Posted 4:46 PM by Gene

We suspect a certain movie that just opened will be a sleeper hit; LUKE SPIELBERG's D-Day theme park and WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!!!!! THE JESUS SLASHER MOVIE taught the movie S&M phreaks that intellectual castor oil is palatable. Possibly people will come out of a misplaced obligation to back the victims, which surely isn't a bad thing; but then con-SER-va-tives have rallied round this flag, noisily rallying round it, me-me-me rallying round it, and GE BANCORP and REALTY knows it; it can't stop plugging the thing on NEWSMAX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! George Will and the Kraut have their oozing execrable pop-cultyure-slumming tributes in the hard drive. We wonder if some people may not know better. Our favorite flack Rog boasts of all the celebs that showed at the premiere, like "Tom Selleck, Steve and Jo Buscemi, Tony Bennett, Marcia Gay Harden, Scott Glenn, Barbara Kopple, Drew Nieporent and Damon Dash" [!!!!!], but not Honorary Mayor Mike -- or Rudy. (This suggests Lloyd Grove was right when he said GE B&R had to "scramble" to get people to see it.) That absence may say something -- not with Honorary, who proves money may not equal brains and certainly does not equal sense. But Rudy lived it. He was it. He must sense anything however well-intentioned can be at best well-intentioned. This is an almost-rote recreation, and no matter how well disguised they are these are ac-TORS, and they'll inflect like ac-TORS, ruining the verisimilitude. We are told this is unsentimental, which dramatically may be for the good; but being a literal recreation it must end as the original did, offering no solace or hope. We don't want the cavalry to the rescue, but neither do we want the slough of despond. And this film goes there. Some have called this a masterpiece; I call this moral evasion.

Then there's the question of its provenance. No recreation of 9/11, however well-meaning, or well-acted, or well-directed, can conquer it. This is the same biz that panders to under-17s with violent porno, and hides trembling under the desk at the sight of a Muslim, screaming for mercy. How can we trust such an industry to tell the truth? Why does an industry so gleeful over violent death suddenly go so serious and solemn and teary-eyed and mortal over this? How can we believe one word of them?

And we must also ask, do we need it? 9/11 was nuclear war with jet fuel. The behaviors of 9/11 are the behaviors of global conflagration. The next 9/11 may be our last. Television rendered movies like this superfluous. Moreover it opens a wound that, judging from some reactions, hasn't reached the scab phase yet. That does not say much for our supposed national fortitude.

And when MMMMMMMMMMMMMM-IIIIIIIIIIIIII-THREEEEEEEEEEE debuts next week, with a fiery blast catapulting THE SON OF GOD 10,000 feet while he assumes a position suitable for lying on a futon and calmly dials his SPRINT (or whoever paid for the ad) cellphone to call in the Air Force, whose jet fighters swoosh under him and take out the bad guys (who most assuredly will NOT be Muslim) with not so much as a bone fragment (this is PG-13), and when he lands splat stomach first atop a moving big rig, and calmly dusts himself off, neither him nor the big rig suffering a scratch, we will know then for all time this was a well-intended fraud.

(We note too that Rog must have sensed this was a downer and has changed the contents. He's a shrewd marketer too.)