Everyone's visiting Boston this weekend. Today my mom flew in after being in Cleveland for a couple of days--my sister the MD was there along with KK for a friend's wedding, so my mom went along to help take care of the niece, but she also went to the wedding and the reception. Haha the niece likes to talk on the phone. Anyways, this afternoon we tagged along as Fujian Gal did her errands; first she went to Verizon over on Boylston to get her phone fixed--they merely replaced certain parts with parts from another phone, rather than exchanging phones with her. Then we went to the Wrentham outlets, which was packed with people today. How sad, spending a day consuming. Fujian Gal picked up some nice suits over at Benetton, plus some shirts at Ann Taylor. For dinner we went to El Cafetal--Sarge missed out tonight.
Later I went with Fujian Gal to see World Trade Center. I pretty much agree with the critiques of the movie--see, for example, Steven Greydanus or John Mark Butterworth. It is difficult to make a movie about 9/11 and the WTC with a happy ending, and not have it sentimental. A documentary making full use of news coverage from that day would have had a bigger impact on me, I think, especially because of the horror of re-watching the sad events of that day. Would it that be merely for the sake of reliving those feelings though without a care for those who died? Would that be disrespectful to the victims? Or would it be like the horror one feels when one watches the aliens decimate the population of New Jersey in War of the Worlds? Is there any good for which one could invoke that feeling? Sigh. I'm not sure.
Mencius talks about feeling pity for others as the root of morality. Can we say that a movie like World Trade Center at least makes us feel pity?
3 comments:
Did you see any similarity between WTC and War of the Worlds? I thought that the latter, among its many flaws, was marred by Spielberg's signature dependence on crude metaphors to set the mood.
Tragedy without personal loss is little more than spectacle, the mark of the pre-9/11 disaster movie. Example: Titanic, which created a few focus characters and populated the rest of the titular ship with little more than stereotypes. In the end, people think about the love story and "that guy who fell off the ship and bounced off the propeller."
I'm hard-pressed to think of a film that effectively captures the monumental sense of loss and disillusionment that comes with a real-life tragedy... maybe A Night To Remember? I still haven't seen Deep Impact. With Hollywood, it's a tough sell to make a movie where everybody dies in the end.
Hrm similarity between the too... nothing overt. On the level of emotional maniuplation perhaps. War of the Worlds had a greater impact on me because it featured more deaths on screen. WTC on the other hand was very subdued; perhaps it was because one was watching a fictional re-creation using footage from that day, and so it wasn't the same as watching it happen on TV.
With recent natural disaster movies, one shows the tidal wave, etc. swallowing up people, but one did not get much of that in World Trade Center, except for the emergency workers in the lobby? of building 5 and 2 cops getting buried in rubble.
Maybe I rely too much on obvious visual depiction of death.
Personally, I found WOTW a movie very hard to take seriously: it had more death on screen, but what death it had was cartoonish (the heat rays feeling fanciful in a Mars Attacks kind of way) or perpetrated against people who in some way 'had it coming' -- the crazed mobs in the ferry town, the soldiers lining up to be fried because that's what soldiers do, etc. The focus characters were all unbearable -- the irresponsible dad, the spoiled neurotic daughter, and the attention-deficient hotheaded son -- and defy the audience to empathize with them.
Stuff like the church getting split in half down the middle broke the fourth wall, as every frame seemed to be Spielberg yelling "This is symbolic!" at the audience. The "Boston is Heaven" ending made all the carnage leading up to it meaningless -- how many would have survived if there were more dads trying to bond with their sociopathic children?
Disaster movies are pretty much broken as far as holding up a prism to how society deals with tragedy and loss -- they end up being about killing only those without names.
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