Product Details

• Actors: Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton, Karina Arroyave, Dato Bakhtadze
• Directors: Paul Haggis
• Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Director's Cut, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Full Screen, HiFi Sound, Special Edition, Subtitled, Surround Sound, THX, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0), English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (DTS ES 6.1)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rating: Unrated
• Studio: Lions Gate Films
• DVD Release Date: April 4, 2006
• Run Time: 115 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,014 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000EHQUOE
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,735 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "Crash - The Director's Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition)" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Movie studios, by and large, avoid controversial subjects like race the way you might avoid a hive of angry bees. So it's remarkable that Crash even got made; that it's a rich, intelligent, and moving exploration of the interlocking lives of a dozen Los Angeles residents--black, white, latino, Asian, and Persian--is downright amazing. A politically nervous district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his high-strung wife (Sandra Bullock, biting into a welcome change of pace from Miss Congeniality) get car-jacked by an oddly sociological pair of young black men (Larenz Tate and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges); a rich black T.V. director (Terrence Howard) and his wife (Thandie Newton) get pulled over by a white racist cop (Matt Dillon) and his reluctant partner (Ryan Phillipe); a detective (Don Cheadle) and his Latina partner and lover (Jennifer Esposito) investigate a white cop who shot a black cop--these are only three of the interlocking stories that reach up and down class lines. Writer/director Paul Haggis (who wrote the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby) spins every character in unpredictable directions, refusing to let anyone sink into a stereotype. The cast--ranging from the famous names above to lesser-known but just as capable actors like Michael Pena (Buffalo Soldiers) and Loretta Devine (Woman Thou Art Loosed)--meets the strong script head-on, delivering galvanizing performances in short vignettes, brief glimpses that build with gut-wrenching force. This sort of multi-character mosaic is hard to pull off; Crash rivals such classics as Nashville and Short Cuts. A knockout. --Bret Fetzer

Stills from Crash (click for larger image)

Product Description

This compelling urban thriller tracks the volatile intersection of a multiethnic cast of characters struggling to overcome their fears as they careen in and out of one another's lives. In the gray area between black and white, victim and aggressor, during the next 36 hours, they will all collide.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not the best film dealing with racism out there, June 5, 2006

By	Brandon Wilkening (Bloomington, IN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Crash (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)

I have to admit that I was slightly biased against this film even before I watched it, because I really liked Brokeback Mountain and couldn't imagine that another film could be more worthy than that one of winning the Oscar. That said, I did try to keep an open mind when watching Crash, and it just didn't work for me.

A number of things turned me off. First, I thought that the dialogue was unrealistic and contrived. In the special features the writers claimed that they were trying to present situations and interactions between people that would make the viewers uncomfortable and force them to confront their own prejudices. It did make me uncomfortable, not so much due to the realism of the situations portrayed in the movie, but simply because of the awkwardness of the dialogue. In this movie, racism is not a subtle sentiment that lurks beneath the surface. Instead, racism is right there, just waiting to be acted upon in response to the slightest provocation.

The first part of the movie basically consists of people being set off by the slightest misunderstandings and resorting to ridiculous racial slurs. A white gun store owner unleashes a tirade of racial invective against a Persian man who takes too long to decide what type of gun he wants. There is a fender bender between a Chinese woman and a Latino woman, who immediately engage in a war of racial slurs before they even have time to assess the damage. This same Chinese woman later curses at a nurse because she asks if the woman can speak English after she barges into the hospital in search of her husband shouting his name at the top of her lungs. There were so many misunderstandings and unfortunate events that could have been avoided if people would just speak in calm voices and resist the temptation to yell.

Maybe this was the point that the movie was trying to make, that people need to chill out and evaluate their own prejudices before acting. And the unfortunate events that occurred were supposed to allow the characters to reflect on these prejudices and ultimately redeem themselves. However, the redemption that the characters did experience seemed artificial to me. What are we supposed to make of the scene where Matt Dillon's racist cop character saves the life of a black woman whom he had earlier molested? Has he been redeemed by this experience? Why? Surely in his 10-year cop as an LA cop he has had other opportunities to help African Americans in similarly extreme circumstances. If so, are we supposed to believe that only an event so extreme as saving another person's life offers the opportunity for introspection? What lesson has the Persian store owner learned after he almost commits a horrific crime? After the incident, he has a tearful conversation with his daughter in which he spouts some babble about a guardian angel, but has he learned to stop flying off the handle every time he is provoked? I was similarly unconvinced by Sandra Bullock's character's sudden conversion to a decent person after her Latino maid cares for her after an injury. In none of these instances is it really clear what these characters have learned. Overall, I just didn't feel as if these movie brought any sort of fresh new perspective to the difficult issue of race. If anything, the film makes me want to rewatch Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which offers a much more intense and realistic portrait of racial relations.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Could this film have BEEN more heavy-handed?, April 26, 2006

By	Joshua Beall (New Brunswick, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Crash (Widescreen Edition) (DVD)

Now don't get me wrong; Crash is decent, and completely watchable. Best Picture material? Uh, no.

Look, I think it's fine and even occasionally necessary to remind people that racism exists and that, despite conscious or unconscious tendencies toward racism, people are more complicated than we think at first glance. Yes, sometimes there's a reason (although not an excuse) for racism.

And having said all that, I still don't think Crash is anything close to a great movie. It whacks you over the head again and again with its message that a) all races are okay, and b) even racists are people, too. It accomplishes this message by taking a minimally simplistic view of racism--racists are baaaaad people--and complicating it, albeit as minimally as possible, by giving all the racists one redeeming quality.

Yes, Matt Dillon's character is racist... but he loves his father! Yes, Sandra Bullock's character thinks all people of color are lazy... but she actually cares about her Latina housekeeper! Yes, Don Cheadle's character is insensitive toward his girlfriend/partner (he calls her white, but she's not; he calls her Mexican, but she's not that either)... but he loves his mother!

And so on. It's something we've all come across in our everyday experience and thought about in much more nuanced terms than this film cares to do. If you have a sixth-grader, then perhaps this film is for him.

Now, let me repeat: this film is decent, and watchable. Perhaps I'd be less disappointed if Academy voters hadn't, in a colossally dumb move, annointed Crash as the best picture of the year. It isn't, not by a long shot. But it's still enjoyable: well-directed, DEFINITELY well-acted, and the soundtrack is excellent. I just think that our national discourse on racism (and yes, movies are appropriate vehicles for this discourse) ought to move beyond such simplistic views.

49 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Supremely Over-rated, August 8, 2006

By	E. E. Eklund "old school" (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This movie is watch-able and that's the best I can say for it. What does this tell you: When it was nominated for best picture, I forgot I had even seen it. Only after they played the clip during the Oscar show did I realize I had rented & watched it months before. I guess the positive reviewers are half right: It doesn't present the racial issues "in black & white"- but only in the sense that it doesn't make all the white characters sophisticated and the minority characters blackface caricatures. There are negative reviews here which seem to presume that racism is a relic of the past, which is patently absurd. It is a very real issue, one which affects all of us (usually in more subtle ways than Haggis seems to understand) which is not going anywhere soon. At the same time, every character in the movie seems to have an obsessive racial awareness which controls everything they do. The characters have no depth at all outside of their racial attitude. As a result, the theme is so prevalent that the movie plays like an after-school special. If you want to see a candid and thought-provoking movie about racial relations, check out "American History X" with Ed Norton. The racial discussion takes place in a context that actually makes sense. And if you want to see the movie that SHOULD have been best picture, check out "Good Night and Good Luck." "Walk the Line" and "Brokeback Mountain" were also fantastic films.