Three Out of Five

With the Oscars tomorrow night, I don't really have much of a chance of seeing all five of the Best Picture nominees between now and then. Still, I did manage to catch one more this afternoon -- Crash.

Shocho once blogged about liking the kind of movies that tell multiple short tales intercut with one another, characters sometimes intersecting, all of it relating to form a single thematic whole. Crash is his kind of movie. But I was a little surprised to find it was my kind of movie too.

I've seen a few movies in this "genre," if it can be called that. Short Cuts, Go, Traffic -- some of them I liked better than others, but none of them were that great to me. Crash is a damn good movie, though.

The characters in the film are all carrying around a ridiculous amount of hatred. I suppose that is what you'd expect in a film about racism, but we're talking metric truckloads of seething anger. There's really only one, maybe two characters that come off wholly likeable. But nearly all of them come off somehow sympathetic in their own way. The script is just brilliant in this respect, delivering many rounded characters with good and bad qualities, and juggling all their stories deftly in the course of the film.

So many of the performances in the movie are outstanding, it's hard to single any one of them out for praise more than the others. (Which is why it scored few acting nominations at the Oscars, but won the ensemble cast award given out by the Screen Actors Guild.)

Crash won't leave you feeling good about life, but it is still a quality movie I strongly recommend. I give it an A-, docking it only a little bit because as good as it was, I'm not really convinced that I would find new nuances in it were I to see it again. It is fairly baldly what it is -- very good, but still probably just a "one time only" film, in my judgment.

Of the three Best Picture nominees I've seen, this would get the award from me, far and away.