Let’s face it, you’re going to be innundated by all things 9/11 today, so I’m only going to second Ed Miller‘s recommendation of United 93, now available on DVD.
Despite some ongoing complaints about the characterization of a German passenger on board the flight, the film managed to do what World Trade Center and Flight 93 couldn’t—not suck.
For the last act of the film I actually felt like I was on board that fateful flight.
Wow.
So I’ve been up since 4am and am now ready to go back to bed. I’d sleep all day if I could but I’ve got an audition to get to at lunchtime. It’s to voice a computer-generated hobgoblin for a feature film called The Spiderwick Chronicles, so I don’t have to memorize any lines, which is good. But I also haven’t a clue how to voice the character, which is bad. Every voice I try in front of the mirror sounds like a weak Peter Lorre imitation, which is about as close as I can get to Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films.
If anyone has any good ideas, leave a comment below I’ll check it before I head out. If I get the gig I’ll give you a percentage!
Pity my poor travel companion… While I had the luxury of a slow, methodical packing day yesterday she was stuck in Hamilton, sweating through a twelve-hour simulated plane crash for an episode of Mayday. Originally she was set to shoot Friday and would have Saturday off to pack with me, but as it turns out the empty runway the production wanted to use at Hamilton International Airport was only available Saturday.
Why?
Because apparently none other than Captain John Travolta had to land his plane there Friday, and didn’t want any cameras or crews around. Like anyone would care.
In the words of Vinnie Barbarino: “Geez…”
If, like me, you saw Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center over the weekend, you’d probably find it hard to believe that the same guy who wrote Salvador and directed Natural Born Killers could even be capable of making such a mediocre film. Chalk it up to these scary times we live in, I guess…
Most of the reviews out there have been glowingly positive, but I suspect that’s more than anything a safety against angry readers who would confuse a bad review of the film with some kind of dismissal of the actual event.
Here’s the truth: WTC is first a mere dramatization of far more compelling documentary footage from inside Tower One, then an only slightly higher stakes version of My Dinner with André, then some really bad schmaltz on par with the retchid M.O.W. about doomed United Flight 93, then finally a feel-good happy ending teaching us that in adversity humans actually help each other… Well, I should certainly hope so!
Oh sorry, did I spoil the ending for you? You probably won’t want to read any further then…
Any film school professor will tell you that if you render your two main characters immobile underneath a pile of rubble then you’d better have some pretty compelling dialogue between them. This movie didn’t. And instead of putting the audience in the middle of the action and showing them the horror of being buried alive we inexplicably cut to the subs, where the victims’ families are at each other’s throats about petty, stupid things. I didn’t feel a lick of compassion for any of them.
I wish now more than ever I made time to see the theatrical feature about Flight 93 while it was still playing… Maybe I was fearful that it would have been just as bad—or worse, just as safe.
Lady, I know just how you feel…
Happy 666 everyone! Hollycrud is celebrating this date by releasing a remake of The Omen. The original is now thirty years old, but it seemed good enough to scare the bejesus out of me when I saw it on video some years later, and I have to say that after watching the trailers for this new version I can’t see anything especially compelling or different about it.
So for the young’uns out there, I’m wondering… Is there any specific rationale for you to see this over the original? Do movies made in the twentieth century have cooties, perhaps? Or is it that you need to see a CG Satan instead of the old-tymey alternative?
If you can’t answer this question maybe you should boycott this shameless attempt at calendar-profiteering, or at least register a complaint on the movie’s MySpace page like I’m going to do now…