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Before
the fall: Nicolas Cage as cop John McLoughlin in World
Trade Center.
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Day
of Infamy
By
Laura Leon World Trade Center
Directed by Oliver Stone
The best thing about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center is
that it avoids the political aspects of the worst day in our
nation’s history. The worst thing about the movie is that,
in paying tribute to the terror, the heroism and the seemingly
untenable hope of that day, it is more sentimental, more standard
Big Picture, than gritty drama. Then again, it’s awfully hard
to wring what we think of as “drama” from two guys stuck for
a very long time in a mountain of twisted metal, concrete
slabs and hissing wires.
While Stone seems at the outset an odd choice to make what
is essentially a memorial about what has become a highly politicized
and polarizing event, he brings an uncanny ability to evoke
the powerful emotions surrounding the actual day itself. Here
we have the business-as-usual activities of a lovely late-summer
workday, and the initial confusing details and our collective
inability to comprehend, initially, the horror of what actually
had occurred. Stone and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey are
at their best in re- creating what it was like before words
like “bioterrorism” and “homeland security” became branded
into our psyches, most notably by small moments involving
Port Authority cops John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will
Jimeno (Michael Peña) as they get ready to start their shifts.
When a small band of New York’s finest prepare to enter the
first tower, the audience senses their feelings of responsibility,
fear and nervousness, especially as McLoughlin, the seasoned
veteran who lived through the ’93 attack, casts uneasy glances
at the concrete and glass monolith towering over and above
them. Various cops and emergency workers pass rumors back
and forth, adding to the anxious feeling, and I’ll admit,
for the first and only time since 9/11, I myself got that
horrible queasiness, the fear of the unknown.
The actual tumbling down of the building in which McLoughlin
and Jimeno become trapped is terrifying, and yet somehow it
avoids the pyrotechnics of movies whose stock-in-trade such
devastation is. This happens relatively early in the film,
so that the vast majority of screen time is spent watching
the two cops try to keep each other awake and alive, mostly
through talking about family and work, intercut with scenes
of their wives’ valiant struggles to stay sane in the face
of no news. Donna McLoughlin (Maria Bello), a gruff mother
of four, focuses on household chores until snapping at a police
sergeant “He gave you 21 years, and you can’t tell me where
he is?” Allison Jimeno (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is more spindly,
the tautness of her skinny limbs and tight nerves at odds
with her pregnant belly; she seems unable to sit still, even
if it means bolting out of a car rather than waiting out a
red light. For both women, family and friends try to offer
solace and strength, but the waiting, the unknown, is too
all-powerful. Not surprisingly, their scenes are the ones
fraught with the most tension and dimension.
Meanwhile, in the rubble, the flashbacks to McLoughlin’s and
Jimeno’s respective times with their wives focuses exclusively
on the happy ones. This is something I found unbelievable;
it detracts, if only slightly, from the situation. Surely,
in such an instance, wouldn’t you have at least one remembrance
of an argument, something in retrospect you wish you hadn’t
said or done, that you’d give anything to make up for? This
omission gives the story a bit of a one-note treatment, as
if showing us anything else might make the cops less than
worthy of our commitment. It goes without saying—just read
the movie posters—that McLoughlin and Jimeno survive, and
that survival, not to mention the staggering amount of work
combined with some sheer luck that lead to it, is indeed worthy
of commemorating.
Stone’s emphasis is not so much on the interior, but on the
epic: The utter shock of a nation to what happened that day
and, importantly, the sense of love that carried through,
at least until George W. Bush decided to use 9/11 as the springboard
for a war that bankrupted much of that good feeling we’d received
in light of the tragedies. The filmmakers pay enormous tribute
to the rescue workers whose tireless efforts, usually in claustrophobic,
highly dangerous settings, resulted in 20 people being pulled
from the wreckage. As McLoughlin and Jimeno, in stretchers,
are being handed from one to another in a long brigade of
rescue workers, there is a palpable sense of simple yet profound
gratitude from both sides, a sense of deep respect for putting
their lives on the line each and every day. If I can buy a
Marine sergeant, in remarking about the deep smoke covering
much of the ruins, saying something prophetic like, “It’s
a curtain meant to shield us from that which we are not ready
to see,” I can nevertheless gripe that this same individual
gets to end the movie with “They’re going to need a few good
men to avenge this.” Such boilerplate rah-rah-isms dilute
the power of an otherwise gripping, emotionally and visually
compelling remembrance.
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Bull
Barnyard
Directed by Steve Oedekerk
Last year, I was annoyed when my fourth grader’s school had
the nurse do lessons on everything from “good touch, bad touch”
to pregnancy to HIV/AIDS, without giving parents prior notification
(or even a nice packet of information to help us old geezers
complement each message). This year, I’m annoyed that a computer-generated
animated flick like Barnyard has the audacity to suggest
that there are male milking cows with udders, and that a female
cow gives birth laying on her back. I might not be ready for
“that talk,” but I sure as hell don’t want to deliberately
miseducate them.
But there you have it. Barnyard is about a party, er, animal
named Otis (Kevin James), who has to be the, um, man of the
farm when his adopted father, an enormous steer—with udders—named
Ben (Sam Elliott) is slain by hungry coyote Dag (Dave Koechner).
That the guy who so famously intones “Beef—it’s what’s for
dinner” is here playing Black Angus almost makes the movie
worth the ticket price. I can buy the joke that the humans,
who are few and far between and except for the farmer (a vegan,
of course), are just plain gross, and can’t know that their
animals can order pizza, drive cars, play musical instruments,
and mosh with the best of them. I can deal with what is essentially
a rehash of The Lion King, with elements of The
Sopranos thrown in. But let’s do something about those
udders.
Of course, Otis will fail his first test against Dag, and
want to cower away into nothingness, but be kept from doing
so by the love of a good cow, Daisy (Courtney Cox), and the
goodwill of the whole farm. In the meantime, there are some
genuinely funny moments such as the mob-like Jersey cows (get
it?) stealing a car to seek vengeance on a youthful cow tipper,
or when the animals debate the definition of vegan. The vocal
talent is quite good, even though, once again, we have the
wiseass “don’t you mess wid me” black female character, this
time thankfully not a skunk nor even black-and-white, played
by Wanda Sykes on much the same note as her recent characterization
in Over the Hedge. The overall look is jarring, the
animals being reminiscent of those strangely popular Playmobil
figurines with their rectangular heads and smooth, plastic
surfaces. That is, when they’re not looking downright archaic,
like an image copped off a ’70s-era Golden Book. Despite occasional
flashes of originality and humor, Barnyard comes across
as a slapped-together undertaking, a scattershot pitch for
a Saturday morning cartoon. Something tells me that’s where
this is headed.
—Laura
Leon
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