Hemanth recommended Crash as we were sipping mocha at bucks. I went straight and added it to the top of my flix queue. Took it over to Ram‘s place to project it over a big screen and watched the crash happening one after another.
Crash has a fascinating screenplay. It isn’t unique. But still fascinating. 13 peoples’ life come in and go out of each others life on an unassuming day in LA. Most of the ‘come in and go out’ happen unexpectedly and that’s the screenwriter’s skill. Even as the movie runs as bits and pieces of incidents, its put together with absolute continuity and perfect harmony with other scenes such that no single incident seems better/worse than the other. These people who crash onto each other’s life are perfect strangers and belong to different races.
The movie talks about racism and post 9/11 anxiety issues which common people face in everyday life. An old meticulous Farsi shopkeeper who wants a gun to safeguard, a powerful attorney’s paranoid wife, a perfectly loving father who is victimized just because of his race, a chinaman caught under a truck for no reason and many more such good and bad people bump onto each others life. Scripting this movie could have been a tight rope walk. It’s easy with so much happening at the same time, the movie could seem like a collection of trailers. Paul Haggis, the writer-director of Crash seems to be a reputed TV series guy. I found that while reading about him after I watched the movie.
All the characters seem as important as the other and each one’s life changing event has been dramatised enough for the audience to relate with. The dialogues are provocative and blatant as required. With a studio producing the movie, these dialogues would have been dumped even during the pre-production. But it’s the same dialogues that makes one relate to the movie better. Independent films like these ensures a hope that movies can also be used for better purposes than entertainment. Movies needn’t propogate social ‘messages’ only through dialogues. They can be strong, subtle and might end-up on you as some kind of revelation. Someone watching the movie heart-of-heart will walk around their neighborhood looking for positives within people. And that’s a success for Paul Haggis.
kirukkal.com 
9 responses to “Crashed !!”
thats onw good movie , anyway how big is the screen at rams house it looks like a theatre , is it a projector.
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Ganesh, the screen is as big as the available wall space plus some extra zooming on the projector. I am ebaying of a good projector too to throw it up on my wall 🙂
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Lazy,
Get your word processor – too many typos dude!
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cool, never heard of this movie before now, will surely rent the dvd.
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Nilu,
1) I hate word processors.
2) I agree that there were many of them. Typed it in the wee hours of the day. Sleep deprived.
3) I damn tough to read a post with spell mistakes. You were polite, I should say.
Nitin, Go !!
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I’m in agreement with your take on crash. I think the race issues in general are not effectively captured for the current generation.
check out my take at – theassimilatednegro.com. – let me know what you think
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I thought this was a mediocre film. Everyone is basically some stereotype or cardboard cut-out. And if they’re not that, they’re underdeveloped. And the “strong” dialogue comes off as totally unbelievable. Racism in America is much subtler and more passive-aggressive than people screaming epithets at each other. The LA police are notorious for targeting black people, most famously in the Rodney King beating. But this film is for the most part pretty shallow.
It has been garnering raves in the US because it just screams its point at the audience.
I strongly recommmend Do The Right Thing as one of the few good films on racism. And if you want to see a good LA film about many different characters, watch Magnolia.
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crash is indeed a nice movie.I thought of writing about it, u beat me.
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I just completed my projector install at home…Optoma H27 with an 87 inch painted HD screen on the wall. I should write a blog entry on that sometime. Would you be willing to post it on your site?
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