Word: crashing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Crash plays this sort of ethical Ping-Pong with most of its characters and with the audience's sympathy. It stretches coincidence and credulity, but it is less a realistic picture than an updated morality play. The people in it are archetypes if you like the movie, stereotypes if you don't, but creatures seen from above by a compassionate, partially complicit outsider...
...That would be Haggis, the Canadian abroad. "After living in L.A. half my life," he says, "I now feel like an outsider in both communities. And that's a good thing in my line of work. With Crash, I thought it important to be a part of that world--because I wanted to look at my fears, my intolerances, not those bad people over there--yet I needed to be far enough away to see what most affluent people in L.A. will tell you doesn't really exist. And I don't mean just affluent white people. Class...
...Cheadle, a producer of the film as well as one of its stars, seconds Haggis' insistence that Crash doesn't play the race card. "To say it is about race is reductive," he says, "and is the problem we have with race in this country. To me, it's really about power--people's fear of losing it and trying to gain it, and what they will...
...Crash earned some rave reviews--notably from Roger Ebert, who recently said the movie ranks with the best Dickens novels. He has pegged it to win the top Oscar. Other reviews read like hate mail. Fueled in part by that stark critical contrast, Crash became, as Cheadle puts it, "the quintessential watercooler movie. It also gave people a way into a discussion that most people don't want to reference. No one wants to say, 'You know I was yelling at this Chinese guy in the store the other day ... ' or 'This person called me a name...
...year's end, Crash earned no major critics' prizes, not even a Golden Globe nomination for best picture. (Not since 1983 has a film won the top Oscar without a Globe citation.) But Lions Gate, the indie distributor that picked Crash up, sent out an astonishing 130,000 dvds of the film, rightly figuring that anyone who saw it would, at least, not forget it. The tactic paid off with the SAG award and Oscar nominations for Best Picture and for Haggis as director and writer (with Bobby Moresco...