“In L.A. nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

I hate that line. It’s pretentious. It’s untrue. It’s indicative of all that is wrong with the Best Picture Oscar winner of 2006. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for almost thirty years. The only time I ever crashed into someone was in college, when my overly focused search for a parking space made me bang into a car driven by a priest. And I assure you, as a Jew, I did not crash into him because I needed the touch of Catholic divinity. I just wanted to get to class on time.

I’ve gone back and forth on Crash ever since it was released in March of 2005. First I took the story literally, as in, here’s something that really might happen in Los Angeles. The film, written and directed by Million Dollar Baby’s Paul Haggis, unfolds its tapestry with laser beam intent to expose the L.A. I know as opposed to the L.A. that thousands of wannabe actors and reality-show contestants dream of. From the opening frame, the movie nudges you out of your slumber and in an age of infosnacking and channel surfing, any film that forces you to sit your butt down, watch and listen for two hours is, I guess, worth something. But it put me in a bad mood immediately because of that ridiculous “we’re so lonely we crash into each other just to feel something” crap. I was also put off by the relentlessly dour nature of every character. Everyone is angry or racist, usually both. Nobody is even remotely happy. Is everyone in L.A. really that miserable? D.A. Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser) and wife Jean (Sandra Bullock) are angry. They’ve just been carjacked by African-American thugs Anthony (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges) and Peter (Larenz Tate). Peter is angry at Anthony because Anthony is angry at everyone. And what really struck me, as I digress from the original point that everyone in the movie is angry, is that Haggis wants it both ways. He wants us to agree with Anthony that a black man is always assumed to be an armed thug. Yet in the end, he turns out to be an armed thug. Is Haggis trying to upset our ideological apple cart or is he spinning us around in circles? Also angry and racist is angry, racist cop Ryan (Oscar nominee Matt Dillon). He’s angry and racist because his father, a hard-working business owner who gave breaks to African-Americans, is sick and can’t get the HMO to help. At one point, Ryan blows off steam by inappropriately fondling Christine, the beautiful wife (Thandie Newton) of Cameron, a TV director (Terrence Howard) during a routine traffic stop. At home, Christine emasculates her husband, saying he should have stuck up for her when Ryan was putting his hand up her dress. The argument alienates the couple and the whole incident makes Ryan’s partner (Ryan Phillippe), who is not racist but is getting angrier, want to find another squad car buddy. 

Tapestry films (like Altman’s Short Cuts and Nashville) are hard to pull off, but Haggis’ characters seem alive, thoroughly lived-in and, if not fully developed, whatever angry or racist thoughts they harbor are fully developed. The dialogue, much admired for its bluntness, is where the film shines and sours. In 2006 it’s brave for a minor-then, but major-now film release to blurt such searing dialogue. And it deserves much credit for that. There should be more films like it. In the world Haggis has created, he’s earned the right to say such things. But he hasn’t earned the right to preach, or hit me over the head. Nor has he earned the right to pile on unrealistic coincidences to prove his point. In the most glaring, the very day after manhandling Christine, Officer Ryan comes upon her burning car and has to rescue her. She doesn’t want to be rescued by the cop who almost destroyed her marriage. However, he has to save her; it’s his job and he doesn’t see himself as a racist anyway.

At that point, I started to consider the film an urban fable. It’s not a true story, but it could be a true story, in a Los Angeles that looks familiar, but is not quite our own. When Mark Isham’s score, with its lonely, pretentious vocals, kicks in, the only way I can handle it is to pretend the movie is a modern day story by the Brothers Grimm. In the end, I don’t think Haggis thinks his film is a fable. He wants to shove our face in the dog bowl of our deeply buried racist inclinations and make us enjoy our Alpo. He tries hard to rip open a societal scab and by virtue of trying, he succeeds. The film is always intense, contains many good performances and gives off the sheen of importance.  The academy certainly agreed by awarding it the Best Picture, Original Screenplay, and Editing Oscars. I enjoyed the film on a surface level, but rebelled against it at the deeper level Haggis is clearly trying to tap into. After months of agonized ambivalence, I realize Crash is just a 3-hankie think piece, one-note and preachy.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Despite the addition of new material, this transfer looks to be about the same quality, maybe a tad better, than the older DVD. The older DVD was married by softness and grain and okay shadow detail. Sadly, much of this remains. I certainly don’t envy the responsibility of transferring such a dark film. And a lot of the nighttime exteriors feature good solid blacks, even if some scenes flag with excessive grain. The interior daytime scenes had some softness and grain that I wasn’t pleased with. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether grain is the fault of the transfer or the original film stock. The color palette is wide, with brightly lit, upper crust mansions mixing it up with skid row bleakness. And the colors never smear, but they do suffer from the softness. Crash is scheduled to be one of the first Blu-Ray releases. If that doesn’t look better than this B-minus effort, I give up.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?
 
The first DVD release of Crash contained an English Dolby Digital 5.1 track and a Dolby Surround 2.0 track. But for this double-dip, Lionsgate goes technological on us by giving the 5.1 track an EX upgrade and throwing in a DTS 6.1 ES track.

The original 5.1 mix was an okay effort, with Mark Isham’s score and the swirly sound effects doing most of the work. That mix is included on this new DVD. But Lionsgate’s EX upgrade sounds better. Dolby EX means that there’s an additional center channel represented by a speaker placed directly behind you. I thought the original 5.1 mix had decent activity behind me. What I wanted was more side activity and more than just sound effects and music in back. With the EX, we pretty much get that. The surrounds are definitely beefed up with more forceful effects and music. The dialogue and effects are more evenly distributed around the front and sides, creating a more enveloping experience than the vanilla 5.1 mix. Like the original track, there’s also some nice panning from side to side, like when cars drive across frame. Big effects, like the car explosion, show off more than the original. The score and effects still do most of the work, but now the whole mix is more evenly balanced and shows more depth and creativity in the sides.

The DTS 6.1 ES track has all the positive attributes of the 5.1 EX track, but the DTS gets the nod for a sturdier foundation of bass. Again, much of this comes courtesy of the score and effects, but the DTS had a nice LFE going and that gives the DTS the edge. That being said, anyone with a Dolby setup will be perfectly happy with the 6.1 mix.

There are English and Spanish subtitles included.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

As mentioned earlier, Crash has already been announced as one of the first Blu-Ray titles. It’ll be interesting to see if the studio adds Blu-Ray specific supplements to the disc or just recycles regular DVD supplements. Anyway, until that happy day, we get the following extras. DVD Introduction with Director Paul Haggis is 15 seconds long and about as enlightening. The same introduction on the original DVD, it’s basically a “hello, thanks for buying this DVD, enjoy the movie” effort.

Next is an audio commentary by Haggis, actor Don Cheadle, and writer Bobby Moresco. Although Haggis says at the top, “welcome to the director’s cut,” much of this commentary is a lift from the older commentary. They get quickly into the movie’s quixotic script-to-screen journey and how pivotal Cheadle was to securing the cast. Haggis gets into directing the actors and how they shot the scenes at the Sandra Bullock character’s house at his own home, which didn’t make his wife very happy. However, they couldn’t afford to invade, and probably trash, someone else’s home. It’s not a great commentary. There’s plenty of silence and some gratuitous praising and laughing. But if you’ve seen the movie before and want to experience it another way, go for it.

Finally on disc one are a bunch of trailers and promotional pieces for Lionsgate product.

The other extras are located on disc two, starting with the featurette Behind the Metal & Glass: The Making of Crash.  Paul Haggis starts with some story about waking up at 3:00 in the morning upset over “things that have happened to me,” and instead of going back to sleep, wrote a forty-page outline for what would eventually become Crash. The project was originally written as a potential series. Then Haggis and director Sidney Pollack took it to HBO, who turned it down for being too controversial. At that point, producer Mark R. Harris said to Haggis “just do it yourself.” When they got Don Cheadle, things started to fall into place. This 28-minute piece really tries to push your buttons in convincing us how important and brilliant the movie is. For those who love the movie, they’ll eat it up like pie. By the way, did I tell you that we in Los Angeles “miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something”?

On Paul Haggis is an interview with the writer/director who says he came to Los Angeles at 22 to make it in the biz. After writing spec scripts, he got a job in TV writing bad sitcoms. Although he loved the work, he wanted to express himself in a more personal way. In 1991, Haggis was carjacked while returning home from the opening of Silence of the Lambs. That event, as you can imagine, resonated with him and helped to inform his eventual script for Crash. I’m just kidding here, but in this featurette Haggis said he woke up at 2:00 in the morning upset over the carjacking, but in Behind the Metal & Glass, he said he woke up at 3:00 in the morning. What is the truth, Paul??!!

L.A., The Other Main Character is the most interest supplement, although I wish the featurette went a little further. Here, Haggis starts by saying he wanted to write about Los Angeles because everything seems so perfect in this city of glamour and eternal sunshine. But as California State Assemblywoman Karen Bass rightly claims, the only people who think L.A. is perfect are those who don’t live here. L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa weighs in with political-speak while still admitting “tensions.” They get into the homeless problem and how many future homeless come to town hoping for fame and fortune. Other community leaders, including Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the executive director of the Community Coalition of South Central, try to tear down Ma and Pa Kettle’s preconceived notions of Los Angeles.  Wealth, race, and the sprawling freeway system are all rightly touched upon as they talk about what has made Los Angeles a beautiful, but actually troubled city.

Next is Unspoken, where the movie pats itself on the back for have the guts to talk openly about race. While watching this featurette, I got the feeling of self-important, wealthy filmmakers trying to convince America to take their medicine and admit it’s good for them. All the actors say basically the same thing: everyone has racist thoughts, whether we want to admit it or not. There’s also an interview with Liebe Geft, the director of L.A.’s Museum of Tolerance. Like L.A The Other Main Character, I wish this had lessened the amount of actors talking in sound bites and gone further with the content. By the way, did you know that in Los Angeles, we “miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something”?  

You can’t have a special edition DVD without some Deleted Scenes. Here we have eight of them, available with optional Paul Haggis commentary. For some of the scenes, Haggis barely says anything and some of these are just extensions of existing scenes. For instance, the carjack scene is extended to show the Ludacris character grabbing a DVD from his victim’s hands before driving away. In another scene, Matt Dillon’s character opines that the reason corporations only hire “black and stupid” customer service people is because customers will get so frustrated they’ll stop complaining. The clips looks like an Avid output, with timecode at the bottom.

Next are two of those “interesting in theory but never interesting to watch” extras. The first is the Script to Screen Comparison. It’s well authored, with the script scrolling along the top of the screen while the scene plays out on the bottom of the screen. A pair of scenes are presented in this fashion. The other is Storyboard to Screen Comparison that has the storyboard on the top and the scene on the bottom. Again, two scenes are presented in this fashion.

Two music-related, soundtrack-shilling extras are next. A singer whose name I sincerely hope is not really Bird York warbles “In the Deep” in a music video. This gentle song is played out against shots of the movie. Finally we’ve got Music Montages. These are snippets from Mark Isham’s score and it’s broken up into Metal Music Montage and Glass Music Montage. I’m not a fan of Isham’s score with its self- important vocals, but if you liked it, check out this useless extra.