Crash sucked. Nothing to do with Brokeback Mountain

Cafe Society
21

I never call movies “pretentious.” I think that pretension is a thing that people project onto movies that they don’t like, but which are generally well-regarded by other people (and movie critics). But the movie itself cannot actually be pretentious, because it’s just a movie, right?

Crash is pretentious. It is the only movie I have ever seen that can be rightly called pretentious. It is also the only movie for which it is an impossible task to describe why it is great without sounding like you, also, are pretentious.

It is a movie that picks a blatantly obvious and simple-minded message - as others have pointed out - and presumes that it can portray it as a subtle web of complexity simply by having lots and lots of characters that are all secretly racist, but do exactly one (1) non-racist thing, and which interconnect with one another in the most predictable possible ways.

It is a movie that believes that it is doing good things and educating all of us moronic viewers, who clearly do not understand racism and need somebody to guide us through life. So, on top of being pretentious, it is also condescending.

It is also full of lies, as the characters’ personalities do not follow through to their actions or vice versa. Matt Dillon’s character, for example, is a racist and sexist cop, but secretly he’s an upstanding man who will do what is right; this is as much a mythical beast as the hooker with a heart of gold. So, on top of being pretentious and condescending, it is also bullshit.

RealityChuck talks about stereotypes and makes the comment that we, as the audience that fails to believe in Dillon’s change of heart, are buying into a stereotype without giving the character a fair chance; lo and behold, we, ourselves, are racists! But this is the exact flaw that Crash so prominently and repeatedly reveals about itself: it does nothing to destroy stereotypes or explore their impacts, it only presents them and then does the reverse without ever showing a reason for the stereotype to be broken down.

Take Dillon’s character again. If he presents himself as a stereotypically racist cop and he will transform into an upstanding citizen, then he must earn his transformation. There must be progression. There must be a subtle and complex web of actions that cause him to unlearn his racism. But there isn’t. He just wakes up one day and is suddenly The Best Not Racist In The World who goes on to save a black woman from a car wreck.

This is not how real life works. And because it is not how real life works, the movie’s messages are a fallacy. And because they are a fallacy, they cannot be applied to real life. And therefore the movie is essentially pointless.

So, it is a pretentious, condescending, pointless bunch of bullshit about RACISM.

I have never seen Brokeback Mountain.

22

I’ve never seen Crash, but every time I hear Nickelback I think “paint by numbers music”. It seems like you may have actually selected a good analog to Crash.

23

It was really deep and important. How do I know? Because every time they had a scene showing something deep and important they played a single neverending low keyboard note to let you know it was deep and important. Weeeewwwwwooowwwwweeeewwwwwoooooowwwwwwwewwwwwwwwwowwwwwww!!!

24

:rolleyes:

Full response: Do you know how many movies that same “criticism” would apply to?

25

I hated the moment I saw it. As each frame went by my hatred increased. I even hated the end credits.

26

The New York Times’ A.O. Scott broke down the film’s problem more succinctly than I ever could: “Mr. Haggis is eager to show the complexities of his many characters, which means that each one will show exactly two sides.”

I personally find the film to be so severely lacking that it’s just not plausible to me that the criticism of it is “generally” because of Brokeback Mountain (which I’ve never seen).

27

This is ridiculously reductive and a stereotypical view of characterization. If that’s the message you got out of the portrayal of this character… well… you share good company with some pretty old fashioned critical concepts of what a character ought to do. (Or maybe like some freshman reading Shakespeare for the first time and thinking every hero needs to be like Hamlet.) Characters, like people, don’t need to progress. They don’t need to improve gradually or transform. They don’t need to learn anything. He’s not the Best Not Racist at the end – wherever did you get that two-dimensional idea? He’s just some guy with a bunch of conflicting motivations, deep ambivalence, and hatred based on frustration. He’s a guy who acts out his anger in jacked-up ways in day-to-day stuff, but can also be brave in a crisis. People are complicated that way, and I don’t see why this character needs to follow some stereotypical redemption trajectory, just because you have that pre-conception.

28

My analogy isn’t about the quality of either; it’s about people jumping on the hate bandwagon for a movie that won an award for best picture 5 years ago. It’s not only too late to gain streed cred by hating it, the conversation is always the same:

“The movie is heavy handed and god forfend anyone lecture a *doper *about racism. Everyone here is color blind and need not be condescended to”.
Sounds more like it touched a nerve
“The movie is unrealistic; people wouldn’t act the way these characters did in real life”.

It’s not supposed to be a documentary. Does everyone have a grip on just what a movie is?

Extra points to each person who takes care to let us all know they’re speaking of “the pretentious piece of crap” and not that thoughtful masterwork made by David Cronenberg :rolleyes:

Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion and I am not the official cheerleader for Crash (the urban fairy tale, not Mr. Cronenberg’s subpar paean to paraphilia:p ) . The vehemence with which people trash this movie just doesn’t ring true to me, is all.

29

I liked Crash. Never saw Brokeback.

30

If you hated Crash, you’ll really hate In the Valley of Elah, another Paul Haggis movie that drowns the viewer with it’s self-importance and smug sense of superiority. This would be bad enough but it completely fails to make it’s stupid point.

I agree with the consensus that Crash sucked. I remember little about it except characters staring into the middle distance thinking serious thoughts while somber music played, the director’s self satisfaction oozing out of my monitor, and that weird determination you feel when you’re halfway through a terrible movie and you decide you’re going to watch the damn thing until the end.

31

I went to see Crash with zero, and I mean absolutely NO expectations.

I didn’t know of this movie’s existence, and therefore it sideswiped me: it took me totally by surprise. And I really enjoyed it. I did like the confounding of expectations, which worked very well indeed, because I had no preconceptions whatsoever about what I was going to watch. And the scene with the gun had me on the edge of my seat.

(The reason? I had been travelling in Asia for several months and had had almost no media exposure, and when my friend, on my arrival in New Zealand, told me he’d got me a free ticket to Crash, I thought I was going to see a rerun of the David Cronenburg movie, right up until the credits started.)

32

I daresay the better adjective is “presumptuous”, not “pretentious.” A pretentious movie would be trying to push itself as something brilliant and if you don’t get it, you’re a troglodyte moron. Crash pushes itself as something noble, and if you don’t get it, you’re a troglodyte bigot (and possibly also a moron).

33

I really wanted to like it, but felt hugely let down. (I also had no idea what it was about beforehand.) Not only did it feel heavy-handed to me, but really contrived and the opposite of subtle. The syncronicity in it was way out of control. I sometimes like movies where coincidences make up a large part of the plot, but Crash tried way too hard for it. If Haggis had pulled back by about 25%, it could have been a great movie.

34

I agree, people ARE complicated. That’s why *Crash * sucks so bad. It doesn’t show the complexity of people realistically and it doesn’t even try to dig deeper to find out the underlying causes of their behavior.

People are complex in the sense that they have many different underlying motivations for every action they do, and they can be pulled in different directions depending on the context. People are complex in the sense that they will do seemingly contradictory things for the same over-arching reason.

Having a guy molest a black guy’s wife in one scene and then save the woman from a car accident in the next scene is not complex. It is just being contradictory on the face of it. The only way to portray it as complex is if you dig deeper and try to understand why he would behave in such erratic ways.

Sure, I’m reducing Dillon’s character significantly because I didn’t feel like writing a ten-page essay on the character for a simple message board post that was only meant to generally summarize my feelings on why I thought a piece of shit movie was a piece of shit. But, more importantly, his character is already reductive. There’s not much more to cut out that I didn’t include in my first post.

What we learn about him is that his father had a business that went bankrupt because, according to Dillon’s belief, anyway, he had to hire black people due to affirmative action. Okay, fine, that’s another example of his racism. But that’s not an answer. That’s begging the question. So why is he really racist? We never find out. He just is.

Later, he does a 180. Instead of being the jerk that we saw earlier in the story, he saves the black woman. There’s nothing wrong with that - people can do unusual things - but once again, there’s no follow-up. There’s no reason to believe that he would act that way in this situation, nor any exploration of it. We don’t learn why he does it. Is it because he’s a good cop and he believes in doing the right thing? Can’t be, because he was seen being a shitty racist cop already and he didn’t do anything else that should have changed his mind.

*Crash *is content to simply be a superficial “study” of characters that only takes a snapshot of each character, but doesn’t actually study them.

To WOOKINPANUB - Yes, I do expect a movie like this to be realistic if it requires realism for its story and message to work. It’s set in a realistic setting and features a real issue that really affects real people. It has no right to be patronizing or fantastical.

Bryan Ekers - You’re right. “Presumptuous” is a much better word. But I stand by the rest of my post.

TL;DR - I continue to whine about Crash as if I will get an award for it or change anybody’s opinion.

35

I’m no defender of the movie, but this is patently absurd. He’s a cop, not a monster. In your view, a police officer who harrasses African-Americans is not above letting one burn to death. :rolleyes: We know that he’s a veteran officer who’s generally well-regarded, which is probably why he can get away with small assertions of authority. But it’s one thing to be a racist cop and it’s another to be one indifferent to the perils of a woman who is screaming for her life. This is complexity, not contradiction, and while the film paints some awfully broad brush-strokes at times, you’re the one being reductive here.

36

After some thought, I’ve realized how to show you that the main problem here is your entire critical perspective. Let’s look at what you pointed out as being major flaws in the movie.

Maybe in your world, but how that would very often be played out is this:

  1. Wife swear out a complaint.
  2. Dillon denies it.
  3. Husband corroborates.
  4. Dillon’s partner back him up (cops very often refuse to turn on their own).
  5. Investigator from the police department says there is no evidence. Dillon gets off.

Meanwhile, the wife is vilified as being a cop-hater. (Remember, the husband convinced his wife to drop it because he didn’t want the hassle, which might have hurt his career, and the two of them in the long run.)

Now, maybe in your experience you’ve never come up with this type of scenario. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Your assumption here is that it’s impossible for things to play out the way they did because Dillon would be fired and arrested. That is, at the very least, naive.

But, your assumption is that your worldview is the only possible one and if a movie shows something different, then it’s bad.

So, in your worldview, the locksmith always decides to press charges. Every single time. You can’t conceive that he may decide that it’s all been a terrible mistake and decide to let it be. Yet people decide not to pursue things like this all the time.

As for the blanks, sure it’s a great way to get your dad killed, but people in real life don’t always think of the ramifications of their actions. They make poor decisions. From your words, you are unwilling to accept this.

So ultimately, the problem is this: you have a particular idea of how things work, and if things don’t match that idea – even if they are perfectly reasonable real-life situations – then the movie is flawed. A movie must meet your assumptions about how a scene will play out, or it’s bad.

If you like having that sort of tunnel vision, that’s up to you. But you’re missing out.

37

I think that the reason the movie didn’t dig deeper into his character was because it didn’t have time to. There were so many plot lines that all we could get was brief 2-dimensional insights into the characters. Haggis decided to go wide, not deep. That’s a formula that can work in some movies, such as Love Actually or It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. But those are comedies. Used in a dark drama, it just comes off as, well, comical. If Haggis had pared the plot down to just 3 or 4 sub plots, then there would have been room to breathe, and to go really deep into the characters.

38

I loved Crash. I find it to be one of the better movies made in the last decade. Compared to some of the junk that’s won an Oscar, it does well.

It’s not without its flaws, of course. But in general, I find that the ones who can’t see past the idea that it is about “racism is bad” are people who don’t get undertones to things. If your assertion is that the movie is about how bad racism is, or how prevalent, then you missed the point of the movie entirely. You might try re-watching it with an eye towards seeing if there is a deeper message.

One simple point: perhaps the Iranian shopkeeper DOES get charged with attempted murder. We don’t know. That’s not the point to the scene. We don’t see what happens to any of the characters past the 24 hours of the movie. Does the white cop who kills the detective’s brother get discovered as the killer? Does he get punished? Does he change how he views life? Does he leave the scene and go have a hamburger, washed down with a Miller Lite? Who knows, and, frankly, who cares?? It’s irrelevant to the point of the plot.

But go ahead. Keep getting righteously indignant because you couldn’t get past the idea that the movie is heavy-handed and the characters shallow. You just confirm things.

39

Okay, I’ll concede this point about Dillon’s character. It’s been a couple years and I don’t remember all parts of the movie clearly, particularly the last part where he saves the woman. (Was it a fiery wreck? I thought it was like a quiet street or something. Am I conflating that with a different scene? A different movie altogether?)

But, I do believe that my points stand for other characters in the movie. For example, the other cop (Ryan Philippe, I think?) who shoots the black guy at the end - that’s more like the sort of superficial contradictions of behavior that I’m talking about. He’s calm and levelheaded for the whole movie, and then out of nowhere, decides to pull his gun and shoot. That’s the sort of behavior that is not complex, in my view - it is simply contradictory.

Unless there was some other scene that I completely forgot about… and then I’d have to re-watch the movie to find out… gah… maybe I should just let this Internet argument go.

40

The car was overturned, leaking gas, on fire, and exploded mere seconds after he pulled her from the wreckage.

With his character, he showed that he was a hypocrite, being willing to harshly (and rightfully) judge his partner without acknowledging he wasn’t without the same ugly attitudes himself. And he didn’t just “decide to pull his gun and shoot”; his passenger (easily profilable as a gang-banger) quickly reached into his pocket as if he was about to pull a piece. Young cop shot back in “self-defense” but clearly made a knee-jerk decision based on his prejudices more than anything else.

:wink: