Crash: Film Review

This is a great attempt to address discrimination and stereotypes in contemporary Los Angeles. It has some good dialogue and some that is contrived. Missing from the diversity scrutiny is the usual forgotten child, i.e., persons with disabilities. Like police, politicians, lawyers, courts and journalists this film ignores the disability community. Hollywood includes homosexuals, and Jews in many productions, but seldom includes disabilities unless it shows the human services industry, psychiatry or the drug industry in a positive light. Several misperceptions focus on how trouble appears when there is none due to the tricks of the human mind. As Mark Twain observed "It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you think you know for sure that just ain't so."

Plot Summary for
Crash (2004)

Several stories interweave during two days in Los Angeles involving a collection of inter-related characters, a police detective with a drugged out mother and a thieving younger brother, two car thieves who are constantly theorizing on society and race, the white district attorney and his irritated and pampered wife, a racist white veteran cop (caring for a sick father at home) who disgusts his more idealistic younger partner, a successful Hollywood director and his wife who must deal with the racist cop, a Persian-immigrant father who buys a gun to protect his shop, a Hispanic locksmith and his young daughter who is afraid of bullets, and more.
Written by Martin Lewison