Director: Paul Haggis
Year Released: 2004
Rating: 2.0
Several people of different races clash in modern day L.A. - it's a real 'crack up at the race riots' to draw a line from Harmony Korine. Deserves respect for bothering to tackle a subject as serious as racism and is admirably brazen in suggesting that every single one of us has some type of belief (or beliefs) that discriminate and are prejudicial, but did the script have to be interwoven so tightly that the scenarios fail to form out of logical occurrence instead of plainly obvious manipulation by the screenwriters (both the hitchhiking scene and the 'invisible cloak' altercation are both way out of reach)? The characters spend so much time verbally revealing their own bigotry and short-sidedness that the scenes more often than not feel like setups where the one race openly confronts another so that the other, 'offended' race appears visibly wounded. It's not smart enough to really pull this admittedly tricky Stanley Kramer-type 'social study' off - like Kramer's least successful films, its heavy-handedness is a serious deficit. But I did mention that I admire the effort, right...?
