And no one has yet answered the question, for me, at least, of why we should need or want pseudo-reviewers who ask why we should need or want - just yet - movies about 21st Century Atrocities: Act I.

Just yet?

Should we wait a generation and a half, suppress and withhold - as for example Nazi documentation this week released - this week! - and ban 9/11 films?

When a critic wonders why the subject of her criticism is needed or wanted, she should just shut the fuck up and pass the job on to someone who understands.

Give us information or give us death.

Just a bit off the subject, but it never occurred to me that Spike Lee"s "25th Hour" had anything to do with 9/11, other than that it takes place in New York sometime after Sept. 11, 2001, as do many movies.

Oliver Stone is an egomaniacal hack, and the only thing more obvious than his contempt for his audience is his tin ear for dialogue.

Alexander was a farce, and this film is just mocked-up snuff porn with a swelling soundtrack.

He's an example of everything that's wrong with "serious" mainstream American film.

No seriously. We need to get past this hero dealth cult worship. Not all dead/injured people are heros. Most of the annointed saints of 911 were in fact ordinary people who didn't know what was happening and couldn't do anything about it. 99.99% of Americans were not really involved in it in any way and 'harrowing' is really in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? I mean if by 'harrowing' you mean sitting in your office watching TV and crashing CNN's website - ok that was harrowing. It particularly sucked if you were flying that day and had to figure out some other way to get home.

But let's face facts. 9/11 has been merchandised about as far as it's going. The widdows and orphans are milionaires, the statues have been cast, the flags and ribbon magnets and whatnot and America can get back to thinking about NYC what it believed on 9-10, that NYC is largely a hated collection of commies, queers, foreigners, liberals, lesbians, artists, Jews, black people and other undesireables.

So I would have done it like a comedy. MMMmaybe a dark comedy.

What a tired and lame rant - you can put on your good lefty beret now, sir - while the rest of us appreciate what 9/11 was - a moment of intense grief for NY and America: your comparisons to WWII and European and African atrocities - not to mention Iraq, are so dimwitted and weak they hardly deserve comment except to say that, yes, we are entitled to our own history, our own pain and our own atrocities - can you imagine what the reaction might've been if people (like you) dismissed Rawanda's misery as petty on the scale of barbarities...

gee, only 800,000 killed by their neighbors - didn't that Stalin fellow take down 20 million? What have THEY got to grieve about... (and they even made movies...)

i didn't see united 93, and i won't see this film, but i read this piece out of curiosity about what a salon writer would have to say about wtc (should be called wtc: the movie!). anyway, while reading it, i thought about whether we'll ever get to a point where someone can make a meaningful (non-doc) film that deals with 9/11/01, which immediately put me in mind of hiroshima mon amour, one of my favorite films, which was made (or released, anyway) 14 years after the bomb was dropped on hiroshima. regardless of the extent to which the film "deals with" the dropping of the bomb, i can say that it doesn't strike me as exploitative or cheap, even though it equates (or compares/contrasts) the fallout of an adulterous affair (to be reductive about it) with an unspeakable act of mass murder. anyway, i don't know when we'll get to the point where 9/11/01 can be used as context in a film (and of course, it is significant that in the case of hiroshima mon amour, the director was french, rather than american or japanese; perhaps a filmmaker with some cultural remove from nyc circa 9/11/01 will be better equipped to capture and frame this historical event), but i'm sure we'll eventually get to a point where the opinion that cinematic art cannot be made with respect to 9/11/01 will not seem self-evident. of course, the fact that many of us experienced the events of that day via television makes us resistant to filmic treatment of the attack, but there's a lot more to "9/11" than planes crashing into highrise buildings.

i remember, in the late months of 2001, wondering when our best writers and artists would speak up about (and, more importantly, make art dealing with) what happened that day, and what happened after that day--remember the silence that followed 9/11/01? eventually, of course, the tacky 9-11 emergency tagline became common terminology, and the tragedy was transformed into a rallying cry for consumerism (if you don't shop, the terrorists have won), and the temporary moratorium on marketing the disaster was lifted. on the other hand, we're not so nervous about talking it over anymore, and that's a good thing (even if we're jaded about discussing the matter). if all we could say about it was "never forget," revenge fantasies really would take the place of remembrance and understanding (remember when "why do they hate us" was supposed to be an unanswerable question?).

anyway, i'm sure there already have been some interesting cinematic responses to 9/11/01 that i'm not aware of; i'll getr on that, but i thought i'd drop a few cents here in the meanwhile.

your

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Lefty the reality based Engineer had some interesting points in background and I thank him for his or her thoughtful thoughts. Funny, I had not had enough thoughtful thoughts myself about the plain success of the evacuation. Lefty is right, they did get a lot of our people out of there.

As far as all of this Joan Walsh shit goes, what in the fuck are you talking about, Cupid? Some old lava from "The Well"?

Who the fuck cares what you you think of Joan Walsh and what does any of that have to do with this review?

Joan, I blow you kisses for every sting from every loveless, unintelligible, cupid. Let them heal your skin.

Stepanie Zacharek is the most unpredictable and nuanced film critic in the USA, and an unfailing delight to read.

This review was no exception.