, but also because Brokeback Mountain is quite close to as good as it can get. [...]