In this game the most committed wins.
Viewed through a post-9/11 prism, Edward Zwick’s The Siege seems at times both impossibly naïve and uncomfortably prescient. Ultimately, however, this movie is more effective as postulation than it is as a narrative, smarter about its subject matter than about its story. Whatever points it scores are undermined by shallow, clichéd characters and a stock, predictable ending.
We prepared for everything. Not for this.
Okay, admit it. When you heard that Oliver Stone was going to make a movie about the events of September 11, 2001, a lot of you rolled your eyes and thought, “Oh, my God, what’s he going to do now?” Was he going to have Richard Nixon rising from the grave to plant explosives in the twin towers? How were the Grassy Knoll gunmen who killed John Kennedy involved? And how did it all tie back to the Vietnam War?
Surprise. (more…)
Right then and there I knew it was going to be the worst day of my life as a firefighter.
If Tuesday, September 11, 2001 had been an ordinary day, you might have stumbled across the work of brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet, a documentary about the first nine months in the career of a probationary firefighter, on some basic cable channel like Discovery or the The Learning Channel.
On that morning, Jules, the least experienced camera operator, was tagging along with the battalion chief, Joseph Pfeifer, as he investigated a gas leak, just to get some practice with their video camera. The sound of a low flying jet caught his attention and Jules tilted his camera up in time to see American Airlines Flight 11 plow into the side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Everyone just pretend to be normal.
In a strange way, Little Miss Sunshine is the film that The Royal Tenenbaums could have been. Both movies focus on extended families who are dysfunctional to a comic extreme. But while the rich but unhappy family in Wes Anderson’s film often just seemed annoyingly arch, little Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin) and her thoroughly middle-class Albuquerque household are sympathetic, full-blooded characters.
Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.
Steven Spielberg’s lengthy rumination about the effects of revenge as a response to terrorism succeeds on the level of a thriller but falls short of its larger goals. Seeking to be evenhanded, Munich ultimately sags under the weight of its own equivocation.
