Oliver Stone's 9/11 flick: just thinking about it gives me a headache

dan — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 11:48:38 +0100

When eloquent critics really, really hate something, it's always worth reading. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian today:

We intercut between this Stygian nightmare of dullness and the fraught drama of the lip-quivering womenfolk, and these people are like nothing on earth... These sleek Hollywood showponies are about as far from real human beings as Earth is from Alpha Centauri: they look like L'Oreal models in peril, twittering and wittering as the guys pull up outside in their squad cars and station wagons.

What a shaming spectacle. In this paper, Natasha Walter recently had a brilliant, sceptical essay, wondering if the big-hitting novelists of the English-speaking world had really done enough to imagine the terrorists' worldview. It's a good question - and one that could be asked of cinema. There have been some bold and honourable movies. Antonia Bird's The Hamburg Cell was a thrilling investigation of this subject. Paul Greengrass's United 93 was a head-on dramatic act of courage.

And Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, though deplored by many liberals who felt that complaisant fence-sitting was the more responsible approach, was a terrific polemic, and every day that goes past makes Moore look better, and his detractors more obtuse. But I fear all these movies are going to be temporarily bullied into the margins by this great big, malign village idiot of a film, which sets the bar very low, and which fatuously endorses the biggest political untruth of modern times. Just thinking about it gives me a headache.

9/11 - seared onto the retina

dan — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:16:02 +0100

It was as if the 9/11 attacks had been written in a fluorescent script with a wattage no American I knew at the time had the eyes to focus on without having his or her retinas seared. A brightly illuminated avowal of war, written in the blood of people from many countries â€” office people - settling into a dayâ€™s work on a morning marked by serene weather.

From the Blog of Rob McGann, director of a new documentary about the war on terror. It sounds very worth watching.

Covered in Bees dot Org - film

Oliver Stone's 9/11 flick: just thinking about it gives me a headache

9/11 - seared onto the retina