Incredibly powerful stuff. I went in expecting great things, both because of the high praise of friends and the abilities of writer-director Paul Haggis, who also wrote Million Dollar Baby. As the film began to unspool, I was initially resistant; characters spend a great deal of the film espousing some very typical prejudices.

But then I started to realize: That's the point. These are the casual bits of hate and discrimination that float in all of our minds, whether we believe ourselves to be without prejudice or we admit to holding certain biases no matter how hard we try to abandon them. The characters are deftly, sharply drawn, especially considering how many there are. The story has the tight inevitability of a classic tragedy.

Yet what lingers the most is the casual prejudice, and how we reacted to it in that theater Saturday afternoon. We laughed, and I wondered why we laughed. Was it out of nervousness that Haggis and his exceptional cast are voicing opinions we consider taboo even though we may believe some of them ourselves? Or was it out of recognition, hearing shameful ideas we only think in our puny brains verbalized onscreen?

My wife suggested that she was disappointed certain characters were "redeemed," and others weren't. I responded that I think the point of this film isn't to redeem anyone, but to instead point out how far we all stand from redemption, whether we're cop or criminal, high-paid TV director or desperate convenience store owner. We're all grey, much greyer than we would ever want to admit to ourselves, and so we don't really get redemption. If we're lucky, we get a tiny bit of self-realization every once in a great while, and if nothing else, Crash achieves that in viewers, powerfully and seemingly without effort.

--Pop Geek