Thought-provoking and unsettling, but worth it - Crash

6/22/13, Crash, Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, 2005

Holy punch to the stomach, Batman. Crash reminded me of a really good roller coaster, it starts out pulling away from the start, pulls you slowly into a curve and up a hill, and then flings you around and down, puts you on a flat bit, and then throws another surprise at you. Imagine a ride like that for two hours. You'll either love it or hate it, I don't think there is an in-between. I think that's how people will view Crash. While 'love' is a very strange word to describe a movie like this, full of the f-word, racial epithets and prejudices, a challenge to preconceptions, I really liked this movie. There were at least three moments when I physically reacted to something that happened on screen, even talking back at one point (that I remember). I can't really give you too many details about the plot because watching it unfold, and part of what is compelling about this movie is the unpredictability, and yet also the eventual synchronicity (I'm not sure I'm using the word correctly, but it fits in my version of things) of everything. The timeline for the story is 36 hours, set in Los Angeles before Christmas time. People from all walks of life 'crash' together at different points throughout the story; the one thing is you do have to buy the premise that in a city as large as Los Angeles, all of these various people do connect, even tangentially. That's fine, I was willing to go along with that. Cops, district attorneys, shop owners, thieves, repairmen, TV directors, all meet up in some way in this day and a half, and all have to make decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. You have to stay with this movie, and I strongly recommend that you withhold your judgments until the end, because you may come to a different conclusion by the time it's over. This movie has an incredible cast, and that may be one of my few complaints, the cast is so good, you want to see more of Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Esposito, Ryan Phillippe, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon and the others. You have to just watch and judge the characters based on what you see, and when you see it, so you may not have all the facts.Crash won for Best Picture, beating out Brokeback Mountain (which was my favorite to win), but now having watched it, I'm not as bitter as I was, although, I still think Brokeback Mountain should have won. 2005 was a great year for movies, and I think I saw almost every movie that was nominated, long before I developed my strange compulsion to watch all nominated films. Films that came out this year include Syriana, Capote, North Country, Walk the Line and more. Paul Haggis wrote and directed Crash, and he has written Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, among others. This is a hard movie to watch, but totally worth it, like Zero Dark-Thirty. For the record, this was another movie I marked 'not interested' on NetFlix and I have since gone back and given it another four-star rating.