Crash
Available at most retail stores that sell DVDs and videos for less than $20.
Director: Paul Haggis
Released by Lion's Gate Studio
Running time of 122 minutes
Rated "R" for language, sexual content, and violence.

Do you ever stop and consider how your everyday interactions with those around you influence the lives of others? Crash, which won the 2006 Academy Award© for Best Motion Picture, examines how we often we will never know how our actions can dramatically alter our lives and the lives of others, often making us crash into one another. How we respond to others is often not simply a result of a split-second decision, but rather the consequence of opinions and ideas we've formed over a lifetime due to thousands of different experiences.

Crash was directed by Paul Haggis and stars, among others, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillion, Jennifer Esposito, Ryan Phillipe, Thandie Newton, Terrence Howard, Brendan Fraser, and many others. These people play complex, genuine characters who make mistakes and are my no means perfect, which is also why they are, in large part, the most real characters I've seen to come out of Hollywood in a while. The movie doesn't make apologies for the actions of the characters, which are often quite unsettling. It simply presents these characters as the people they are, watching how a span of 48 hours unfolds before them. The characters crash, literally, into one another, forcing everyone involved to take notice not only of what's going on around them in that moment, but to encounter those issues that they most fear.

In the "Behind the Scenes" feature, director Paul Haggis explains the idea behind Crash: "I wanted to tell a story without any of the characters knowing each other. I wanted to see how one person affects another person without even knowing or met that person, without having touched them. And I wanted to see how that circles around."

Each of the characters affect each other in some way, and yet the director, Paul Haggis, managed to not make such influences seem contrived or fake in any way. These things happen every day, and we often have absolutely no idea. Simply being aware of that idea has the power to make one more mindful in their everyday encounters.

By the movies Hollywood often puts out, it becomes abundantly clear such movies are made primarily because they will make money. Sometimes I become disappointed in American society because the movies are made in order to make money, and we are the ones fueling the process. Then, by my complete surprise, a movie such as Crash comes along that renews my hope in American movie makers, slightly pushing the envelope, offering a perspective we may not have originally thought about, making us emerge from the theater, seeing our encounters with those around us with new eyes. The predicableness that accompanies some movies is just not seen here. The viewer cannot anticipate what's going to happen, which just adds to the authenticity and integrity of the film.

"I will help you. I will need you. I will kill you. I will love you. I will judge you. I will protect you." These words are found at the top of the main menu screen. While they may seem utterly hypocritical, they are nonetheless extremely powerful because they reveal how integral we all are in the lives of one another. We may think, "I will kill you" at one point, until we experience something so profoundly moving, that we are left with no other choice than to declare "I will protect you."

However, all too often the ideas that lead to "I will kill you" and "I will judge you" are allowed to perpetuate, which is what leads to such traumatic crashes.

When some people hear the word "discrimination" or "prejudice" their minds immediately turn to African Americans. However, this movie deals with stereotypes we may have not even known we had. Think about it. Whether you think everyone in the Middle East is Arab, or every metrosexual male is gay, or every recent immigrant in the United States is from Mexico, or everyone from Asia is Chinese or Japanese...We all have stereotypes such as this. It has a profound influence on how our society functions, yet surprisingly many of us may not notice it in our day to day interactions with others. We don't want to think about it, so we don't see it, and then we deny such an influence exists. However, it's because we don't think about it, that such stereotypes persist.

Actor Don Cheadle says "These are not issues that to me are new. These are not issues that to me are daring and risque. It's like, 'Look, this is what goes down. This is how people think. This is how people talk. This is what happens when people aren't being polite.'And can we be honest enough to admit that? And that's what the challenge of this film is. It's to say, 'You know you wanna laugh at that. You know it's wrong to laugh at that, but you wanna laugh. So, go ahead and laugh. But then examine, 'Why was that funny to me? Why was I struggling with is it okay to laugh? Is it okay to laugh?' That to me is the best thing a film can do, is really raise questions and make you examine your own motives."

Director Paul Haggis said one of his primary motives with Crash is to "get people angry, get people talking, because once you get people talking, you can resolve issues."

This movie is not at all politically correct, nor should it be. A politically correct world is not the world we live in. The writers and directors and producers and everyone else involved in Crash had to be truthful about what these things - race, stereotypes, ethnicity, culture, etc. - really meant in America, no matter how ugly it was.

As writer Bobby Moresco said, "It's really about the things that you don't say and the things that are below the surface, that are always trying to bubble up. And in this movie, they do. To me, it's really about power and how power plays into or doesn't play into all of these peoples lives..."

Watching this movie, and inevitably being moved by this movie, won't stop all the crashes. However, when we do crash into one another, perhaps it will make you walk softer, talk gentler, reconsider what you say and how it just may alter another's life. This movie shows that such crashes often lead to tragedy, but sometimes, they make us see a part of ourselves we were reluctant to see, discover a voice we didn't know we needed to hear, and lead us toward growth.