Mark Goes To The Movies

Crash (dir. Paul Guigan) Initially I was really annoyed by this movie. It seemed like the characters were stereotypes from your typical liberal critique of soulless, economically-segregated Los Angeles: the soulless Westside yuppies, the hard-working Mexican ex-gangster, the racist honky cop, the self-loathing African-American sellout, the enterprising Iranian immigrant family, yadda, yadda. And the plot (another of those twisted multicharacter multistory tapestries like Short Cuts or Pulp Fiction, to name two L.A.-specific antecedents) does pile on the coincidences. But I'll watch anything Don Cheadle stars in (except, shamefully, Hotel Rwanda, which Barb warned me was a little rough for my sensitive sensibilities), and a couple of sequences (one where the policeman saves the life of a woman he molested during a traffic stop the night before, another where the ex-gangbanger calms his beautiful five-year-old daughter's fear of random bullets coming in her bedroom window) are just breathtaking. It might seem corny that the characters all come to more-or-less happy conclusions after the 24 hours the movie covers, but as intense as the preceding two and a quarter hours were I was relieved and grateful. Mark's review: ****