Crash: And Burn, Baby, Burn
Time for another screed. “Crash� has suddenly emerged as an Oscar front-runner, drawing big love from the Producers Guild, Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild. And while ordinarily I’d be all about honoring a small sleeper-hit tackling tough social issues head-on, I have a few qualms about Paul Haggis’s movie, which should be called “L.A.: City of People Lacking Tact.�
I mean, really: In just about every confrontation in this movie, Going for Someone’s Jugular is Option No. 1. Holding One’s Tongue or Letting Some Jerk Who’s Clearly Having a Bad Day Vent or Considering Diplomacy don't even seem to be on the radar. Every Caucasian automatically whipsaws on any minority who traverses their periphery and, almost, vice versa. Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing� tackled similar material and was more obviously intended as a polemic, but even there the characters behaved more like real people.
Maybe Haggis’s real point is that living in L.A. just stinks, with its oppressive traffic and chunky-soup air quality and unreasonable housing and auto-insurance costs and dubious public schools, all of which just intrinsically puts everyone in a crummy, hostile mood. In which case, OK; I can go with that.
