Crash, is a film that has its watchers widely divided.

There are those that think it's one of the best films that they've ever seen, and believe that it deserved its Academy Award. Then there are those that can't comprehend it's enormous following, and had a deep, rooted hatred for it.

I am of the latter group. Many, many other critics, including Roger Ebert are of the former. I mention Ebert because I respect him more than most, and it causes me great distress that a critic of his experience fell for such a condescending piece of shit.

The film starts out on a respectable note. Some of the dialogue is witty, and people react to each other in perceptive ways (I speak of the two young African-American men as they talk about how the people around them react to their presence). But it doesn't take more than thirty minutes of the movie to completely betray its intentions of wit and realism. All (!) dialogue becomes indiscriminately racist, the characters intersect with each other in the most obvious and unrealistic ways, and the story goes so far over the top that it seems like it was originally intended to be a screwball comedy, and not hard-hitting social commentary.

The desired effect of this picture, and honestly the effect that it ultimately had, was that people went around talking to each other about how strange and coincidental life is, and how bad racism is, and how hatred breeds more hatred, and how Crash is evidence of this. While most of those things may be true, using a film like Crash as proof is like using a film such as Garfield as evidence of how much personality your pets have. I don't know which film was worse.