If there's one thing worse than seeing a crummy movie, it's writing about it days later when you should have put the ordeal behind you. The reason I feel this sense of obligation is that for whatever reason, respected critics (Roger Ebert being a good example) seem to like the film Crash. For the life of me, I'm having trouble understanding why.

Do they like it merely for being an anti-gun, multiculturalist advocacy film? It is certainly all of that, but to make a good film you have to have more than just a bias. I saw it with a liberal friend who (unlike me) had no problem with the message the writer was trying to convey, but despite our political disagreements, we both thought that as a film it failed miserably.

From any objective standard, the film would seem to have everything going for it: written and directed by Paul Haggis (who wrote the screenplay for Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby), and very decent if not excellent acting with well known stars like Matt Dillon.

The problem is that the writing (while technically skilled) all revolves around a simplistic idea which just doesn't work. An insufferably stultifying sense of boredom sets in early, and never leaves. While I know it was the whole point of the film that almost every character was so blinded by racism as to be unable to see reality, the fact that they were reduced to absurd and unbelievable caricatures instead of characters left me behind. I've lived all over the place, and ordinary people just aren't like this. Racism is far more subtle, and far more denied.

Early in the film, an Iranian shopkeeper has a showdown with a Los Angeles gun dealer who balks at selling him a handgun. The gun dealer, an undisguised bigot, calls the Iranian "Osama," mocks his inability to speak English and refuses to refund the money or give him a gun. Finally, he hands the gun over to the Iranian's pretty wife, only because she tolerates his crass sexual innuendo. The dealer was a thoroughly despicable, thoroughly malevolent bigot who wouldn't remain in business for more than a month. Perhaps the director has never known a gun dealer. I have and I've never seen one who would ever, ever behave in his store the way this loony tune did.

From then on it gets worse. If you have any friends who are cops, be sure to warn them not to see this film. Matt Dillon's portrayal of an unhinged racist cop (who pulls over an attractive black couple to get his rocks off by sexually humiliating them at gunpoint) would upset almost anyone. I'm sure the director would claim this wasn't meant to be stereotypical, and it certainly doesn't typify real life.

Unfortunately the whole premise of the film is that these stereotypes are typical.

Over and over again, my reaction was one of, "Come on! People just aren't like that!" And they aren't.

But it doesn't stop. It just gets worse and worse.

Then there's the soundtrack. Most of the film consists of the same wailing song played over and over again. Talk about belaboring the point! Even if you liked it the first time, by the time you get halfway through the film you'll hate it. On top of that, the director uses an insipid technique I hated back in the 1970s (and which I thought had died) of showing long sequences of no action or dialogue, but just scenery, maybe people walking, to an endless musical score. It's just filler masquerading as profundity, and I wouldn't even let a college film student get away with it.

A central "character" in the film is the gun the bigot reluctantly sold to the Iranians. I know it's tough to get a gun to act, but the director almost succeeded, and from a rhetorical standpoint this was the best aspect of the film. For years, I've heard gun owners complain about how the gun control people think guns actually have an evil animus. Well, this guy damned near manages to prove cinematically that they do! The gun -- an evil looking snub-nosed .38 -- lurks malevolently in the Iranians' drawer. They look at it, and it's obvious they consider it stronger and tougher than they are. It's Big Brother watching over them. Always there. And When All Else Fails, and some racist thugs have broken into their store and vandalized it under the mistaken belief they're Arabs, why, the first thought is to check to see if The Gun is still there. And sure enough, there it is, not only in the drawer, but looking almost as if its about to levitate, and Avenge The Crime. Sure enough, All Else does fail. The insurance company refuses to pay the Iranians' claim because the Hispanic locksmith who looks like a gang member (really an innocent family man who happens to sport prison gang-style tattoos) had warned them they needed a new door and not a new lock, and instead of understanding they assumed he was a crook and the door was never fixed. Thinking this over with the assistance of the sullen .38, it became quite clear that the Only Thing To Do was what the gun was there for: the Hispanic locksmith had to be killed. So, with the gun seeming to guide his every move, the Iranian drives to the locksmith's home, and lies in wait for his return from work. Just as the man returns home and is confronted by the Iranian with the gun, his cute little daughter (who, we're told earlier, was terrorized by guns) leaps into her daddy's arms. The gun, of course, reacts instantly to this sudden outburst of love, and fires itself point blank at the little girl. (Ironically, no one is wounded, as the bigot gun dealer had maliciously supplied the Iranians with blanks.) The Gun and the Iranian drive back to the store, and hold each other for an incredibly long time.

It could be my overactive imagination, but somehow, I could just swear that the writer/director has a major problem with firearms.

What I did not know when I went to see the film was that this film is based on an interpretation of his own experience being carjacked at gunpoint. Over time the story evolved, with his criminal attackers becoming objects of artistic sympathy, even lovers of foreign films:

....[B]eing white and newly privileged, I would gladly have bought a home north of the divide without a second thought; we just couldn't afford one. And as our sprawling Spanish home was five times the size of our former North Hollywood bungalow, we had no complaints. It was a great house. And if we hadn't stopped off at a video store that night, we would never even have had to change the locks.

I can't recall whose idea it was, probably mine. Having an addictive personality, I find if one movie is good, two can only be better—so we parked on a side street and ran into our local Blockbuster in search of a companion piece for Jonathan Demme and Ted Tally's terrifying fable. As this was a ritual we practiced several times a week, the pickings were thin and we finally chose what I remember to be a Norwegian or perhaps Finnish film quite well reviewed by a less prominent mid-western paper.

The Porsche was a convertible, with something akin to a picnic table protruding from the rear engine compartment. A "whale tale" is how enthusiasts describe it. Less enthusiastic people suggested it would look better draped in a red and white checkered cloth. I was not one of those people. It was my first expensive car; in truth, my first new car since my dad bought me a 1974 Ford Ranchero. The Ranchero rusted until replaced by a used Chevy Nova, which drove bravely until I adopted a three-year-old Alpha Romeo. I loved my new Porsche.

So, all things considered, I would really rather not have given it to the two young black men who approached us with guns, but their argument, while simple, was compelling.

As I turned over the keys, they suggested Diane and I walk toward the dark parking lot. I thought this ill-advised, so putting Diane in front of me, we walked briskly toward the well-lit boulevard. "Stop," came the command. I froze—heard footsteps running up behind us—felt the gun barrel pressed into my back—and watched helplessly as he…snatched the video tape out of Diane's hand. The passenger door slammed and my Porsche disappeared around the corner.

I almost started laughing.

The police arrived within moments. After describing the car and what we remembered of our assailants, I then passed along my theory of the crime. I believed, I said, that these two young men had come to the store often, each time in search of that particular video, and it was never in. This time they arrived only to see us leaving with it, and it was just too much to bear. They grabbed the video and took the car to make a getaway. Realizing I was most likely in shock, the officers kindly nodded and drove us the three blocks to our home; which is when we realized that the car thieves had our address and house keys. We called a locksmith and paid them after-midnight rates to change all the locks.

Ten years later, I woke up at two in the morning wondering about those young men. I'd thought about them before. Fear long ago gave way to anger. Anger faded and became curiosity. Who were these guys? Did they think of themselves as criminals? What did they care about, laugh about? How had this incident affected their lives, if at all?

I began writing their story. Diane and I became fictional characters, our midnight locksmith became a Hispanic kid with troubling tattoos, and I let my fears and hopes and prejudices and dreams for a better world run loose. Bobby Moresco and I wrote the script and I shot it last year, staging the car jacking scene much like it happened. But, upon viewing it in the editing room, I realized what I'd known all along. The performances were good, but the act itself was so ridiculous as to be unbelievable. So the genesis of the film ended up on the cutting room floor. Well, they still steal the car, but no self-respecting car thieves would stop to grab a Norwegian movie. Some things are better left for real life.

It's an odd life we live in Los Angeles, a city that uses freeways and wide boulevards to divide people by race and class. We spend most of our time encased in metal and glass; in our homes, our cars, at work. Unlike any real city, we only walk where "it's safe"—those outdoor malls and ersatz city blocks we've created to feel like we're still part of humanity, if only humanity could afford to shop where we do. We no longer truly feel the touch of strangers as we brush past them on the street.

Don Cheadle's character sums it up in the first moments of the film. "I think we miss that touch so much," he says, "that we crash into one another just to feel something." And it's those moments, those slim yet defining moments, that often take us to places we'd not seen coming, making us into who we are, for better or for worse. My car, the one I'd worked so hard for, was taken from me—but it was the young men who brushed against my life that I never forgot. Fifteen years after the fact, I still feel their touch.

Paul Haggis can't remember the faces of the L.A. punks who carjacked his white convertible Porsche in 1991, but he'll never forget the guns they used. "Snub-nosed .38s," says the screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby, who now owns a Mini Cooper and three Toyota Priuses. "When the barrel is three inches from your face, it's tough to forget."

Haggis has written the horrifying experience into his directorial debut, Crash -- a film about race relations in L.A. (the ensemble cast includes Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon). But what does this 52-year-old guy who grew up in London, Ont., know about racism?

According to Haggis, September 11 was what finally gave him "focus."

When September 11, 2001 arrived, Haggis finally found his focus. "I'd seen what happened," he says reaching for the ashtray in a Toronto hotel suite. "And I'd seen our President say that the only thing you can do is watch out for suspicious people." Haggis, a social activist on the board of a number of organizations promoting non-violence, literacy and environmentalism, pauses and feigns a stunned look. "All I know are suspicious people! Look at me, I'm suspicious as you get. And I thought, `That's what we're supposed to do as a nation?'" In Crash, all the characters a gripped by this vague but insinuating fear, and all it takes to stir it are a series of random incidents: a carjacking, a car accident, a robbery, a sexual assault. But when that fear manifests itself, the form it most frequently takes is racism. A robbery victim lashes out at the Hispanic locksmith sent to her home. A cop insults the black hospital official who declines to admit his ailing father. A white gun-shop owner refuses to sell a firearm to a man he's convinced is a terrorist. Fear is the boil these incidents prick, and racism is what spurts out.

As it is, I am far too busy this weekend with out of town visitors to give this film the attention I should.

It deserves a sound fisking, by reviewers more serious than I.

Like Crash and Fizzle by David Edelstein.

All the coincidences—there are more, involving Persian and Chinese families—make for one economical narrative: Haggis wants to distill all the resentment and hypocrisy among races into a fierce parable. But the old-fashioned carpentry (evocative of '30s socially conscious melodrama) makes this portrait of How We Live Now seem preposterous at every turn. A universe in which we're all racist puppets is finally just as simpleminded and predictable as one in which we're all smiling multicolored zombies in a rainbow coalition. It's strange, but I came out of Crash feeling better about race relations—not because of anything in the screenplay, but because of the spectacle of all those terrific actors (of all those races) working together and giving such potentially laughable material their best shot. And, really, whites in L.A. are at one another's throats all the time, too.

But I thought laughter was disrespectful....

UPDATE: Laughter is disrespectful.