I think there are movies you don’t have to see in order to hate them. “The Passion of the Christ” is certainly one of them, and from my perspective, “World Trade Center” is another. I only heard about it recently, and at first it seemed like an interesting idea. Then I saw that Oliver Stone was the director, and Michael Shamberg the producer. Uh-oh, and uh-oh. Then I read an article about the project’s history: At some point, two hugely successful female studio executives met on a street in New York, and discussed the script. One says, Oh, we must make this movie! Then, one reports that she cried when she read the script. If you don’t live in Hollywood, you may not know that “I cried!” is the stock response to any script that isn’t a comedy. You HAVE to cry; it shows how sensitive you are. You can then go ahead and pass on the project, after making sure it’s understood that you Cried.
Hollywood shit aside, I don’t want a film about September 11. It strikes me as stupid and ghoulish, and incapable of providing any insight into anything. The use of this event as entertainment of any kind is just preposterous, verging on pornography, in my opinion. But of course, I don’t approve of Holocaust movies either. The notion of actors shaving their heads and running around pretending to be in gas chambers, while people watching them do this eat popcorn, is just outrageous to me. If you need to be “educated” watch a newsreel or “Shoah”. Likewise, the cataclysmic deaths of so many people, on September 11, should not be fodder for entertainment, and certainly not in the form of a schlocky studio film by Oliver Stone.
On September 11, I was awakened by my best friend, who was watching TV. She knew my son worked at the World Trade Center, for a snooty investment company. For the next three hours, I sobbed and tried to call New York. I watched the news on the internet and all I could think about was finding my child. Life could not go on without him, I kept thinking in my panic. Finally, his friend’s mom called to report that my kid was okay. He called later, and told me how he had run for his life, and how his office in the building next to the Twin Towers had been sheared off by fire.
My great sense of relief was soon followed by tremendous guilt. This was pretty common, I hear. It’s terrible to realize how many other moms didn’t get good news that day. I still don’t know to what extent my son has been affected by his experience. I can’t think of anything more traumatizing, outside of war.
I don’t see how anyone would want to make a film that focuses on the “bright side” of September 11. Courage and compassion are beautiful traits, but should not be celebrated in the context of a feel-good movie that exists to enrich the director and producers, all of whom could already afford to feed the greater part of Africa. I hate these guys for personal reasons and political ones (aesthetic ones, too.) But I’d hate this movie no matter who made it. It underscores everything that Muslim Fundamentalists think about us Infidels: Nothing is sacred, nothing. At least, not if there’s some money to be made.
Too bad Oliver Stone wimped out on the conspiracy angle
you know the truth is i get upset and cry just seeing the previews. i don’t mean that in a maudlin way, so shoot me if anyone thinks i’m just histrionic, i don’t seek this stuff out and it pisses me off that i go in to see something like superman and i have to sit through these previews without warning. i mean it’s a horrible, horrible thing that happened and there is something wrong with me because i have a very difficult time distancing myself from any of these events, not to disrespect the people who actually had to live it, but i can’t watch anything to do with any of 9/11 without automatically putting myself in their place and it totally fucks me up. and i don’t really give a shit if the families of the people who died gave it their blessing or not, it’s just fucking demeaning to make it in to a spectacle. it’s like that asshole filming people committing suicide, and not to reduce what happened on that plane to committing suicide at all, that is not my meaning, but it should not ever be entertainment, it should not ever be the object of some kind of twisted voyeuristic fascination. pornographic is the right word exactly. sadomasochistic might be another – on the part of the audience. if it were me and i thought someone was getting some kind of twisted form of entertainment from watching my agony and fear i’d want to hurt them bad. the ones that decided to fight, i got nothing but respect for them, and that’s why i’ll never see this movie. i don’t need to try to capture some part of it by reliving it from some unreal point of safety to get it. dying is private, facing death is not something that can be approximated, being trapped on a plane with death imminent is pretty traumatizing, so there is really no way any film could do it justice without doing serious damage to the audience, and i kinda doubt folks would be interested if that were the case, so you know they are just there to get just that cathartic experience and convert something that was too real into something digestable and sanitized and manageable, which is really a way of sweeping it under the carpet. fuck’m.