The hands-down quote of the day comes from David Cronenberg. The filmmaker was recently asked how he felt about Paul Haggis naming his “race relations are hard” Oscar winner Crash less than a decade after Cronenberg released his own film, about car crash fetishists, with the same title. According to IMDB, there were at least five films called Crash before Cronenbeg’s, but his, based on a J.G. Ballard book of the same name, was certainly the most well-known. And according to the New York Post, Cronenberg thinks Haggis plagiarized on purpose:

I’ve told [him] that he was a [bleep]hole basically for doing that. And so have many other people. It’s very disrespectful, not only to me, but to J.G. Ballard, who wrote the book . . . I made my movie . . . in a very respectful way. Haggis just co- opted the title, and he knew what he was doing.

Did he, though? Could Haggis have really thought that the titular confusion would *help* his movie? I guess there could have been a cunning plot afoot, but I don’t want to give Haggis too much credit.