BIGOTOLOGY

Carina Chocano, in May of 2005, wrote the review of "Crash" for the LA Times, describing how seemingly every character in the film eats, breathes, sleeps, snarls, mewls, and spouts nothing but bigotry. Of all of the commentary I have heard and read about this polairizing, polarized film that seems to somehow capture the worst haranguing excesses of Stanley Kramer, the worst hectoring melodrama of Oliver Stone, and the worst of M Night Shyamalan's penchant for arbitraryily "neat" surprises, all of these worsts tinsel-wrapped in hate-paper seemingly made by Robert Altman trying to imitate P.T. Anderson on a bad day (for each of them), this comment is the funniest and most perceptive:

Add to this daisy chain of bigotry a Korean who sells illegal Thai and Cambodian workers to sweatshops, a black HMO worker who denies coverage to a sick man because the man's son is a racist, a white cop on his third African American murder, and a member of the D.A.'s office who wonders "what it is" with black people who "can't keep their hands out of the cookie jar," and the film's characters stop seeming like they've been culled from a random cross-section of the citizenry so much as cherry-picked from the top of the class at the Pat Buchanan School of International Relations.