Keyword Archive:
September 11

No End in Sight (2007)

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
★★★★★

Are you telling me that’s the best America can do?

I have a feeling that a lot of trouble could have been avoided if our current president had just asked his father one simple question. “Dad,” he could have asked, “exactly why did you leave a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein in power after the 1991 Gulf War?” Bush 41 could have gone on to explain how they foresaw that power vacuum in Iraq could leave the country in a state of sectarian chaos and Iran as the sole regional power.

No End in Sight

We wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?

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A Mighty Heart (2007)

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
★★★★★

I am not terrorized. You can’t be terrorized.

Despite its Hallmark Hall of Fame title, A Mighty Heart is a spare, unblinking look at the last days of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl through eyes of his wife, Mariane, and those who desperately tried to find him after he was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. With a subject just asking to be sensationalized, director Michael Winterbottom’s matter-of-fact documentary-style approach is not only much more effective, it’s downright commendable.

A Mighty Heart

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World Trade Center (2006)

Saturday, September 8th, 2007
★★★★★

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?

World Trade Center

Surprise. (more…)

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9/11 (2002)

Friday, September 7th, 2007
★★★★★

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.

9/11

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.

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United 93 (2006)

Monday, October 9th, 2006
★★★★★

Of the four aircraft hijacked that day, United 93 was the only one that did not reach its target. It crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03am. No one survived.

Despite the highly speculative nature of the scenes set aboard the ill-fated flight, nothing about Paul Greengrass’s United 93 rings false. The heroics of the titular plane’s doomed passengers are not hyped-up or Rambo-ized, but carry a sufficiently believable air of fear and desperation to let you believe that, if it didn’t happen exactly this way, the real events were not far off.

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