Crash at 20: Is it the worst best image winner of all time? | film

IT does not take long for Paul Haggis' crash on the shortest shortlists for the worst film to win the best picture at the Oscars, perhaps the worst in the color time since 1954 in 80 days. At that time it was a favorite of the dark horse to annoy the widespread brokeback Mountain and to premiered a whole year earlier at the Toronto Film Festival before driving an unexpected cultural wave to the honor of Awards. Now, 20 years later, it feels like a moment “they had to be there”, which is difficult to explain, because the film itself is so obvious that it suggests only a few answers themselves. The job is probably better suited for cultural anthropologists than for film critics.

Nevertheless, Haggis' Ensemble piece about racial animus in Los Angeles seems to have hit a chord with the many academic meters from Los Angeles who live in this clumpy melting pot. Haggis also used the interconnected trend in the arthouse script and took off a chunky version of the narrative engineering that brought films such as Magnolia and Alejandro González Iñárritus Perros. By combining a little more than one day together, Haggis confiscated the potentially powerful idea of ​​racism as a viral scourge in the city and infected everyone he touched. Instead, it plays like a PO face of the Avenue Q, which is a bit racist for everyone.

The Hamhandness begins immediately when Don Cheadle plays a police detective who has just joined his partner (Jennifer Esposito) in a small return connection and poetically about life in a city in which everyone drives and is touching nobody. “We are always behind this metal and glass,” he says. “I think we miss this touch so much that we crash into each other just so that we can feel something.” (Amusingly, this line could apply to the other crash of David Cronenberg, which deals with love aid figures that get out in collisions.) But Cheadles Philosophizing runs against the blunt conflict that defines the film as soon as it rises from the car and the leg walls start to fly.

There is a large, honking turn with this opening scene, but Haggis and his co-author Robert Moresco choose the clock over 24 hours earlier if a larger line-up of characters even comes into metaphorical crashes. When two black Carjackers (Chris “Ludacris” bridges and Larez Tate) wipe an SUV in front of a restaurant, his wealthy white owners are thrown into a crisis, whereby the woman (Sandra Bullock) seemed wrong at all, and her husband (Brendan Fraser), the district rejection that looks against great political brass than the news. In the meantime, a racist police officer (Matt Dillon) terrorizes the black couple in another SUV and forces a TV director (Terrence Howard) to look helpless while the policeman molested his wife (Thandiwe Newton) in a body research.

Haggis is not finished to turn the screws around a long shot. The racist police officer has a partner (Ryan Phillippe) who is enlightened to apply for a transfer, but does not enlighten enough to later avoid his own tragic confrontation. After buying a pistol from a white man who calls him “Osama”, he thinks that he uses her on a Hispanic locksmith (Michael Peña) if he is responsible for his business to be searched by Islamophobic. Then the cherry on this sticky sundae is a Chinese man who is run over by a car, but turns out to be a faulty victim to express it easily.

Here a pattern of Herky-Lucky pattern appears, in which Haggis keeps pulling out the carpet at the audience and punishing us for our suspected narrow-mindedness. Do you think that is an unprocessing racist, what? What if he is able to risk his life to save exactly the woman he violated? Do you feel good about his conscientious partner who asks for a transfer? What if he shoots an unarmed black man and covered up his crime? Disassemned by Sandra Bullock, who suspects that her Hispanic locksmith could be a gang member? What if her Hispanic housekeeper is her best friend all over the world?!

There is a version of the crash that could have been panic on the streets, Elia Kazan's Great 1950er Noir over a Pneumonian plague that slips through the port of New Orleans and spreads around the city, which creates a domino effect that threatens everyone that touches it. Kazan's film is an elastic allegory that could apply to the spread of foreign ideology or the dangers of mob mentality, but it initially acts as thrillers, whereby the topics flow more organically. Crash makes the opposite: it has a big, fat theme and orchestrates at any moment to serve it, such as an essay in the school, which supports some paragraphs of supporting evidence of the support of the thesis that is repeatedly offered in the first count and in the last. There is no place for how actual people could behave.

In all of these negotiations, the title crash implies a collision with several cars, in which a racist action leads to a cascading consequence of tragic consequences, similar to the individual ball that would create a butterfly effect in Iñárritus 2006 film Babel. But these stories only come together because Haggis bends them into a decent little pretzel, the time, space and fate bends like a malignant god that reduces the population of Los Angeles to a diverse dozen angry, unfortunate, occasionally re withdrawal souls. The alleged message of the crash is pleasant – racism is indeed bad – but Haggis ends with the funny note that racism is such an insoluble problem that it is fruitless. Another day brings another crash and the cycle starts again.

Do you want to change? Forget it, Jake. It's chinatown.