Hollywood's last taboo . At least not in New York and, mutatis mutandis, in those parts of America which resemble New York.' This is the subject of Crash, the debut as writer- director of Paul Haggis, who scripted last year's Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby, in which the benign notion of America as a melting pot is replaced by the image of a seething cauldron of racial prejudice. The movie begins at a night- time accident scene in Los Angeles, with an African- American later to be revealed as Graham, a plain- clothes cop (Don Cheadle), saying that in New York City you walk around the city and brush into people, but in Los Angeles you just drive around and nobody touches you. That is until you crash into them. So from the start Los Angeles and crashes are announced as metaphors and reality and the movie proceeds to examine the relationships between a variety of citizens over the previous 3. Christmas, supposedly a time of peace and goodwill. Crash follows the form - popularised in the cinema during the Nineties by John Sayles's City of Hope, Robert Altman's Short Cuts and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, though in fact going back to Balzac's La Com. An Iranian shopkeeper, paranoid since the corrosive suspicions following 9/1. Mexican locksmith. A white District Attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his wife (Sandra Bullock) are car- jacked by two armed blacks. This drives the DA to consider how this affects his re- election campaign and deepens her neurotic alienation from society. An embittered veteran cop (Matt Dillon) viciously harasses a middle- class black couple, driving a wedge between the two, and disgusting his young partner, a recent recruit to the force. A Chinese victim of a hit- and- run accident turns out to be a people- smuggler, transporting Cambodians into bondage. An overzealous undercover cop (white) kills a black colleague, in the belief that he's a drug dealer, and Internal Affairs investigate. At the centre the plain- clothes cop Graham is having an affair with a Latina colleague, coping with his sick mother, delinquent brother, and a variety of investigations. In what some may regard as an overly contrived fashion, these stories are neatly dovetailed and interwoven to make ironic and often paradoxical points. Two characters for instance, seemingly drawn together by chance, are in fact mirror images of each other; both carry with them figurines of St Christopher as talismans for their journeys through life. The surface is realistic and the characters neatly sketched, but they are part of a network of fate and destiny that reveals the city and modern life in all its mystery. This is a world where good people can be forced into acting badly, and ostensibly bad people perform acts of kindness and heroism; where the guilty go free and decent men are spurned and punished; where the wise are baffled and the stupid go accidentally to the heart of the matter. Paul Haggis, who has considerable experience writing for TV, and his co- screenwriter Bobby Morosco, have an acute ear for a variety of speech, and their picture is sharply observed and frequently extremely funny as well as artfully orchestrated. It ends on a tragic note, but they manage to avoid easy cynicism or fashionable despair. In Altman's Short Cuts and Anderson's Magnolia there are biblical judgments on the wickedness of Los Angeles, a plague of medflies and an earthquake in the former, a climactic downpour of frogs in the latter. Crash, too, plays out on a religious or mystical note with what is a fairly rare event in Los Angeles, a snowfall on Christmas Eve, suggesting some kind of benediction or token of grace. But this is comically undercut though not undermined by yet another car crash involving ethnic figures, seen in a high angle shot as if from the viewpoint of a puzzled God. Incidentally, both Short Cuts and Magnolia run for an extravagant 1. The economical Crash is more than 7. In 'The Last Taboo: Why America Needs Atheism,' published in the New Republic in 1996, Wendy Kaminer wrote, 'Atheists generate about as much sympathy as pedophiles. But, while pedophilia may at least be. Over the past few weeks I have been called naive, stupid, brave, predictable, slow, cumbersome and astonishingly, cute. All this, because I was making a television programme. Mind you, all that was nothing compared.
The Last Taboo For today's leaders, it's the sin none dare confess. We recommend this Building Church Leaders training tool: Rest and Renewal for Busy Church Leaders. Ex-British number one Annabel Croft says sportswomen's periods are 'the last taboo', after Heather Watson became unwell during the Australian Open. Documentary about CLTS in Kenya by Tony Steyger: “THE LAST TABOO is not a worthy documentary with a righteous message. Instead it uses humour and sincerity to tell the stories of two remarkable Kenyan men who are helping.
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