Crash, Paul Haggis’ sleazy 2005 cartoon about race relations, is probably the worst film to win a Best Picture Oscar in the last ten years.  Something to collect awards and be quickly forgotten… right?  The other day a friend asked me if I’d noticed that Crash had been the top Netflix rental for as long as he could remember.  I assumed it was a software glitch.  Amazingly, it wasn’t.  It turns out, Newsweek did a story a few weeks back (Pajiba brought it to my attention) on the most-rented Netflix movies of all time, and Crash was number one.  Crash.  The most Netflixed movie of all time.

1. Crash (2005)
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
3. The Bucket List (2007)
4. The Departed (2006)
5. Iron Man (2008)
6. No Country for Old Men (2007)
7. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
8. The Proposal (2009)
9. Gran Torino (2008)
10. Casino Royale (2006)

Even putting Crash aside, there’s a lot of WTF going on in there.  The Bucket List?  Really?  That’s… weird. I get the feeling Netflix is overwhelmingly composed of semi-hip middle-aged white people. It’s the Don Henley concert of websites.

Also fun: the interactive Netflix map.

^{THIS SUMMER… SCREAMING AND CRYING AND BEATING OUR CHESTS!}

The following story disturbs me far more than the Japanese gore orgy I posted less than an hour ago.  Crash has been Neflix’s top rental for almost four years running.

“The Dark Knight” couldn’t dethrone it.  Neither could Harry Potter, Indiana Jones or even Iron Man. No, “Crash” has remained Netflix’s No. 1 rented movie since its DVD debut in September 2005—much to the delight and confusion of its director, Paul Haggis.  “I just assumed it was some sort of anomaly,” Haggis told the Tribune recently. “I have no idea why anyone went to the movie in the first place, let alone rent it. It was a little independent film, and when people started to see it, I was amazed.” [ChicagoTribune]

That makes two of us. Crash was a sleazy, sensationalist piece of trash that made me want to shower after I watched it – the perfect example of what happens when you turn “gritty realism” into a ridiculous cartoon.  You can just imagine the upper-class white liberal writer thinking “Yeah, man, and then when the cop shoots the little Mexican girl for no reason, people will be sad, but they should be, because that’s the reality out there on the streets, man.”  No.  No it’s not.  You just made that up because you’re a dick and you like ruining everyone’s day.  Frankly, the whole thing is ludacris.  Shut up, I know where the corner is.

Crossing Over is another Crash clone set in the intense boiling racial melting pot cauldron of Los Angeles, where caricatures from all over the world come to get caught up in a series of sensationalistic vignettes about important social issues.  Can Indiana Jones solve the immigration problem?  Not if Henry Hill has anything to say about it.  Who will emerge triumphant??  The viewer!*

*Not really.

Watch in HD at Yahoo.

^{Oh sheet, ése, they’re bout to throw chingasos. Ten bucks on el gato sério.}

That 70′s Show’s Wilmer Valderrama stars in this brand new red-band trailer for Crash 2: Eclectic Pukaloo Days of Wrath, set in the hot simmering intense racial boiling pot gangland cauldron fart that is Los Angeles.

The plot: Some Mexicans shoot an Asian chick while stealing a black guy’s shiny car! I wonder if the whiteys will say racist things and the Jews will act neurotic and the Koreans will open grocery stores that take money out of the black community! OMG, the racial problems so complex!  Can’t we all just get along? 

Coming soon to a theater new you, probably owned by a greasy dego wop who grabs his balls a lot.
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This came out last week but I wasn’t able to get to it.  Hey, remember Crash?  That sensationalist portrayal of racial caricatures that somehow won best picture?  Well guess what, they’re turning it into a TV show. It’s about sensationalist racial caricatures.  It’s nice to see they’re tackling this whole race thing head on.  As Oliver Stone and Spike Lee well know, nothing fosters understanding like being able to see each other as the malevolent, unrealistic cartoon villians we all are.