Sunday, May 07, 2006
Watch United 93
My day converged harmonically, and compelled me to go to the movies this afternoon.
Last night, I put up a short note celebrating the brief detention of five innocent men. On a flight into Newark, passengers had spotted four Angolans and an Israeli with flight instruction materials, speaking a foreign language (one might well wonder what foreign language, but that's another matter). My observation was that Americans are still vigilent, almost five years after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Glenn linked back from one of his "A pack, not a herd" posts, which included a link to George Will's essay arguing that it was our "civic duty" to see United 93. Then, I stumbled across a post at Sabbah's Blog, detailing the imprisonment of one of Egypt's most prominant bloggers, which post reminded me that we still have a lot to do. Finally, and most importantly, it turned out that I had the afternoon off, the rest of my family riding horses and playing Dungeons and Dragons and who knows what else.
So I decided that even if it wasn't my civic duty to see United 93, I should catch the 2:45 show at the Princeton Garden theater on Nassau Street.
It was the most powerful movie I have seen in a very long time. Duty or not, you want to see this film in the theater. Paul Greengrass, the writer, director and producer of the film, is a genius. George Will nailed it in his review:
[Greengrass] imported into Hollywood the commodity most foreign to it: good taste. This is especially shown in the ensemble of unknown character actors and non-actors who play roles they know -- a real pilot plays the pilot, a former flight attendant plays the head flight attendant -- and several persons who play on screen the roles they played on Sept. 11.
Greengrass's scrupulosity is evident in the movie's conscientious, minimal and minimally speculative departures from the facts about the flight painstakingly assembled for the Sept. 11 commission report. This is emphatically not a "docudrama" like Oliver Stone's execrable "JFK," which was "history" as a form of literary looting in which the filmmaker used just enough facts to lend a patina of specious authenticity to tendentious political ax-grinding.
Agreed. Here is a compendium of links to reviews, almost all of which praise the film, as a film.
Make the time to see it on the big screen.
1 Comments:
By 
Cardinalpark, at
Mon May 08, 09:24:00 AM:
Just don't read Frank Rich's idiotic piece in the NYT on it.
