Congratulations, Los Angelenos! Your mayor has declared that this Tuesday, April 4, is Crash Day, in honor of the homegrown Best Picture Oscar winner whose flattering portrait of your city’s racial cordiality has done such wonders for L.A.’s tourism bureau and chamber of commerce. (No doubt it’s just a coincidence that Tuesday is also the date that the Crash director’s-cut edition hits DVD. April 4 is also the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination; you can decide for yourself whether that’s also a coincidence.)
We’re sure you’ll all be busy this weekend planning your Crash Day parties. You’ll want to hang some streamers, buy blanks for your firearms, change the locks on your doors (and then have them changed again by someone who doesn’t look like a gang member), refill your mom’s refrigerator, car-jack an SUV to shuttle your guests, think up creative racial invective to hurl at strangers, loot a convenience store, and hug your maid. Oh, and get plenty of ice — you can never have too much ice.
A couple of safety tips, though: First, remember your mom’s advice and always wear clean underwear, in case you get into a car accident, or if you’re groped by a racist cop. Second, when you car-jack someone, always wear your seat belt.
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Interesting that they also pick the day that the *REAL* Best Picture of 2005 comes out on DVD. Don’t they know that they won the oscar, they don’t have to keep campaigning for their movie anymore?
I still have a hard time believing that movie won Best Picture. Not that it was bad, but it was the worst of the 5 nominated films AND I can think of at least 7 or more others that weren’t nominated that were better:
Squid and the Whale
King Kong
Cinderella Man
Walk the Line etc etc.
I went and saw Crash with my sister while I was visiting her in LA. When it was over I turned to her and said, “Wow, everyone in LA is a racist A$$hole.” And the mayor wants to give the movie its own day? Weird.
stop hating on that movie. “Crash” was a fantastic movie. “Brokeback Moutain” was junk comparatively. The only reason it’s gotten so much praise is NOT because it is a really great movie but because it breaks boundaries. That’s great and all, but it shouldn’t mean that if I put some guys having sex in a movie, it should be more highly praised than a true masterpiece like “Crash.”
I thought “Crash” was great. Then I found out a White Canadian made it. The whole “preachiness” of the movie was okay when I thought it was one of our own pointing out a unique issue shaped by our common history and geography. But to find out an outsider is calling us names is like having some “external consultants” come by and conclude “all of you are racist”. Brother what?
Why don’t we make a movie about racist Canadians are, with their less than 10% population of color and their desire to have non-English Speakers SECEDE from the country. Not to say we don’t have a lot of room for improvement, but those in glass houses should not throw stones.
Ep, you’re so full of it your eyes are brown.
No one in Canada wants to see Quebec, the unilingual French province, secede from Canada. Watch our polls more closely and see the evidence. And come to our country and go to cities like Vancouver and Toronto or Montreal and tell me we’re not racially diverse. Your ignorance makes me laugh.
And Paul Haggis is Canadian all right, but he has dual American citizenship. His commentary on race in “Crash” was directed at North Americans in general, not just U.S. citizens. It sounds more like YOU are racist towards Canadians more than anything.
To be honest, I’m ashamed that Paul Haggis is CDN also, since it was such a blatant, almost laughably stereotypical account of “racism” in L.A. Maybe the Real LA is that bad, maybe it’s a little overblown, but NO ONE SPEAKS LIKE THAT FOR REAL LIKE THEY DO IN THE MOVIE. Todd’s right, funny how they pick the day the REAL Best Picture os 2005 comes out on DVD. Ed, have you never been to Canada? Yes, there is always racism everywhere but it’s generally pretty much hunky dory here, whereas I really notice it when I visit the states (and yes, I am a person of colour).
Geez. Get out of the bitter barn about Crash winning. It’s time to move on.
That is the day the real Best Picture is released. I don’t live in Los Angeles. April 4 is Jake and Heath Day.
I disagree with you, hellboundhalo. A ground-breaking film like Brokeback Mountain deserves good praise and awards. Was Crash ground-breaking? No.
What makes BBM ground-breaking is that the film is about a romance between two men, but these men are not stereotypical gay guys. Plus, the film had the guts to show their romance in a sexual way.
Is Crash the only Oscar winning movie that was filmed in L.A.?
Hey hellboundhalo: I didn’t hate Crash and I recommended freely when it squeaked into theaters. But I was more interested in how it actually seemed to say it was OK to feel the racist feelings you might have. And it was more a fable (so unrealistic at times) than a gritty story where racism has real repercussions. The good guys became bad guys, the bad guys became good guys – all way too clean cut and unrealistic. It served it’s purpose but it was just so heavy handed and afterschool-special like.
Brokeback isn’t just about two guys having sex – talk to anyone who liked the movie and you’ll get more than one answer as to how it affected them and what they came away with. Often, it has nothing to do with the male/male relationship. It’s a movie that has great depth, layers and subtleties that stay in your head long after you’ve watched it. But you’ve gotta have a heart, and you’ve gotta like movies that make you think, not just bang you on the head.
Crash was ok, but despite a great performance from Matt Dillon, I just thought it was kind of ho hum overall. I thought Brokeback Mountain was fantastic, even though I was a little put off by the love scenes, the movie trancends being a “gay love story”.
That being said, people act as though those were the only two movies nominated, Good Night And Good Luck and Capote were both much better than Crash imho. I haven’t seen Munich, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t better than Crash. But really, I guess it doesn’t effect much unless you produced the movies.
Hellboundhalo, you have horrible taste in films. CRASH was derivative, preachy, inane garbage; BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was superior on all fronts. It’s people like who are contribute to the dumbing-down of films these days.
I’m confused. If Brokeback is all about two gay guys who have to hide their love from society and can only get ‘together’ in the mountains, how is that supposed to be a plus for the gay agenda? Isn’t the real message of Brokeback that gay people should be miserable in society and ‘together’ in the mountains?
Hey, how come everyone is being so bitter over Crash Day. Get over it, stop whinning. What is done is done and you guys can’t do anything about it. Besides, some of the best movies of all time didn’t win a single Oscar. That is not what it’s about. So stop it and give Crash a break.
Wow, I think we need to set up a cage match. The producers of Crash vs. the producers of Brokeback Mountain. Not only does Crash win the Best Picture Oscar, which it shouldn’t have (not because Brokeback wuz better – but because all the other Best Picture choices were better) and then they release a “special” director’s cut DVD on the same day people are going to be flocking for the Brokeback DVD. I’m glad Annie Proulx wrote what she did in The Guardian. Someone from Team Brokeback needs to start slinging the mud. The Crash people are crazy, as they try to force this bad movie into the history books. It won’t work; no one is going to remember Crash in 15 years, trust me.
Sorry to crush your article here Gary but Paul Haggis, writer and director of Crash is from London, Ontario, Canada same as good old Rachel McAdams. When will you people realize the best talent comes from Canada.
Wow, the Crash-BBM war is back on! Awesome. Here’s a hilarious little piece of info. There was an article in the NYTImes today about Joakim Noah, UF’s star player, and how he’s this kid that no-one’s been able to pigeonhole. His dad is Yannick Noah (French-Cameroonian?) and his mom is a former Miss Sweden — in other words, he’s racially “complicated.” And the article ends with how much he hated the movie Crash, and how he almost walked out of it because it annoyed him so much! I thought that was kind of telling.
Just for the record, I’m totally on Team Brokeback, but I would have been fine with any other movie in the Best Picture category winning the top prize, with the exception of Crash.
I rented it a few weeks before the Oscars, and I thought it was pretty good, especially Sandra Bullock’s performance and the plot involving the locksmith (I must admit, my friend and I started bawling when we thought his daughter had been shot). But you know what i was thinking immediately after the film was over? “Damn, Terrence Howard and Ludacris were pretty good in that. Time for Hustle and Flow!”. I watched it right after Crash, and I can honestly say I felt it was the better film. The story was something new and fresh, the music was fantastic, the performances were superb, and the scene in the church was just beautiful.
Emotionally, it affected me more than Crash. Contrary to what the latter was supposed to do, it did not make me “think”. I never once felt the need to re-evaluate and re-examine how I view the people around me. What my friend and I got from watching the film is that everybody in L.A. is a racist, which is an unfortunate thought because even though I’ve never been to L.A., I know it probably isn’t true. Maybe it’s just because I’m a bilingual teenager from Canada, and i can’t say I live in a discriminatory city or go to a prejudice school, and therefore see daily examples of racism, but Crash wasn’t powerful. It didn’t hit me like the other films did. Capote blew me away. Munich was heart-breaking. I wasn’t able to see it, but because Jeff Daniels was in it, Good Night and Good Luck looked amazing. And Brokeback Mountain was just beautiful.
This was undeniably the year of the gay cowboys, and not that of the racist citizens of L.A., and thefore BBM deserved Best Picture over Crash. If you look at the effect that the Best Picture nominees are having on not only North America, but the rest of the world, BBM is leading the pack. It is helping to change laws and improve GLBT rights around the globe. That’s the mark of a truly revolutionary film.