Peter Welch "Racist people are bad, but I'm not racist, so I'm not part of the problem." That is the feeling you are supposed to have when you finish watching Crash. I don't know if a movie could possibly have a more harmful message than that.Crash tells the story of many characters of different ethnic backgrounds who live in LA. Their lives all come together at different points and they learn about racism.Each character has a bizarre and undeveloped hatred of a racial group. Sandra Bullock's character hates black men. Ludicrous's character hates Asian people. Don Cheadle hates Latino people (but is inexplicably dating a Latina woman?). Why do these people hate these groups? Hell if I know. The movie just sort of assumes that average people are extremely racist for no reason.The audience cannot connect to any character in the movie because every character is extremely and cartoonishly racist. As soon as you think a character is reasonable, they go and say something outlandishly racist and you have to dislike them. This is by design. If a viewer sees 10 characters in a movie who are all racist, the viewer thinks "I'm special because I'm not racist like them." This is meant to make the audience feel good about themselves. With a Best Picture win from the Academy, obviously this strategy worked.Racism is not a black and white phenomenon, there is a lot of gray area. Every person operates with subtle racial biases in their day-to-day lives. A movie like 2017's Get Out depicts this form of "casual racism." Some people are more than just casually racist, and that racism usually stems from something about their background- maybe they were raised in a town where racism was accepted, maybe they had a bad experience with a person of a specific racial group and have since projected that onto an entire ethnic group. The point is that the racism depicted in the movie is unrealistic and harmful to show to audiences, since people will believe it.This movie almost serves as a "field guide" for racist catchphrases. Characters hurl disgustingly racist insults at each other constantly throughout the movie. A person who hopes to use racism to put somebody else down now has this entire movie as an example for funny and clever racist sayings. The actors are given such over-the-top intensely racist dialogue and it is all played in such an overdramatic and serious way that the audience can't help but cringe and feel secondhand embarrassment while watching the movie.The "cathartic" ending to the movie was actually disgusting. Sandra Bullock like sprains her foot and her black maid drives her to the hospital so she has an epiphany and doesn't hate black people anymore. I'm not even joking that actually happens. All the other characters have similar "epiphany" moments so none of them are racist anymore. Portraying racism as a simple thing that can be cured just like that is mind-bogglingly stupid. Racial biases don't just go away, and it's shamefully incorrect to imply that. If racism was easily cured, then it wouldn't be an issue.As I struggle to think of positives about the movie, I have to mention that Ludicrous's acting was actually very good in this movie. He's primarily a musician but he elevated the script really well and had a lot of charisma in his few scenes. I don't know much about his acting career, but he certainly impressed me. Another positive is the cinematography. There are a lot of cool-looking shots with a dynamic camera that is always tracking. There are also a lot of stylish transitions which look nice.In total, Crash isn't just unworthy of its Academy Awards, it's actually one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It is smug, overdramatic, and actually more harmful than good in spreading its anti-racist message. Don't watch this movie.

Matt Sewell Oh boy. As a feminist accidentally born with testicles, I can tell you, there's nothing I look forward to more than a film reminding me how privileged white males like myself are the scum of the Earth. I generally use movies like this as a sort of intellectual self-flogging to make up for the thousands of years of oppression my people have caused the entire world. This one, however, didn't amount to much more than a sappy, manipulative Disneyesque take on the state of racism in the United States.We know we're in trouble early on when Sandra Bullock's privileged character warns her liberal husband to be worried about two African-American gentlemen on the street and she turns out to be correct. It's like the film is shooting itself in its foot from the get-go. Afircan-Americans should NEVER be portrayed in a negative light on film or in television. They've suffered enough. Later, we meet an atrociously disgusting white police officer in the character of Matt Dillon. He molests an innocent African-American woman (as one suspects white police officers are apt to do on a regular basis) and then, as though the film wants to make some clever statement about irony, the same racist cop saves the same poor, innocent African-American woman from a burning car. The director plays games like this with the audience throughout the picture. It's like he's learned the very worst lessons Spielberg has to offer. Set the audience up, smack them sideways in a manner the filmmaker no doubt considers "clever." It's not. The whole movie reminded me of the patronizing scene in Schindler's List when Liam Neeson notices white flakes in the air. The audience thinks, "Snow! Christmastime! Yeah!" and then he walks a few blocks and we see it is actually ashes from burning Jews. Crash is nothing but an endless series of episodes like this. It looks like it was written by a freshmen cultural studies major who hasn't had enough Liberal Arts training to learn how to make his art subtle and, thus, more meaningful. Avoid this at all costs. For a great movie to feed your white guilt, I recommend "The Brother from Another Planet."

Inception Report Crash is a solid movie for me, it's not amazing but I do think that it's got very good intentions and found the story to be very interesting and while I do agree that it shouldn't have won Best Picture that doesn't make it a bad film. One thing that nobody can deny about this film are the excellent performances by its entire cast with Michael Pena, Terrence Howard and Matt Dillon being the standouts. Pena gives a fragile and heartwarming performance here I loved his scenes with his daughter and you truly feel for him with the racism he has to deal with. On the opposite end of the spectrum Matt Dillon completely falls into his hostile and racist character but the best thing about his character was the fact that you understand why he is the way he is the fact that he has not got the right but the right reasons for his feelings and quickly turned from a hate able character into an intriguing and sympathetic one. Terrence Howard plays a perfect coward he's become used to the casual racism and discrimination that he has to put up with on a daily basis and watching him let it all happen while he wanted to do something was truly tear jerking especially in the scene with his wife. Technically this movie is fantastic Paul Haggis did an excellent job directing this film he panned along very nicely and he's back enough to left the actors to perform on their own without ever getting in their way with needles cuts and movements. This film won an Oscar for its editing and its very well deserved they knew when to cut at just the right time and managed to keep the film very well balanced. However this film is far from perfect for one, it lacks subtly instead of allowing the actors to just emote through their performances the writers felt the need to have them go on with big monologues or outbursts. When certain characters snap it just didn't feel earned while you certainly understand some frustration or anger it just seems as if they've lost the will to live and it just feels so out of place. An I found the ending of this movie to not really fit with the rest of the film it feels to much like a sitcom from the 90s. However I thought they did do a good job at closing out all of the character arcs in a satisfying way. Crash is not perfect it's got some narrative issues and some over the top moments and it. Certainly should not have one best picture against Munich (one of my favourite movies). But it has fantastic performances and a great message that I could really get behind. 78%/B+

kimthurston2004-839-560726 Plan on sitting through almost 2 hours of a "poor me I'm black, or brown, or yellow, or whatever other color as long as it isn't white" they were able to fit in as long as it wasn't white message with as many racist stereotypes as they could fit in that amount of time. If this had been the other way around and shown all the factual racist motivated incidents that have been perpetrated on whites, there would have been riots all over the country and anyone that had anything to do with the movie would have had to apologize and the movie would have been banned all across the country. I'm sure the people who made it are saying that this is a "statement" about the inhumanity towards the "minority's". I am getting tired of trying to watch a movie for entertainment and instead being subliminally lectured to by an industry that has no morals. There has never been a more racist movie since CSA, but at least that was a comedy.