Sneak Peak Review
Aint It Cool News has posted a sneak-peak review of the as yet unfinished Oliver Stone film, "World Trade Center":
"It's strictly TV-movie-of-the-week level, this one. A bunch of decent actors flail around trying to say lines that no one should ever have to try to say with a straight face, and Oliver Stone directs the whole with a sort of plodding determination NOT to be provocative . . . Here we have one of the most dramatic and moving experiences in modern history, and the movie manages to take all of those real images and all of those real stories and produce exactly NO real moments of emotion or truth. I actually kind of liked the trailer and was expecting a sort of big emotional cathartic event. But the movie manages to suck all of the life out of the true story, and only ever manages to squeak together any moment of epiphany toward the end with a Nicholas Cage voiceover TELLING us what we're supposed to take away."
I have a feeling that there's a good reason why movies about Vietnam didn't really start to resonate with the mainstream consciousness until well into the nineteen-eighties ("The Deer Hunter" notwithstanding). "Platoon" achieved its significance precisely because it was filmed fifteen plus years after the actual events, and can you imagine "The Bridge Over the River Kwai" if it had been rushed to production in 1947 instead of being released in 1957, twelve years after the end of the second World War?
Besides, there's something cynical and unseemly about the whole exercise of filming supposedly cathartic movies about a painful sociopolitical event and then asking people to pony up their dollars to "experience" it. No matter how respectful people say "United 93" was, it was still a film that was put out into the marketplace to generate a profit off the fear and pain of a still raw American psyche, and really, how respectful is that?
I can understand the temptation that 9/11 must offer Hollywood -- a huge event beyond imagining, striking visual imagery, a New York City backdrop and truly insane villains, but what the Hollywood studio-heads don't seem to understand is that a 9/11 film could only be a blockbusting, popcorn munching extravaganza if 9/11 didn't actually happen . . .