Crash (2005)
Directed by Paul Haggis
In post-Sept. 11 Los Angeles, tensions erupt when the lives of a Brentwood housewife, her district attorney husband, a Persian shopkeeper, two cops, a pair of carjackers and a Korean couple converge during a 36-hour period.
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30 films that influenced Crash
What critics say influenced Crash
Clearly modeled after Short Cuts and Magnolia —the latter of which is nakedly aped during a third-act montage of sad characters set to a mournful ballad by Aimee Man-style singer-songwriter Bird York— Crash explores, via interlocking stories, the cultural, racial, and spiritual isolation of Los Angelinos.
“Crash” never reaches the heights of “Short Cuts” or “Magnolia” – two multi-story films that clearly provided inspiration – but it’s a thoughtful road trip well worth taking.
The interlocking stories recall Short Cuts and Magnolia, but they mesh more smoothly into a better-crafted whole.
The difference between Crash and other depressed L.A. films (Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon) is that it focuses entirely on race -- its tensions, its stereotypes, its misunderstandings.
Other cross-cutting Los Angeles stories come to mind, especially Lawrence Kasdan's more optimistic " Grand Canyon " and Robert Altman's more humanistic " Short Cuts ."
Like Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," it's is an all-star fresco, but the stars--none of whom carries the movie--get to play the kind of morally ambivalent, sometimes unlikable parts that big-name actors usually avoid.
Clearly modeled after Short Cuts and Magnolia —the latter of which is nakedly aped during a third-act montage of sad characters set to a mournful ballad by Aimee Man-style singer-songwriter Bird York— Crash explores, via interlocking stories, the cultural, racial, and spiritual isolation of Los Angelinos.
Opens Friday in select cities Crash has echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, two other L.A.-centered films about intertwining lives told in a fractured narrative, though it is not as heart-wrenching and complex as the first and not as superficially glib as the latter.
He energetically weaves together interlocking characters and disparate plot elements, in the vein of "Pulp Fiction" and "Magnolia."
It reminded me just a tad of "Magnolia."
“Crash” never reaches the heights of “Short Cuts” or “Magnolia” – two multi-story films that clearly provided inspiration – but it’s a thoughtful road trip well worth taking.
The interlocking stories recall Short Cuts and Magnolia, but they mesh more smoothly into a better-crafted whole.
Similarly constructed films that followed were superior (Altman's own Short Cuts, 1993), stranger (The End of Violence, 1997), more ambitious (Magnolia, 1999), and more shameless (Crash, 2004), but it was Grand Canyon that tilled the soil.
Crash has echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, two other L.A.-centered films about intertwining lives told in a fractured narrative, though it is not as heart-wrenching and complex as the first and not as superficially glib as the latter.
As in other films set amid the amorphousness of Los Angeles -- P. T. Anderson's Magnolia, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon -- his solution is to counter the sprawling milieu with a sprawling cast shoehorned into a connect-the-dot plot.
Crash bears uncanny similarities to Grand Canyon, Lawrence Kasdan 's overearnest 1991 meditation on urban life, which starts with a scene similar to the real-life impetus for Crash and features a filmmaker who changes his life after he becomes a crime victim.
Opens Friday in select cities Crash has echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, two other L.A.-centered films about intertwining lives told in a fractured narrative, though it is not as heart-wrenching and complex as the first and not as superficially glib as the latter.
The difference between Crash and other depressed L.A. films (Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon) is that it focuses entirely on race -- its tensions, its stereotypes, its misunderstandings.
Haggis borrows heavily from movies like 21 Grams, Amores Perros, and Traffic where, instead of an overarching plot, the movie uses a theme to tie together several short stories.
Like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's explosive art-house hit Amores Perros (2000), it begins with a car accident and then moves into flashback to trace the events that led up to it.
But this is all a pose; like a race-baiting Magnolia or a less-charming version of Amores Perros.
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The best ensemble films are the ones in which the characters are given an opportunity to breathe ( Magnolia , Short Cuts , and Nashville come to mind).
Like a mini-Nashville or Magnolia, the film follows an ensemble of L.A. dwellers, each succumbing to the frustrating, confusing pressures of racism.
Although the movie's fate-binds-us-all scheme (an integral component of these multilayered, multi-character dramas from "Nashville" to "Magnolia") may strike some as manipulated coincidence, the big picture, the passing truths and the overall suspense are too omnisciently compelling for any of that to matter.
Haggis, making his directing debut (he adapted Million Dollar Baby, though none of Eastwood's artisan-grace has rubbed off), aims a hammer at our racial (hence political, hence spiritual) complacency, but the results are comfily neutered, not worth a frame of Burnett's scandalously forgotten The Glass Shield, a far more bruising study of how deep racism runs.
Despite its stylistic debt to Robert Altman's films, the true inspiration for "Crash" are the liberal "problem" dramas of the late 1950s and early 60s like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "The Defiant Ones."
For all its daring and intermittent power, Crash seems destined to join other films like Gentleman's Agreement, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, and Grand Canyon among well-intentioned social dramas in which message becomes reality.
Despite its stylistic debt to Robert Altman's films, the true inspiration for "Crash" are the liberal "problem" dramas of the late 1950s and early 60s like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "The Defiant Ones."
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Race as a fable, Africa as a fantasy--and the last reel interested in beautiful, rich white people falling in love; I think about Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels and a couple of challenges presented therein to white, privileged, "morbid rich" filmmaker Sully, played by Joel McCrea: "What do you know about trouble?" and, later, "I have never been sympathetic to the caricaturing of the poor and needy, sir."
ALT="[Crash]" align=right width=225 height=140 hspace=15 vspace=5> For more than 20 years, from the cerebral schlock horror of Shivers (1975) to the rarefied literary perversities of Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg has explored with shocking imagery and uncompromising insight the blurred boundaries between living and inanimate, human and non-human.
Add in the fact that the lazy, amoral main character isn't the slightest bit likable (a reflection of real-life critics?), and you've got a pointless attempt at cool whose most interesting feature is the reunion of Crash stars Spader and Deborah Kara Unger, who once again play spouses turned off to each other and the world.