The New York Observer, August 4th, 2006
Today's Post gives Cindy Adams a much-deserved page-one teaser: "WTC: Why I hate this lousy movie."
Inside, on page 14, Cindy--self-nominated as "New York's watchdog" (motion seconded! And carried!)--touches all the critical bases:
* Filmgoing experience? "Slow-moving and formulaic."
* Commercial prospects? Oliver Stone's "handlers are moving him around with a tweezer. Must be, like on that actual day itself, they, too, can smell death."
* Factual accuracy? "Goshen to Manhattan for a cop driver on an empty highway at that hour is an hour and 15....He couldn't still be driving at 6 a.m."
* The ethics of commodifying and aestheticizing the mass murder of thousands of people, thereby reinforcing the horrifying success of the terrorists in their principal aim of creating an unforgettable spectacle? "When it came to filming, the city wouldn't allow Oliver Stone to close off those streets again and again, dress them with ash and debris and personal belongings and bleeding bodies, and more screams and agonies and horror and people jumping from windows...[F]ilm crews were permitted establishing shots, skyline shots, outdoor location shots only as close as Canal Street. The rest was newsreel footage, CGI graphics and whatever real pain they could fake in the studios in L.A.....I now report these Hollywood people out for a buck should have left us alone."
Cf. David Denby in the New Yorker, calling United 93 "a hundred percent professional filmmaking" and "true existential filmmaking," in the belief that settles anything.
Plus, a restaurant manager kissed her! And a waiter!
Today's score:
Five Yorkies!
