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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
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Hollywood Reporter.com
July 15, 2005
Hollywood Reporter
Lions Gate steering 'Crash' into awards race
By Martin A. Grove
"Crash" contender: In a summer where some big expensive movies have struggled to attract audiences, Lions Gate Films is in the enviable position of having scored big with Paul Haggis' low budget drama "Crash."
A critically acclaimed boxoffice hit that's already grossed about $51 million, "Crash" was acquired by Lions Gate at last September's Toronto International Film Festival. It's emerging now as a solid contender for Best Picture Oscar and Golden Globe nominations.
Directed by Haggis, an Oscar and Writers Guild of America nominee for his adapted screenplay "Million Dollar Baby," its screenplay is by Haggis & Bobby Moresco. "Crash" was produced by Cathy Schulman, Don Cheadle and Bob Yari and by Mark R. Harris, Moresco and Haggis. Its executive producers are Andrew Reimer and Tom Nunan and Jan Korbelin and Marina Grasic. The film's ensemble cast includes Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, William Fichtner, Brendan Fraser, Terrence Howard, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Thandie Newton, Ryan Phillippe, Larenz Tate, Nona Gaye and Michael Pena.
"Crash" takes place in the diverse racial melting pot post-9/11world of Los Angeles where a multi-ethnic set of characters' lives intersect and in some cases collide over the course of a troubling day and a half. The film's press notes sum it up well without giving anything away that would ruin the film for those who haven't yet seen it by saying the characters struggle "to overcome their fears as they careen in and out of one another's lives. In the gray area between black and white, victim and aggressor, there are no easy answers...'Crash' boldly reminds us of the importance of tolerance as it ventures beyond color lines...and uncovers the truth of our shared humanity.'"
The originality of "Crash's" story is particularly impressive at a time when Hollywood's focus seems to be remakes, sequels and franchises with very little in the way of fresh and original storytelling. Moreover, "Crash" has tremendous relevance to those of us who live in Los Angeles and are no strangers to the film's complex storyline revolving around the city's car culture and its multi-racial population.
As one who's been recommending "Crash" to friends since I saw it, I was happy to have the opportunity to focus on it in depth Wednesday with Lions Gate Films Releasing president Tom Ortenberg and Lions Gate Entertainment worldwide marketing president John Hegeman.
"At the end of the day," Ortenberg observed, "we had to remind people that this would be a film that they were, on the one hand, going to remember and talk about with their friends, but more than anything else, it was going to be an entertaining evening out at the movies."
Ortenberg applauds Lions Gate's handling of the picture across the board: "The distribution crew led by Steve Rothenberg and the marketing team led by John Hegeman did a great job. And you couple that with a great film that people actually like and that's the recipe for success. We had excellent creative materials. We had a terrific publicity campaign. We had a very aggressive word of mouth screening program. As part of the publicity campaign, Sarah Greenberg, our EVP of Publicity, did a great job in identifying the critical champions of the film out of Toronto and really working them and creating a terrific critical buzz among both film critics and feature writers and rallying the supporters and (generating) some great word of mouth events like the New Yorker screening series that (film critic) David Denby hosted and working with community and cultural organizations like the NAACP and with (influential leaders in New York's African-American community) like Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters.
"Sarah and her team and John and the whole marketing team did a terrific job of reaching out as broadly as possible. Steve Rothenberg did a great job (on the distribution front). We opened up in (over) 1,800 theaters. A lot of people thought we were going too wide, but Steve's distribution pattern proved to be right on. And here we are 10 or 11 weeks later and the picture's still going strong. It's still getting endorsements. The picture has become truly a cultural phenomenon. It's become a water cooler movie whether you think about things like Ophra (Winfrey) and her incident (while shopping) in France that she describes as her 'Crash' moment and now just yesterday on his TV show Regis Philbin was raving about the film. People are still discovering (the movie) and when they discover (it they are) raving about the movie. Who would have thought (that would happen)?"
With the film entering its 11th week in theaters, Ortenberg noted, "We're still doing big numbers at Lincoln Square in New York and The Grove (in West Hollywood) and the Criterion in Santa Monica and the Arclight (in Hollywood) and hundreds of theaters around the country. Steve Rothenberg did a great job of identifying those theaters -- the big commercial theaters and the ones that could play that mixture of upscale films yet also very mainstream broad (in their appeal). To pigeonhole this picture in art house theaters would have been to do a disservice to the film, but to keep it away from the classiest of theaters also would have been a disservice. So we had a nice blend.
"Also, between Steve's distribution pattern, John's marketing campaign and Sarah's publicity campaign, I think people got the message that while this picture was going to be provocative and informative, more than anything else it was going to be broadly entertaining. Certainly, we didn't want the picture to come across as homework or medicine or anything like that."
When I spoke to Hegeman about the film's marketing, he told me, "One of the things as a company we always have to do is be alternative to what's going on in the marketplace. So for us, whenever everyone else is doing one thing, that's the perfect opportunity for us to do something else because that's how we become unique and that's how we stand out as being truly alternative to very mainstream commercial fare."
Hegeman, who already belongs in Hollywood's marketing hall of fame for orchestrating the blockbuster success of "The Blair Witch Project" in 1999, summed up Lions Gate's approach to marketing "Crash" by explaining, "We started the campaign very early on. We started our screening program to see how the various cultural groups would respond to it. That was our first thing we did. Once we knew that we had the support of these first groups, our next thing was a long lead screening program and then as early on as possible we just wanted to make sure (people saw the film). The thing that works the best is the movie. So what we wanted to do is whenever we screened it, we wanted to make sure that there'd be an opportunity for the audience to talk about it.
"We had a great cast that was unbelievably supportive and we broke them throughout the entire country. So at some time you may see Don Cheadle and Matt Dillon host one of these screenings and the conversations afterwards. And (at) another one you may have Paul Haggis with Michael Pena talking about it. So it was always a diverse group even from a cast perspective hosting these screenings. And I think the hosting of the screenings across the country, which were really led by our filmmaker and the cast, really helped in just developing conversation. And the bottom line is, if you get people to talk about something in a thoughtful way, it's going to be impactful and it's going to become cultural."
Talking to Ortenberg and Hegeman they both make it clear that "Crash" is a very special film to them and to Lions Gate. "'Crash' has certainly been one of the most rewarding experiences in my career at Lions Gate," Ortenberg said. "'Crash' is really the perfect Lions Gate film. It's got indie credibility in that it was made on a lower budget by a group of filmmakers and actors who were so passionate about the material and yet the film also has great commercial viability in that, as our $50 million (plus) gross indicates, 'Crash' can play very well to a broad audience. So to have that indie cred but (also) the commercial viability -- that's a zone where we're very comfortable at Lions Gate. And it's rewarding because it's not a cookie cutter kind of film. This is a film that deserved to succeed and deserved to be seen by a broad audience, but it didn't necessarily have to work. It was not a no-brainer. Under different circumstances, perhaps the film wouldn't have found as broad an audience as it did.
"So its success on the backs of the great filmmaking crew and thanks to the incredible distribution and marketing team that really gave their all, makes it very rewarding and we're looking forward to a very successful and competitive awards season. We're going to be running a very broad awards season campaign for the picture. We think that 'Crash' should be a leading contender in every category from Best Picture on down. We're absolutely setting our sights on Best Picture from various awards committees and we think we can get there. Without question, I have gotten more unsolicited phone calls and e-mails from friends, acquaintances and even people I didn't know within and from without the film industry telling me how much they loved 'Crash'...and to please pass along their congratulations and thoughts to Paul Haggis and the rest of the filmmaking crew."
Having picked the film up in Toronto last fall, clearly Ortenberg and his team were quick to see its strong potential. "When we saw the picture (we) immediately entered negotiations to buy it," he pointed out. "We knew in our heads and our hearts that 'Crash' was a terrific film and absolutely had the potential to play very broadly. And, although it wasn't the motivation for us buying the film, we also knew that it could and should be a serious award contending film, also. It was just that good. So we entered into negotiations to buy the picture immediately. We sat down with Paul Haggis the day after we saw the picture and explained our vision for the film and our enthusiasm for the film. We connected with Paul right away and knew that he was definitely the kind of guy that we would love to work with."
This, of course, was long before "Million Dollar Baby" came out. "When we bought 'Crash' in Toronto last September, 'Million Dollar Baby' wasn't even on the 2004 release schedule yet. So it had nothing to do with, 'Oh, this guy's got a hot film coming up, let's ride piggyback on that.' Frankly, I didn't even know he had written 'Million Dollar Baby' at that point. I had heard of the movie (but) didn't know when it was coming out and wasn't aware (of who wrote its screenplay) until Paul told me he had written it."
Asked if there was a lot of competition to acquire the picture at Toronto, Ortenberg replied, "I really don't know. It doesn't appear that way. We entered into negotiations quickly and never really stopped. I got the feeling that our major competitors were not being as aggressive as we were and I also got the feeling that the filmmakers were very comfortable with Lions Gate as a potential distributor, which of course is very heartening to us."
It has, needless to say, turned out to be a very good marriage between Lions Gate and "Crash." "Talking to some other industryites in Toronto, I'm not sure that others saw the commercial potential in it that we did," Ortenberg added. "Many of us at Lions Gate had read the script and we knew that it was a very well written script, very compelling, but that the film was going to be execution-driven. There's just so much (there). It's a very dense script. There's a lot going on. We believed it would be execution-driven and we saw the film, we looked at each other and said, 'He pulled it off.' And we went and bought it. On the surface, you know, a complex well written script with a first time feature director is not a slam dunk. In lesser hands than Paul directing his own work, I'm not sure a lesser director could have pulled it off.
"For all of the kudos being passed around, first and foremost it's got to go to Paul Haggis for writing and directing a brilliant piece and to people like Don Cheadle, who signed on early to play the lead and who also served as a producer of the picture and worked very, very hard to help get that picture made, as well as (all) the other producers. I mean, it was a labor of love for a long time by a lot of people before we got involved last September. And once we did get involved I think the team here at Lions Gate did a terrific job, but there would have been nothing for us to work on if all those guys didn't go out and make a great film first."
Of course, great films don't always find their audience and that typically has a lot to do with how well they are marketed and distributed. In Lions Gate's case, the studio was on top of things from the long before the picture opened May 6 at 1,864 theaters, placing fourth with a very promising $9.1 million ($4,886 per theater).
"The first thing that we did was we found a time slot that was perfect for the picture," Hegeman told me. "We followed 'The Interpreter' (which opened April 22) and we went before 'Cinderella Man' (which opened June 3). We saw a window there. We thought there'd be a hunger before the big summer blockbusters came for adult skewing fare. We started our marketing of this movie six or seven months before it ever opened. So we were very aggressive in screening it for a lot of different groups both from an audience perspective as well as sort of a press perspective.
"What we found out is it works for beyond adults. Most of our movies have one demographic or one core audience that we go after. What we found out with 'Crash' both from a playability perspective and a marketability perspective is that it crossed a lot of lines and a lot of different audiences. There was a 25 to 49 year old sort of sophisticated adult audience that would like the movies. There was an 18 to 24 year old college audience that was into the movie. There was a very strong urban and African-American component to it. And then because of the heartfelt emotional element of it, there was a female audience."
Given that widespread playability, Hegeman observed, "For the first time really in a long time, Lions Gate had the opportunity to go after a lot of different audiences simultaneously. Knowing you have the goods going into a release campaign certainly makes your life a lot easier. Our material was testing (well) to all those different groups. We knew that it played to all those different groups. And then you're talking about a cast that (also) was working for all these different groups, too. So when you can have a movie that can work for a 25 to 49 year old sophisticated audience yet you also have elements like Ludacris and Larenz Tate that work great for a hip young audience, it just gives you such diversity in your arsenal in how you can gain traction with all those different groups."
To reach these audiences, Hegeman explained, "We did a very aggressive screening program. Paul Haggis as well as Don Cheadle would do separate efforts. We had efforts on the East Coast. We had efforts on the West Coast. We had efforts in the South. We would take our talent and we would go out in the field and we would screen (the film) for all these different groups and have q&a's afterwards that would be hosted by our talent and by Paul. By doing that, I think, we were able to create this really big bond between our audiences we were going after and the film because our filmmakers and our talent really were out there in the forefront hosting these screenings, talking about the issues that the movie raised. And the issues that are raised (in such q&a's) are different from every region in the country."
The level of cultural diversity in each region, he noted, "made the reaction to the movie different. How a person in New York reacts to the movie and the situations that make up the movie is completely different than how someone in the Mid-West or the South, who may not have the same involvement in such diverse races. So everyone reacts to the movie differently. One of the things we wanted to try to max out is that not everyone's reacting to this movie the same way, which is great because that spurs conversation.
"When you can spur conversation based on the reaction to a movie, that's what makes something a cultural event over a media driven event. That's one of the things for us as a company that we always have to strive for -- how do we make this be a cultural event? It was very easy with this movie just because of the subject matter, just because of the diversity of the cast and the reaction the various audiences had."
Lions Gate's aggressive screening program for the film was critically important, Hegeman said: "The first thing we wanted to know was how do the different national groups that are out there (feel about the film) -- whether it was the NAACP or other groups that represent the diversity of our cast. We screened it for them and we found that everyone was unbelievably supportive of the message of the movie. All these different racially diverse groups came together. We had the support of the individual groups. We had a screening in D.C. for politicians...What we were doing is looking for people that were involved in politics and people that were involved in racial issues in a very public level to get their support of the movie.
"We had (Haggis and the film's stars) host screenings and what we found was everyone embraced the movie and everyone can use it to sort of further their own individual causes or messages. We wanted to make it be about acceptance, something positive, and by embracing all these outside and diverse groups we really became more than an army of one. We had people in almost every single major city wanting to support the movie because of its message. I think when you're able to develop that type of relationship where people are looking to be supportive, where people are looking to want to speak out positively about the movie, it just helps the cause so much."
The result was word of mouth, he pointed out, that was generated "on every different level. We had a screening program that was focused on the college age audience, which was made up of very racially diverse groups. And those conversations were very spirited. We went to groups that were just going after the African-American community. We screened for others that were a little bit more Asian. We tried to get the movie out there to all these individual groups so by the time we got close to opening the groups were all coming together in a singular message. So how the movie at the end of the day brings all these racially diverse groups and issues together, sort of the same thing happened through all these screening programs whether they were for national groups or whether they were for press outlets or whether they were for the consumer.
"All these screenings just set off and created this very universal message. I think it was a very hopeful movie...What it does is it makes everyone looks into themselves and sort of look in the mirror. The reaction from a lot of the people in L.A. -- because the movie took place in their backyard -- was different from the rest of the country. It's because it hit home a lot more and a lot of people didn't like what they saw. A lot of people didn't like what was being said about them. I think it forced people to sort of look in the mirror a little bit and figure out where they stand."
The screenings started, he said, "right at the beginning of the New Year and had a couple of them before Christmas. We never wanted to sell medicine. We wanted to sell emotion. The movie's unbelievably emotional and from a marketability perspective the materials just were testing through the roof. So a lot of people would say, 'Are you sure you should be going that wide? Shouldn't you wait until the fall?' And the answer was, 'No. We have materials that test like a broad commercial movie.' It's a marketer's dream to have a movie that works at such high levels to such a diverse audience. That was a big plus. We knew we had materials that were testing well. We knew that we could open this movie, aside from the publicity efforts, because of our TV commercials."
Opening "Crash" at over 1,800 theaters was a bold step for Lions Gate. "We had a lot of conversations internally and with the filmmakers," Hegeman said, "and there were sort of two separate camps (about how wide to open). This is a film festival acquisition. Usually most people think, 'Let's see? How do we platform this and go for year-end awards? Let's wait until the fall.' Our feeling was, if you wait until the fall it takes away something unique and special. The movie doesn't stand out as much because there's a multitude of specialized upscale fare and we didn't want to pigeonhole this picture because we just thought it was more marketable than that.
"By going in the late spring we thought it was (good) because there hasn't been a serious picture in a while. The only one there was 'The Interpreter' and we thought that would sort of kick start the adult audience's interest in more dramatic fare. We were far enough from them that their opening just sort of reinvigorated the marketplace. We weren't going to be competitive against them. We wanted to have four good weeks where there would be nothing else for the audiences to see until 'Cinderella Man.' And it ended up that the picture actually played way beyond that and still is doing business in the theaters and just recently broke the $50 million mark."
In the end, Hegeman observed, "People just wanted to rally behind the message of the movie. When you have support from such a broad spectrum of people it really gives you the confidence to say, 'Let's go for it.'"
Given "Crash's" potential as a Best Picture nominee, how does Lions Gate position the film to get there? "What we do is utilize is utilize our home entertainment release of the DVD to reintroduce the movie into the marketplace," Hegeman said. "That will be in September and October, so it's sort of perfect. That was one of the issues. People were saying, 'Okay, let's say we do business? What are we going to do for awards?' We said, 'Well, if we open here, then we can time the home entertainment release so it kicks off the awards season.' So they'll have DVDs (of 'Crash') everywhere."
Awards marketers know it's a tremendous advantage these days to have a film that's a Best Picture contender come out in DVD just as Academy voters are starting to think about who to nominate. Even though many Academy members will see films at year-end screenings, others are hard pressed to find time to do so because of the volume of late in the year awards hopefuls, their upcoming winter vacations and time pressures involving their work or families. While Academy screeners are a useful awards marketing tool, having a film actually go in to DVD release complete with special bonus features about the making of the picture is even better.
"It will have more things on there," Hegeman said of the upcoming "Crash" DVD. "It'll have a complete (marketing) reintroduction into the marketplace. It obviously did a lot of business so there will be a very strong push from our home entertainment division in releasing it so it gets back out in the public's mind in a very natural way."
Filmmaker flashbacks: From September 5, 1985's column: "Like any good hypochondriac the British film industry keeps careful tabs on its vital signs. Whether it's already dead or just dying is a popular subject over lunch in movie business haunts like the White Elephant Club or the posh New Champagne Exchange across from it in Curzon Street.
"For a second opinion on the patient's condition, the other morning I visited Lord (Lew) Grade, chairman of Embassy Communications International here. 'The general health of the industry in the U.K. is quite good,' he told me while enjoying one of his trademark foot-long cigars. 'The cinemas are doing fairly well, better than they have been doing, because there have been a lot of major films.' People will go out to see movies they want to see, he notes. What they won't spend time and money on these days are ordinary films." |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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Here is an week old article about "Crash" from Reuters/The Hollywood Reporter.
Hollywood Reporter
'Crash' draws crowds as box office stumbles
Fri June 3, 2005
By Nicole Sperling
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Crash," a film about race relations in Los Angeles with a cast including Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon, did not seem the obvious choice for an early summer success story.
But with the box office experiencing a slump this year, Lions Gate Films' pickup from the Toronto International Film Festival has become one of the season's few bright spots.
Its success can be credited to a bold release plan, an emotional marketing campaign and an aggressive screening program. For "Crash" has been able to do what few movies accomplish nowadays: It has attracted four very distinct demographic groups -- college students, upscale adult audiences, the urban market and females
The result has been ticket sales of $36 million in just four weeks. The film could gross as much as $50 million [domestic gross]-- a number that might exceed the final domestic grosses of the expected summer hits it opened against: 20th Century Fox's "Kingdom of Heaven" and Warner Bros. Pictures' "House of Wax."
And it hit that mark in an unconventional manner for a specialty film: by opening wide in the early summer instead of taking the more traditional route of opening in New York and Los Angeles in the fall, gaining traction through word-of-mouth and expanding to a critical mass just in time for Academy Awards consideration.
"Fall is a season when a lot of highbrow quasi-commercial pictures get released," Lions Gate Releasing president Tom Ortenberg said. "We didn't feel the need to wait that long and then compete in a crowded marketplace."
Lions Gate picked up the picture for $3.3 million in the fall and soon after pursued a wide release plan.
"We had great actors, a very promotable filmmaker and a lot of national press. We didn't want to waste it on a few city openings," said Ortenberg.
The film was perfectly timed in that writer director Paul Haggis was coming off his Oscar-nominated screenplay for "Million Dollar Baby," and Cheadle was fresh off his Oscar-nominated role in "Hotel Rwanda."
In retrospect, a platform release actually could have killed Haggis' directorial debut. While the film received mostly positive reviews around the country when it opened May 6 on 1,864 screens, film critics at the New York Times and Los Angeles Times issued scathing reviews.
"There was a lot of talk about a fall release in New York and Los Angeles, but there would be no conversations right now (about 'Crash') if we had done that," said John Hegeman, president of marketing at Lions Gate. "Our only bad reviews were in the New York Times and the L.A. Times." |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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From the Hollywood Reporter (Reuters), Crash is slated to be developed by FX into a series for for cable television.
Hollywood Reporter(Reuters)[/u][/b][/url]
FX gets 'Crash' course
Tue Jun 28, 2005
By Nellie Andreeva
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - After a detour to the big screen, writer/director Paul Haggis' "Crash" is about to reach its original destination: television.
FX is developing a cable TV series based on the hit Lions Gate Films release, which has earned almost $50 million after eight weekends.
Don Cheadle, one of the stars of the gritty drama about race relations in post-Sept. 11 Los Angeles, is likely to appear in and direct several episodes of the project if it goes into series. Sources said talks are under way with all other members of the cast, including Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Brendan Fraser and rapper Ludacris, to reprise their roles from the film.
Haggis is executive producing the TV project, which has received a script commitment from the network. Bobby Moresco, who co-wrote the feature script with Haggis, is in negotiations to write the pilot script, sources said.
The idea for "Crash" stems from a real-life carjacking that happened to Haggis and his wife 10 years ago in front of a video store in Los Angeles. The scene is re-created in an opening scene of the movie by Bullock and Fraser as the couple whose car gets stolen.
Several years later, Haggis woke up one night with the idea for "Crash" and soon penned 40 pages. Because of his TV pedigree, Haggis, who by that time had worked only in television on such series as "thirtysomething," "Due South," "EZ Streets" and "Family Law," envisioned the project as a TV series while also pursuing the project as a feature.
But in 2001, when reality was red hot and taking over drama series' one-hour time slots, no networks were interested. So Haggis called his friend Moresco, and the two finished the script as a feature.
Lions Gate picked up "Crash" at the Toronto International Film Festival last September for $3.3 million and released it May 5. By that time, Haggis had received an Oscar nomination for writing "Million Dollar Baby," and Cheadle an Oscar mention for his lead role in "Hotel Rwanda."
"Crash" has emerged as the indie hit of the summer, and is expected to do continue its successful run on video when it's released Sept. 6.
Reuters/VNU |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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People Magazine
May 16, 2005
Vol. 63, Iss. 19, p. 39
Crash
Leah Rozen.
People review of Crash
Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, Brendan Fraser
DRAMA
Here comes a direct order: See Crash. Movies don't come better acted, as lucidly written or, most importantly, more capable of grabbing a viewer emotionally and intellectually than this exceptional ensemble drama about racial and ethnic relations in urban America today.
In the same way that 2000's Traffic looked at the world of drugs, Crash relies on overlapping storylines and intersecting lives to weave a complex tapestry depicting the consequences of city dwellers making snap assumptions about each other based on accent or skin color. In the movie, over the course of 36 hours, a dozen diverse Los Angeles residents come into conflict over a carjacking, a traffic arrest, a break-in and various other incidents.
Certain scenes in Crash-one involving an angry Persian shopkeeper confronting a Latino locksmith (Michael Pe?a); another with a snarling white cop (Dillon) pulling over a black couple (Howard and Newton); and a third with the same cop trying to save the black woman-are so fraught with dramatic tension they'll leave you gasping. Few films can make you care this much. Major credit belongs to the polished cast, with Cheadle, playing a conscientious police detective, earning special mention for capably carrying the world's woes on his shoulders. Crash is the first movie directed by Paul Haggis, whose previous screenwriting credits include Million Dollar Baby. I can't wait for his next one. (R) * * * * |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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Boston Globe
May 6, 2005
Sec. D(Arts), p.7
Ty Burr
The Boston Globe is owned by The New York Times Company.
NY Times and LA Times gave "Crash" the only poor reviews out of the critical reviews.
Well-Acted `Crash' is a Course in Stock Characterst:
Boston Globe Review of "Crash"
Weekend Movie Review
Crash written and directed by: Paul Haggis Starring: Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Thandie Newton, Sandra Bullock, Terremce Howard, Brendan Fraser, Ludacris, Larenz Tate, Ryan Phillippe, Michael Pena, Shaun Toub, Bahar Soomekh
Running Time: 100 Minutes Rated: R (Language, Sexual Content, Violence) ** 1/2
There will be people who will think "Crash" is the most important film they have seen in years, and good for them. Whatever makes sense of this vale of tears through which we travel in air- conditioned isolation at 75 miles per hour.
Permit others to be less convinced. "Crash" is one of those multi- character, something-is-rotten-in-Los Angeles barnburners that grab you by the lapels and try desperately to shake you up. It's more artful than "Grand Canyon," less artsy than "Magnolia" (LA gets dusted with snow instead of frogs), and much less of a mess than "Falling Down." (Michael Douglas as an angry nerd in horn-rim glasses, remember?) It also features some hellaciously fine acting and at least one scene that will stick with me for years.
But its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do. You can feel its creator shuttling them here and there on the grid of greater LA, pausing portentously between each move.
Since that creator is director Paul Haggis, a longtime TV writer who grabbed the gold ring last year by writing the script for Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby," I guess he's earned the right to make a big statement. But, boy, does he want you to know it.
Traffic and race are the twin obsessions of everyone in "Crash" the latter especially sends the characters into conniptions. Two young African-Americans, Peter (Larenz Tate) and Anthony (Chris Bridges, a.k.a. the rapper Ludacris), stroll down a busy boulevard and watch the rich Caucasians flinch. Anthony, the angry street- corner philosopher, muses, "We're the only black people, surrounded by a sea of overcaffeinated white people why aren't we the ones scared?"
His friend has an interesting response, which I won't spoil, but it's fairly shameful, and it underscores that while Haggis thinks he's exploding racial cliches, he's really just rearranging ones we already live with.
Elsewhere in "Crash," a rising young district attorney (Brendan Fraser) gets carjacked and despairs that the perpetrators had to be black (now he'll lose either the African-American vote or the law- and-order vote). His pampered wife (Sandra Bullock, who's barely in the movie, no matter what the trailers imply) retreats behind a wall of privileged paranoia, taking it out on Daniel (Michael Pena), a Mexican locksmith with jailhouse tattoos.
Daniel, of course, is a sweet-natured husband and father struggling to get his family to a neighborhood where the gunfire doesn't pop all night. He also struggles to keep his cool when dealing with Farhad (Shaun Toub), an Iranian shopkeeper who understands English only as it suits him and is so convinced the world is ripping him off that he buys a gun against the wishes of his upscale daughter (Bahar Soomekh).
Most central to the movie's harrowing vision are two LAPD cops, the venomously racist Ryan (Matt Dillon) and the good-hearted rookie Hanson (Ryan Phillippe). We first meet them as Ryan decides to pull over a Lincoln Navigator in which buppie film director Cameron (Terrence Howard) and his chic wife Christine (Thandie Newton) are engaged in a bit of post-awards-banquet horseplay.
The scene gets ugly and Dillon turns Ryan into a genuinely hateful man Haggis pushes his loathesomeness into our face. So it's a shock when "Crash" humanizes the cop later in the game. That becomes the film's modus operandi: The director dares us to assume we know these people, and then neatly offers conflicting evidence.
Rather too neatly in places, and in others most unconvincingly. After Cameron is further humiliated on a film set by his producer (Tony Danza), he embarks on a course of action that simply makes no sense. Characters intersect with one another in what can only be called Screenwriter's Coincidence: By the time the young cop picks up Tate's Peter, I was sure everyone in this overcrowded film had been randomly introduced to everyone else. (I was wrong the shopkeeper's daughter unexpectedly shows up at the very end.)
Against that, Haggis pulls off some powerful scenes, particularly the sequence in which a rescue from a flaming car is intercut with the shopkeeper finally being pushed over the edge; the soundtrack music, which could have been wham-bam thriller stuff, is instead a lovely and liquid Arabic track by the American rai singer Shani Rigsbee.
Also quite wonderful is Don Cheadle's performance as Graham, the police detective who connects the story's tangents and who becomes the film's weary heart. You get a sense of LA's racial gridlock in the scene in which Graham gets a dose of realpolitik from the district attorney's political adviser (a brilliant William Fichtner).
At the same time, the cards are stacked against Graham in ways that are all too "ironic." Haggis still has the mind, if not the soul, of a TV writer I don't say that to be unkind (I can't wait to see what he does next) but to insist that real life does not fall apart quite this tidily. His agony may be real, but his perspective is still that of a man looking down from the Hollywood Hills, seeing chess pieces rather than people. |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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Los Angeles Times
May 30, 2005. Sec. E, p.2
Chris Lee
Cultural 'Crash' at the water cooler
Despite mixed reviews, the controversial depiction of a tinderbox Los Angeles has become the movie to see and discuss.
[Crash opened on May 6, 2005]
LA Times, May 30, 2005
With its depiction of multicultural Los Angeles as a city riven by racial strife, urban ennui and class warfare, "Crash" has sharply divided film critics. But it has pulled together a critical mass of filmgoers to remain among the top-grossing movies at the box office for four weeks running.
The ensemble drama has turned into must-see viewing for those who want to stay inside the cultural loop, much the same as last year's "The Passion of the Christ" -- another controversial movie that became unavoidable small-talk fodder -- albeit on a smaller scale.
"The movie is becoming water-cooler conversation," said John Hegeman, president of worldwide marketing for the movie's distributor, Lions Gate Films. "There's a cultural relevance to it."
The Los Angeles Times called "Crash" "a grim, histrionic experiment in vehicular metaphor slaughter"; it also received a scathing review in the New York Times. The New Yorker, however, hailed it as "the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's 'Mystic River.' " Despite those mixed reviews, the $7.5-million film -- which stars Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon and Sandra Bullock -- has played strongly throughout the country. In Manhattan, "Crash" was the most highly attended movie on its opening weekend, and it remains among the three most attended films in Southern California.
"Everyone in my office has been talking about it," said Jun Rhee, 37, an Internet technology supervisor from Los Angeles. "I felt like I had to see for myself or else I wouldn't be part of the conversations."
For his part, writer-director Paul Haggis, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of "Million Dollar Baby," feels gratified that "Crash" has gotten people talking. "I think it's fabulous that people are coming out of any film and debating it," he says.
"When you're making a film like this, you want strong opinions. You want people to argue about things. When [executive producer and co-star] Don Cheadle and [co-writer and producer] Bobby Moresco and I were setting out, we knew we'd stir up a lot of feelings -- some of them negative."
However, to combat perceptions that the filmmakers had set out to sensationalize racial conflict, the movie's marketers pre-screened "Crash" for influential activists and pop icons, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, music producer L.A. Reid and the Rev. Al Sharpton.
"We got community leaders from a diverse makeup of nationalities who we wanted to give a feeling of why this was important," said Hegeman of Lions Gate. "All were supportive of the movie. We just had to screen it and they said, 'Do you need help getting the word out? We would love to spread it.' "
Further, "Crash" has benefited from the kind of "you gotta check out this movie" buzz that is hard to manufacture.
"The proverbial fourth act -- when you're walking out of the theater -- is the most important act," observed Vicangelo Bulluck, executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People's Hollywood bureau, who enjoyed the film. "It's about what it makes you think about and discuss with friends and colleagues."
The breakdown of ticket sales illustrates Bulluck's point. "Crash" was the fourth-highest-grossing film on its opening weekend, May 6-8, and attendance dropped only 23% in its second week in nationwide release. (By comparison, "House of Wax," which was released the same weekend as "Crash," dropped 46% in the same period.) More significantly, on "Crash's" third weekend, the drop- off rate fell slightly, to 21%.
By the fourth weekend, the drop-off rate was only 13% -- an indicator that interest in the film is holding relatively steady. Its cumulative gross, meanwhile, stood at just below $35 million.
"I not only recommend this film to friends, family and colleagues," said Beth Sacks, 36, an actress in New York, "but to strangers I may happen to talk to on the street."
"Crash," which is playing on 1,800 screens across the country, appeals to moviegoers from every demographic stripe, its marketers say.
"So often, a movie will click with a specific target audience," said Hegeman. "What's interesting about 'Crash' is that it's working across the board in upscale theaters, blue-collar areas and racially diverse areas across the country. This is a movie that's hitting a chord with a diverse group in terms of age and racial composition."
"I think the movie has very strong word of mouth," said the NAACP's Bulluck. "In the African American community, those that I know are encouraging everyone they know to go and see it."
Not everyone shares the same warm feeling for the film, however. Angela Clemons, for one, walked out of the theater about an hour before the film's ending.
"I couldn't stand the anger and frustration everyone exhibited toward each other," said Clemons, who lives in Tyler, Texas, where she also saw the movie. " 'Crash' seemed to pit every race against the other races. It overwhelmed me."
At work, she cautioned an African American colleague to avoid the film, citing the way it would push her emotional buttons. The advice, however, backfired. "That's made her more curious," said Clemons, 48. "Now, she wants to see it."
While she doesn't second-guess her decision to leave the film before it was over, Clemons remains curious enough to give "Crash" a second chance.
"I can't get the dang movie out of my head," she said. "I will have to rent the video when it comes out. The anger that made me walk out of the movie has stuck with me and I want to see if there's a happy ending."
(Copyright (c) 2005 Los Angeles Times) |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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Entertainment in Motion
Quotes from Review about Crash.
SkyFilms.com
"'Crash' is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River...." David Denby, NEW YORKER
"Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep clich?s and make their characters particular." Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
"This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting. It asks tough questions, and lets its audience struggle with the answers." Stephen Hunter, WASHINGTON POST
"Haggis's drama is about much more than interlocking front-end collisions. It's about the way we learn, often badly, about one another and how it may take a bad confrontation to peel away the misperceptions." Desson Thomson, WASHINGTON POST
Academy Award nominee Don Cheadle stars in this edgy and powerful ensemble drama that takes a bold look at race relations in America. The lives of several people, including a police detective (Mr. Cheadle), a District Attorney and his wife (Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock), and a cop (Matt Dillon) impact on each other as their differing viewpoints, their fears and bigotries, and their connections to a minor car crash and a dead body are explored. This serious and yet often funny tale examines and illuminates the secret and not so secret prejudices that everyone harbors. With Tony Danza, Larenz Tate, Ryan Phillipe, Thandie Newton |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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The New Yorker
May 2, 2005
"Crash"
ANGRY PEOPLE
David Denby
The New Yorker
If there?s an ill-tempered remark that has ever been uttered in the city of Los Angeles that hasn?t found its way into Paul Haggis?s ?Crash,? I can?t imagine what it is. ?Crash? (opening May 6th) is about the rage and foolishness produced by intolerance, the mutual abrasions of white, black, Latino, Middle Eastern, and Asian citizens in an urban pot in which nothing melts. The characters run afoul of each other, say things better left unsaid, and get into terrible trouble. And yet the movie isn?t exasperating in the way that movies about steam-heated people often are. ?Crash? is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it?s easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood?s ?Mystic River,? though it is not for the fainthearted. In the first twenty minutes or so, the racial comments are so blunt and the dialogue so incisive that you may want to shield yourself from the daggers flying across the screen by getting up and leaving. That would be a mistake. ?Crash? stretches the boundaries: after the cantankerous early scenes, it pulls us into the multiple stories it has to tell and becomes intensely moving.
Like other recent movies set in Los Angeles (?Grand Canyon,? ?Short Cuts,? ?Magnolia?), the picture is structured in vignette form, a natural dramatic outgrowth of a strange automotive paradise in which people live in separate racial and class enclaves, drive to work, and stick with their own. ?We?re always behind this metal and glass,? a melancholy police detective, Graham (Don Cheadle), says as he sits in his car with his partner and girlfriend, Ria (Jennifer Esposito). ?It?s the sense of touch. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.? This may seem a fancy conceit until one realizes that Haggis is pushing the word ?crash? beyond the literal: he means any kind of rough contact between folks from different ethnic groups. But after the collision, what then? The stories, which begin on separate paths, slowly mesh; the characters are thrown together in bizarre ways, and they go past their initial distaste for each other and at least admit that they live in the same city, and are touched by the same fatality and magic.
Paul Haggis, who is fifty-two, was born in Canada; he crossed the border into the land of dreams and folly in his early twenties. For many years, he worked successfully in American television, and was responsible for, among other things, the short-lived but much-appreciated series ?EZ Streets.? A few years ago, Haggis, working with his friend Bobby Moresco, wrote the screenplay for ?Crash? on spec. Most writers who have been around as long as Haggis wouldn?t write anything?not even a thank-you note?on spec, but the virtues of working this way are obvious enough: ?Crash? was created freely, without the usual anxieties that shape big-budget films. The screenplay then attracted a number of people eager to take some chances, including the star, Don Cheadle, who helped raise a production budget of $6.5 million, which is roughly one-tenth the budget of the average Hollywood studio feature. Yet ?Crash? doesn?t look small. Haggis, in his first outing as director, has put together an extraordinary cast, and the stories are set high and low, in Brentwood and the ghetto, among cops and civilians, the young and the decrepit elderly.
?Crash? begins with out-of-focus lights, moving in the dark, as if a stunned post-collision consciousness were slowly coming back into focus. The time is Christmas, a very cold Christmas for Los Angeles, with dreamy flakes of snow in the air. At the side of the road the police are investigating a shooting; a young black man has been killed. Cheadle?s detective examines the crime scene and stares at something in horror. The movie then goes back to the previous afternoon and fills in the events leading up to Cheadle?s unhappy moment. Two young African-Americans, Anthony (the rapper Chris ?Ludacris? Bridges) and Peter (Larenz Tate), argue merrily on the street. Anthony is convinced that everything in his life, including the large windows on Los Angeles buses, is part of a white plot to humiliate blacks. His friend tries to tease him out of it. The real joke, however, is that Anthony, who rants that whites assume that all young black men are thugs, actually is a thug, and when he and Peter spy a prosperous white couple walking down the street to their Lincoln Navigator, they jump them, at gunpoint, and take off in the car.
The couple, it turns out, are the Los Angeles district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his spoiled-bitch Brentwood wife (Sandra Bullock). At home after the incident, the young D.A. complains hysterically that the incident, which is sure to become public, may lose him either the black vote or the law-and-order vote, and his wife, who saw trouble coming, is mad because people might think she?s a racist. Later the same evening, a prosperous black couple, Cameron (Terrence Howard) and Christine (Thandie Newton), are out on the town. A little drunk, Christine performs a companionable sex act on her husband as he drives their own Lincoln Navigator. A white cop, Officer Ryan (Matt Dillon), who?s got a heavy case of L.A.P.D. malaise?he knows he?s a racist but can?t suppress it?pulls them over, even though it?s obvious that their Navigator isn?t the stolen one. As his partner (Ryan Phillippe) looks on in disgust, Ryan humiliates the couple, reaching up between Christine?s thighs in a mock weapons search. Christine, shaken, taunts her husband for not standing up to the cops, a fight that sickens both of them, because it seems so old: the black manhood issue again. But also that night we see that Ryan?s father is in terrible pain from a misdiagnosed prostate problem, and Ryan can?t get a straight answer about his father?s condition from the black supervisor at their H.M.O. What Ryan does to the black couple is not justified by his problems, but, as we later find out, a racist can also be a good son and a good cop.
I give so much detail about a single plot thread because the entire movie is as intricately worked as this one piece of it. Haggis?s complex take on each furious encounter makes previous movie treatments of prejudice seem like easy and self-congratulatory liberalizing. Apart from a few brave scenes in Spike Lee?s work, ?Crash? is the first movie I know of to acknowledge not only that the intolerant are also human but, further, that something like white fear of black street crime, or black fear of white cops, isn?t always irrational. In another strand, an Iranian shopkeeper named Farhad (Shaun Toub) has become a quarrelsome fool; he?s sure that everyone is out to cheat him. But this incensed man?s neighbors think that he and his family are Arabs, and trash his store. In Haggis?s Los Angeles, the tangle of mistrust, misunderstanding, and foul temper envelops everyone; no one is entirely innocent or entirely guilty.
?Crash? could have turned into an exploding nebula, the superheated pieces flying off into dramatic irrelevance (as they do in many of Lee?s movies), but Haggis has imposed a tight formal organization on his narrative. He has set up parallel events and characters (two wealthy couples, two daughters who save their fathers, and so on), and also multiple echoes and variations, all of which deepen the thematic lines. Haggis sustains the temporal fiction?a long day?s journey into night, then day, and then back to the film?s opening moment at night?with shrewdly timed cutting among the stories and with many silent moments in which a single character, staring at the city?s moving lights, falls into a brooding funk similar to Cheadle?s melancholy in the first scene. The moments of rest, deepened and prolonged by Mark Isham?s gentle electronic score, serve as caesuras between the high-tension scenes. There are plenty of angry people in movies and on television, but Haggis has an intimate feeling for the way rage fuels itself and redoubles?the demotic eloquence of the street, the marital quarrel, the police-station tirade. I can?t think of a single flat or dramatically pointless scene, and some of the big moments play out at the edge of insanity, where contentiousness spills over into tragedy or farce.
The actors grab at their roles as if their careers depended on it. Thandie Newton and Terrence Howard expose the kind of torment and shame that could drive this educated, privileged couple apart. Cheadle?s soft-spoken intelligence has become one of the most expressive elements in American cinema, and, as the man who sees the most, understands the most, and pays for his knowledge in suffering, he holds this movie together. But everyone steps up, including Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, and the angel-faced Ryan Phillippe, who pulls off a moment of near-calamity with character and force. The heart-swelling resolutions of the different stories will, I know, strike some viewers as overwrought. But hasn?t Haggis earned the tears? He has laid the groundwork for emotional release by writing some of the toughest talk ever heard in American movies. Some things may be better left unsaid, but the exuberant frankness of this movie burns through embarrassment and chagrin and produces its own kind of exhilaration. |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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From MetaCritics.com
What the Critics Said about
Crash:
MetaCritics.com site
8.1; based on 38 reviews
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale.
100 The New Yorker, David, Denby
Hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River," though it is not for the fainthearted.
100 Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum
The stunning, must-see drama Crash is proof that words have not lost the ability to shock in our anesthetized society.
100 LA Weekly, Ella Taylor
Not just one of the best Hollywood movies about race, but, along with "Collateral," one of the finest portrayals of contemporary Los Angeles life period.
100 Austin Chronicle, Steve Davis
It's the most compelling American movie to come around in a long, long time.
100 Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert
Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.
90 Washington Post, Stephen Hunter
This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting.
90 Dallas Observer, Robert Wilonsky
What makes Crash so gripping--so terrifying in spots, so moving in others, and even a little funny at times--is how nothing happens as we think it will.
88 Philadelphia Inquirer, Steven Rea
Crash fools around with chronology in a Tarantinoesque way that brings its story full circle. You could argue that as events, and people, merge, Haggis' spiky screenplay (cowritten with Bobby Moresco) gets to be, quite simply, too much.
88 Rolling Stone, Peter Travers
The acting is dynamite, notably by Dillon and Newton in their shocking second encounter. Despite its preachy moments, the film is a knockout.
88 Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington
Like Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," it is an all-star fresco, but the stars--none of whom carries the movie--get to play the kind of morally ambivalent, sometimes unlikable parts that big-name actors usually avoid.
88 USA Today, Claudia Puig
Flaws are outweighed by Crash's intricate construction and intelligent.
80 Washington Post, Desson Thomson
Life's an exhilarating and often dangerous ride, and its accidents can yield good and bad things. Anticipation of the bad keeps us watching Crash, to be sure, but so does hope of the good.
80 Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum
Pivots on the characters' racism and xenophobia, playing tricks with our own biases and ultimately justifying an extravagant array of coincidences and surprises.
80 New York Magazine, Ken Tucker
It's a film you won't stop thinking about, arguing over, debating, after the lights come up.
75 ReelViews, James Berardinelli
Unfortunately, the running time is too short for us to get to know, or care about, the characters in a way that would make the film's themes strike a responsive chord.
75 New York Post, Lou Lumenick
Never reaches the heights of "Short Cuts" or "Magnolia" -- two multi-story films that clearly provided inspiration -- but it's a thoughtful road trip well worth taking.
75 The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Rick Groen
The result is a film where blisteringly naturalistic drama bumps up against sentimentally arch melodrama (that's the biggest collision in Crash). Haggis showed the same tendency in his script for "Million Dollar Baby," yet there it was better hidden under a simpler narrative. Here, the tendency has gotten magnified right along with his thematic ambitions.
70 Wall Street Journal, Joanne Kaufmann
Ultimately, Crash succeeds in spite of itself. Its color war starts to feel obvious and schematic. Its coincidences and clich?s become like a pileup on the 405 freeway, but there it is -- you find yourself rubbernecking and can't manage to look away.
70 Variety, Todd McCarthy
The tense drama eventually becomes off-putting when it becomes clear almost every scene hinges on an unpleasant or ugly racial interaction.
67 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, William Arnold
Crash can't rise from the ashes of its pessimism.
63 Boston Globe, Ty Burr
Its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do. You can feel its creator shuttling them here and there on the grid of greater LA, pausing portentously between each move.
60 The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann
Haggis has made a safe picture. It is familiar enough that it slips easily into our film-watching faculty without any fuss, yet his handling of it--his muscular belief in what he is doing--makes us hope that his next screenplay will be a bit less safe.
60 The Onion (A.V. Club), Scott Tobias
Haggis, who wrote the fine adapted screenplay for "Million Dollar Baby," embeds Crash's script so deeply in allegory that every revelation feels manipulative and programmatic, in spite of some terrific individual scenes and performances.
60 TV Guide, Maitland McDonagh
Rather than feel reductively schematic, the film overall seems vividly complex and provocative in the true sense of the word -- it challenges viewers to reflect and discuss, rather than surrender to knee-jerk reactions.
60 Village Voice, Michael Atkinson
Full of well-observed supporting riffs, Crash might've accumulated more frisson had it cast a clearer eye on how social tension actually plays.
50 Charlotte Observer, Lawrence Toppman
A well-intentioned but obvious, often clumsy picture.
50 Miami Herald, Peter Debruge
Almost certain to polarize audiences, this bit of emotional agitprop plays like a watered-down "Short Cuts" or "Magnolia" with a shrill, one-note message: We're all a little bit racist.
50 New York Daily News, Jami Bernard
Concludes in a shower of ashes, which is fitting because this movie is a billowing bonfire of ugly human behavior. Rarely have there been so many characters in need of timeouts, cold showers or house arrests.
50 Premiere, Glenn Kenny
It's too bad that the movie induces eyeball-rolling almost as much as it does armrest-clutching.
50 Slate, David Edelstein
It might even have been a landmark film about race relations had its aura of blunt realism not been dispelled by a toxic cloud of dramaturgical pixie dust.
50 The New York Times, A.O. Scott
So what kind of a movie is Crash? A frustrating movie: full of heart and devoid of life; crudely manipulative when it tries hardest to be subtle; and profoundly complacent in spite of its intention to unsettle and disturb.
50 Los Angeles Times, Carina Chocano
Any glimpse of emotional honesty comes courtesy of the actors, who manage to do a credible job despite the material.
50 Newsweek, David Ansen
An ambitious, intense, but overdetermined exploration of the varieties of ethnic intolerance.
50 Salon.com, Stephanie Zacharek
These interlocking stories don't move along as swiftly or as urgently as they should, and much of the dialogue thumps along on square wheels.
50 San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle
In the end, Crash lacks a cumulative impact. It takes audiences to new places, but we've all been to similar places, and we walk out knowing no more than we did walking in.
50 Baltimore Sun, Michael Sragow
New York critics have anointed Crash in advance as the Second Coming, but it's just another over-ambitious first movie.
42 Portland Oregonian, Marc Mohan
The result is a hybrid of "Falling Down" and "Short Cuts" without the iconic central character of the former or the latter's clear-eyed humanism.
40 Film Threat, Greg Wilson
I have seen it before. I saw it when I saw "Magnolia", and "Traffic", and "Grand Canyon." |
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SandraFan2
Joined: 26 Mar 2005
Posts: 61
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NY Post, 8/28/05, p.77
Fall Movie Preview
By Kyle Smith
In the Fall Movie Preview mentions Crash as one of two serious candidates for Best Picture so fall in 2005.
"Two-Thirds of the way through the year, only two serious candidates for the Best Picture Oscar have yet emerged: 'rash' and 'Cinerella Man.'"
[here are four months to go in 2005.] |
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