Culturally important?

I got back from a business trip to Seattle. Ended up not even getting straight home...as I was hitting Chehalis my phone started ringing. By the time it was done I had somehow agreed to go to a flick with my brother and friends. We went to Sahara.
One of the previews was fairly strange. It gave no inkling as to the story...is it a drama, a crime, an action....what is it? It looks like the type of thing that I have no interest in. I did not like the camera work, the mise-en-scen was a little more bare than I typically prefer, the colors were fairly dark...in many ways it seems a bleak, dark melodrama.
With that said...as I said to Ken while he was waiting for Stanica to come out of the lgr...it is one of those movies you will have want to have SAID you saw. I think it will be a culturally important thing that people who do not see will regret.
Those films come along on occasion. They are sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes harder to place.
An early example would be Birth of a Nation. It was important for two reasons;First, it was the birth of the feature length film. Griffith did a masterful job of storytelling in an era where many of the conventions we take for granted when we watch a movie today were still being developed or refined...largely by him. Second, many people credit Birth for restarting the Ku Klux Klan. Obviously, I would argue that was a negative effect.
Other films that were culturally important include Gone With the Wind (often cited as the movie that broke profanity into the mainstream movie), Casablanca, Citizen Kane (if you are unaware of the indictment of certain media moguls the film will make much less sense), and the beat goes on.
The 50s and 60s were rife with cinema of vast cultural import...movies that produced talking points to open necessary discourse, etc. The 70s produced the epic Star Wars which people still reference with regularity...it may not have had the same impact or social importance of something like Little Big Man in the lines of making a political statement, but it is hard to find a 50 - 60 year old who has ever seen a movie that will admit to not having seen it in the theatres.
Recent movies of that level of importance might include Boyz in the Hood, Blwling for Columbine, or one of the most obnoxious, inaccurate, misleading pieces of crap I have ever seen, Farenheit 911.
That movie single-handedly turned me from someone who casually disliked Michael Moore to someone who will never see anything else he produces and it nearly moved me from voting on my principles (which means none of the major candidates) into throwing the switch for a complete Republican ballot. I really, really hate being manipulated.
Furthermore, the question needs to be asked....why did he need to be so manipulative and border on outright lies? Many of the accusations were nonsensical. I lost all respect for him and a lot of respect for the majority of his supporters when I saw that crap. Bush's Brain was nearly as bad:if you have not seen it, let me sum that flick up for you: "We KNOW Karl Rove has done this, this and this...FBI investigations say otherwise and there is not one scrap of evidence, but we don't like him, we believe it, and we keep saying it so it is true."
Agitprop like that typically annoys and angers me.
Crash looks like an important cultural movie. My first reading of it has it being about inter-racial marriage and the problems that causes in a society which preaches color-blindness but divides itself over issues such as "celebrating diversity". I have already ranted about that...so moving on...
My early take is Crash has the potential to be a great movie even if it is as bad as the preview...simply because it can be an important source of opening new discourse. We will see.