we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.

I think the theme of Crash is twofold:

• If you're racist, you're a bit of a dick.


• Everyone is racist.

This message is played out repeatedly (indeed, the whole affair seems to occur in some kind of netherverse in which one's race is the only permitted topic of conversation) as the film covers 36 hours in the lives of seven (possibly more, it's kind of hard to tell) families as their lives interweave (in a manner reminiscent of the superior Traffic) with one another: A rich white couple, a rich black couple, a plainclothes detective and his mother, an Iraqi store-owner and his daughter, a latino locksmith and his daughter, a uniformed cop and his father, and two carjacking hoods. Each of them crosses into the lives of the others, subtly or grossly changing and affecting them.

Sometimes these crossovers are a bit implausible (per example: two cops bust the rich black couple, and then each cop independantly encounters a different half of the same couple the very next day. These must be the only people in LA), but I'm willing to forgive the coincidence in the spirit of interconnectedness that the film is bangin' on about. The flipside of this is some very sharp (and often very funny) dialogue and overall excellent acting, making the whole thing easier to believe in. Although, did you ever notice how Hollywood movies generally ignore the existence of racism in their films? Normally, if a character were to say even one of the many racist statements from any of the characters in , they'd be marked as irredeemably evil and be killed by the hero in the next act.

However the director of Crash seems to want to make up for this by having his characters obsess about race and racism. I mean, I accept that it's a reality and that it's out there (I mean, would poor Jean Charles de Menezes be dead now without it?), but I think this film exaggerates it (slightly, I mean it is LA we're talking about here) for the purpose of making a point- which is fine, but some may find the excessive speechifying a little grating.

So: it's not without its flaws. But it's a bold, well made, watchable work with a couple of memorable set pieces- that's more than most films offer these days. It probably wouldn't lose much impact if you waited to see it on vid, but I'd definitely recommend that you give it a look in.