Letters to the Editor
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TOO SOON
That's it. TOO SOON.
Even the trailers make me sick.
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What about Mark?
I read Stephanie Zacharek's review hoping to know how the movie portrayed Mark Bingham, but no mention of Mark.
"Now you cannot change this
And you can't erase this
You can't pretend this is not the truth"
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Bloody Americans
I find it ironic, that Americans whose government
commits atrocities on a daily basis get so worked
up over a "political" film.
3,000 people died, how many have your government
murdered in Iraq???
You are spoiled.
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Hmmm.
I don't know if it's enough to say "that film disturbs me, so what is the value in its art?"
Just because it disturbs you MUCH more than, say, "American Psycho", doesn't mean that it is valueless as art. Art is not obligated to give you a specific feeling. In fact, if you're driven to question whether something is art or is valuable as art, then it is and it is, in my estimation.
All silly art posturing aside, the film needs to be shown, and it needs to be seen. Why? Because we need to see what Flight 93 did, both for themselves and for us. We need to remember them. We need to know why we go on. We need to know what we're fighting for, if anything, in this psychotic "War on Terror". Most people probably won't want to see this film, and that's their right. (I walked out of "American Psycho", for example.) But unlike that dumb chainsaw-wielding romp through the greed culture of 1980's Wall Street, this movie is about something that is real, and that touched all our lives.
All this hand-wringing strikes me as much more useless than the film itself.
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Motherwell...
"I can't speak with any authority about cellphone calls at umpteen-thousand-feet".
So shut up. Seems that you, as well as Steve and a few other posters, can speak with authority about what a terrorist said to a plane full of people who are now all dead. What did you do, teleport onto the plane to catch the action, realize there was a shit-storm going down and teleport safely back home -- only to report these "facts" to me in a letters column while insulting me as well? Imagine what you people could accomplish if you used your powers for good!
And then Steve chimes in with this nugget: "There was nothing, at that point, that a passenger could relay to someone on the ground that would help one bit, and the hijackers knew it."
Oh, really? Seeing as how all planes come with a GPS system and Cheney had authorized them to be shot down (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50745-2004Jun17.html) I'm pretty sure that if the proper authorities were contacted using the AirPhones (which work via satelite and were used successfully by some passengers - one would assume "on the sly") a plane could easliy be tracked, located and shot down within minutes.
I put enough caveats in my post to make it obvious that I don't know exactly what happened that day on that plane (and I certainly never put the word "alleged" in front of the word hijackers). Nobody but dead people do. But to try and make ourselves feel better by ingnoring certain known facts and their inconsistancies does everyone, including the dead, a disservice.
Where I come from adults don't blindly accept what their government says, regardless of who's running it. Maybe you're the one who needs to grow up and join the real world where our government has done enough secret crap (Iran/Conta anyone?) in the name of "justice" to make me a permanent cynic. On a monthly basis my threshold for "beyond the pale" gets extended more and more with BushCo. Anytime I think "well I guess it can't get worse": blammo!- Abu Graib (which some right-nutter blogs doubt ever happened); blammo!- Plamegate; blammo!- NSA. It's gotten so bad I don't even flinch anymore when I'm struck by this administration.
How about you Motherwell? Steve? Feel like we've seen all we're going to see? Or you just gonna get sucker-punched again and wonder why you didn't see THAT coming?
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Bloody Sunday
Ms Zacharek argues for the artistic superiority of "Bloody Sunday" as opposed to "United 93" because of its "you-are-there immediacy that dissolves the decades between then and now". Yet she complains about "artistry" that "sucks the life out of you". She complains that "while "United 93" offers a horrifyingly realistic evocation of pain and fear, it doesn't open itself out to any greater, more expansive truth. And it offers us no hope of transcendence."
Has it occurred to her that perhaps Irish and British audiences might have found that film as disturbing as "United 93" is for American audiences, or perhaps even more so?
And has it occurred to her that perhaps the point of this film is precisely that there is no greater, more expansive truth, no transcendence which can give a sense to these horrific events?
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Hey Jonathan
Your posting above was the 93rd about a review of the
movie FLIGHT 93, and it appeared on the 13th letter
page. I'm not a numerologist, but....
Let's be careful out there. Funny posting, too.
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Entertainment ............... ?
Alot of americans on this forum are working themselves up into a lather about how 'necessary' the film is and how we 'must' know what went on aboard and why ... and how the relatives of the dead were 'consulted' therefore the movie is a noble effort to memorialise 9/11
What rubbish.
Anyone who buys a ticket for this piece of trash should really look in the mirror and ask themselves why.
Americans aren't going to flock to this movie for any noble reason: They are going to be entertained. Admit it.
It is voyeurism pure and simple.
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Would that Homer had made a film
Putting tragic historical events into artistic form is a basic human drive. There was a time when the artistic version of a tragic event was the only one you would have ever gotten. Homer’s Iliad, Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, and countless other artistic tragedies came before. Today the medium has expanded but the impulse remains the same. If the artists of yesterday had cameras and film, I do believe they would have made films of the events, and would have wasted not a second in doing so. The closeness in time between an event and its telling, if not a guarantee of a more accurate depiction, nevertheless documents how we felt about it and chose to portray it at the time.