The worst movie ever made?

I finally caught up with last year's Best Picture Oscar winner, Paul Haggis's "Crash," which I'd been avoiding for some time. I generally skip these terribly insincere prestige "message" movies, but "Crash" became such an omnipresent conversation piece and cultural reference, I decided to get all zeitgeisty and rent it. Of course, I'm about a year too late to get in on the zeitgiestiness of it all, so consider this post pointless and dated. I hated this movie, and I need to complain about it, hence this post. Feel free to skip, or take this post with you the next time you travel back to 2005/early 2006:

Right away, I knew I was in for it. Writer/director Paul Haggis explicitly lays out his metaphor in the clunkily awkward opening lines delivered with achingly dumb gravitas by Don Cheadle (why is Don Cheadle, a performer who is either competent or completely out of his league, considered one of our finest actors again?): "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something." I don't know if Haggis expects us to marvel at his profundity or if he actually thinks people talk this way, but these opening lines of dialogue are simply one example in maybe 250 of Screenplay Run Amok Syndrome. This is a film that has no visual reason to exist. Every line is so exceedingly overwritten, so loaded with thematic jism, every scene is so stuffed with patronizing condescension and preposterous coincidence, and every character merely a Teleprompter for Haggis's pompous and idiotic conclusions about racism in L.A. and possibly the world, that a poetry of images has no space to exist. Haggis doesn't trust his audience members enough to let them make connections on their own. The film has been praised for its interweaving of multiple characters and the intersections of plot that connect them to each other. This is bullshit. Haggis could have covered the same subject and themes with a smaller cast, but that would have required him to flesh out his characters, maybe give them more than one characteristic. Instead, he uses the Altmanesque approach to throw a shiny coat of paint over astoundingly lazy writing and remarkably uninspiring conclusions. What do we find out about racism, or life in Los Angeles? Not one fucking thing.
Haggis's background is in television writing ("The Love Boat," "Walker, Texas Ranger") and it shows. The film plays like an anthology of season finales from any number of overwrought television melodramas, right down to its use of an aggressively overbearing musical score, musical montages, and slow motion in place of real tension. This is a film in which we're supposed to share Sandra Bullock's screechy racist character's revelation that Latinas are people, too, after Bullock falls down the stairs (in slow motion, no less) (creaky plot device #496) and sprains her ankle and her Mexican maid (Yomi Perry) is the only one around to help her. Haggis seems completely unaware that his camera ignores Perry in favor of Bullock, and that Bullock's "revelation" is not a revelation at all, but another example of her character's selfishness (i.e., I will learn to respect you as a human being only if you can do something to help me). Other lessons learned: Matt Dillon's cop is a racist prone to sexual assault, but he will save people from flaming cars and he's worried about his Dad not being able to take a piss (what complexity this man possesses), if you run a chop-shop, you will also know exactly what to do with a van full of Asian refugees (a black market's a black market, am I right? huh? huh?), a family man with no prior criminal behavior will attempt premeditated murder even though, with the exception of a hot temper, he has been given no character traits that explain why he would do such a stupid thing except that he needs to do it to further the machinations of the most retarded plot in cinema history, and a little girl survives a shooting because she has been provided a magic invisible cloak. No shit. Deus ex machina, indeed.

Not only did this film win Best Picture, not only did it steal the title of a much better David Cronenberg film from 1996, it is also currently ranked the 108th best film of all time by Internet Movie Database users. Bring on the bird flu.