The drought has ended. We got back from a wedding last night and decided to slump down on the couch for a flick. Now I’ve had two movies out from Netflix for months without watching – it was either ‘that euthanasia movie‘ or ‘the one about lots of people in L.A.” We chose the latter and watched Crash.

Interesting film although I probably enjoyed it a bit less than the critics. Two problems. For the first, I’ll need to use a metaphor: if you were to reduce a baseball game to just the strikeouts, it would seem like a pretty ugly sport. Crash reduces humanity to the 12 people who over 36 hours seem to get caught in ugly, heavy life issues around race and prejudice. Now I understand that’s the message of the movie, that this is all around us and we’re all not who we think we are, but the resulting effect was like going to the beach and kneeling down at the point where the waves break – it may be meaningful but sooner or later you’re just going to get tired of being wet.

Second, it used the ‘it’s snowing in L.A.‘ plot device.

Otherwise, good directorial work from Paul Haggis and a thought provoking film.