30 Days of Film: Lou's Day 12

| Posted by Lou | The time is 8.35am here in London UK |


A film that you hate


There is one film I hate above and beyond all others. It isn't the worst film ever made, but it is the worst film ever to win a Best Picture Oscar. I am of course talking about none other than Paul Haggis' Crash.

I fucking hate Crash.

I fucking hate it for winning the Oscar ahead of one of the truly great films of recent years (Brokeback Mountain), I fucking hate it for winning in some sort of weird anti-PC PC vote ("Hey! Let's hide our homophobia by voting for a bleeding-heart faux-PC film!"), and - to give a reason that actually belongs in the film itself - I fucking hate it for being the most pretentious, empty and chokingly manipulative film I have ever seen.

I hate it so much that I don't even want to bother writing why.

I will concede that Matt Dillon managed to make this scene genuinely spine-crawling. That is all.


So I googled "I fucking hate the film Crash" and this this was the top result (but one of only many, I must specify). I believe he/she sums it all up in saying:

I’m generally a forgiving filmgoer, but Crash’s gross tone of self-importance really bugged the shit out of me. The movie casts itself as a gritty and in-your-face exposé on race in contemporary America, but it isn’t exposing jack. And it’s certainly not gritty. It’s pandering in knowingly fabricated, cheesy moments to elicit easy emotions.

Yup. A rich white guy wrote a script full of coincidence and forced sentiment with which to pontificate to the masses from behind his big fence (did I mention he was an active high-ranking Scientologist at the time?), and people lapped it up. I fucking hated it.

(Fun facts! My second-most hated film (the subsequent winner of the Best Picture Oscar Million Dollar Baby) was also written by Paul Haggis. And! My third-most hated film (The Last Kiss) - guess who that was written by? Ding-ding-ding, we have a winner: Paul Haggis.)