There's Been an Accident

At least one commenter expressed confusion at my complete hatred of Crash and asked for a little more detail. To detail the film's myriad problems would require more time and energy than I have right now, but thank goodness for Matt Zoller Seitz, who gave the film a proper berating here.

Yes, I admit, the movie’s more primally exciting than, say, “American Beauty” or “A Beautiful Mind” or “The English Patient,” and more superficially “edgy.” But it’s also dumber and meaner and uglier, an Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank. And it’s lazy and simplistically cynical about its central subject, race, in that it promulgates a false idea of how Americans express racial attitudes in public.

...[D]eep down [Haggis] doesn’t actually want to say something useful about the modern state of race relations. He just wants to be able to play with racially charged material and be acclaimed for his bravery. The up-to-the-minute realities of American racism are too subtle and elusive for Haggis and his cowriter to grasp, and require too much care to dramatize.

It's worth (re)reading the whole thing.