Saturday, April 01, 2006 , 5:32 PM
Crash
A lot of people were telling me this movie was crap and didn't deserve the Oscar it got, so I was very interested to see it for myself.
My verdict? Yes, it wasn't subtle, it was contrived and the racism was exaggerated. It also may have had too many characters and stories, and was unable to develop all of them throughly, (some of the plot lines even felt unfinished at the end.) But what it so obviously set out to do it accomplished well. It got us thinking about how we judge people based on race, and did so through the eyes of interesting characters and stories.
Most interesting was the Ludacris character, a black man paranoid about the judgements made on his own race, but was perpetuating the stereotype himself. And Officer Hanson (Ryan Philippe), a cop who fought for equality, but didn't realize the racism was in him all along.
Come to think of it, a lot of us are unconsciously racist in some way. We don't believe or realize that we are until we put it in action.
The tough question is how much can we blame people like that? We deal with so many people in our day to day life, we don't have the TIME to get to know what a person is really like. The truth is by necessity, we make assumptions to help us interact, and these are largely based on first impressions, appearance, and sadly race. As portrayed by the movie, when those judgements are applied to a life threatening situation, they can be devestating.
Anyway, to sum it up, still didn't deserve to win, but it wasn't a bad movie!
7/10
