CRASH

I went to see a movie at SM last Friday. It was a movie of Paul Haggis, CRASH (producer of Million Dollar Baby). The editing was good, acting was par excellence. This movie is heavy in dialogue, so I advise that you listen carefully while watching ... ask questions after the movie.

I'd seen the various ways we discriminate against each other in everyday life. I'd seen how we rationalize and excuse it, how we organize our lives so that we dont have to deal with it, and how we deny that discrimination exists. The movie is not really about race or class, it's about fear of strangers. It's about intolerance and compassion; about how we all hate to be judged but see no contradiction in judging others.

We live in a society of fear, where people use that fear in order to control us, and the media uses that fear to manipulate us. The movie wants to discuss that and how that fear resonates and distorts how we perceive the world around us. Our reality is so detached that I think it requires a catastrophic event to make us either feel or acknowledge what's actually going on. We are too comfortable, way too comfortable.

It is a film that escapes genre categorization because it escapes tonal categorization. This is a film about real life. It's also something of a fable and a morality play. And it's a story of hope. There's levity, heartbreak, tragedy, beauty, comedy. You will see in Crash how fragile humanity is in general and how the slightest choice you make, which may not seem that important at the time, can end up having huge ramifications, a ripple effect way beyond yourself.

Probably one of my favorite movies this year!