Category: Culture

    Nearly five years later, United 93 has risen from the ashes, only to return to ash all over again. United 93, Paul Greengrass’ minute- by-minute account of a flight that some have called the opening battle in the War on Terror, is as harrowing an experience as the average moviegoer could possibly ask for. Using documentary techniques that he wields with consummate skill, Greengrass puts us on board the Boeing 757, with its 44 passengers and crew members, including four Middle Eastern gentlemen who—although they’ve bought one-way, first-class tickets—arouse little suspicion. The passengers’ apathy is understandable: It’s been years since anybody hijacked an airplane, and even longer since a hijacking resulted in widespread fatalities. As the tragedy unfolds, we’re the only ones who know that these particular hijackers aren’t interested in a ransom or the release of prisoners. They want the plane itself—a guided missile, a weapon of mass destruction.
    By adding us to the passenger list, United 93 puts us in a peculiar position: We know what’s going to happen before it happens, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. This creates the exact opposite of suspense—instead, we feel an overwhelming sense of dread, as in a recurring nightmare. And you have to wonder why anybody would want to put himself through this. Wasn’t it bad enough the first time around? “Too soon!” New Yorkers reportedly yelled at the screen when the movie’s trailer ran before showings of Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Manhattanites are the hibakusha of 9/11: survivors of the closest this country’s ever come to having an atomic bomb dropped on it. But do you have to live within spitting distance of Ground Zero to ask whether it might be too soon for a movie like United 93? Might it, in some ways, always be too soon?
    That depends, in part, on what kind of movie United 93 is. To all outward appearances, it’s a docudrama—a dramatic re-enactment told almost in real time. And Greengrass has gone to extraordinary lengths to be as faithful as possible to what actually happened. But what actually happened? All we have to go on are the flight-data recorder, the cockpit voice-recorder, control-center monitoring data and transcripts of phone calls made by the passengers and crew members to family, friends and colleagues. As voluminous as that sounds, it actually provides only a sketchy account of what happened during United 93’s 84 minutes in the air. Did the passengers storm the cockpit after realizing they were on somebody else’s suicide mission? Did they down the plane? Did Todd Beamer lead the Charge of the Flight Brigade after shouting “Let’s roll!”?
    Possibly. President Bush certainly thought so, using Beamer’s lock-and-load moment as a rallying cry from here to Afghanistan and beyond. The 9/11 Commission thought not, although by then it was too late; United 93 had lifted off into the realm of myth. What at first had seemed like “that other plane that got hijacked that day” was now “The Flight That Fought Back”—the actual name of a documentary aired on the Discovery Channel last September, narrated by Kiefer Sutherland and featuring techniques—splitscreens, elapsed-time readouts—used on “24.” Acknowledging the gap between how it was and how it might have been, Sutherland called the documentary “informed speculation.” Likewise, Greengrass has claimed he was going for “a believable truth,” which is another way of saying the same thing.
    But just how many believable truths are there? One? Ten? A multitude? And how do we know where “truth” ends and “a believable truth” begins? Is this how it was on Flight 93, or is it how we want it to have been? Has Greengrass snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat, à la Schindler’s List? Does he even have an agenda? Or is he, like everybody else that day, trying to get by on a wing and a prayer?
    The movie opens with a prayer…in Arabic. Two of the hijackers, holed up in a hotel room, have begun their morning ablutions and absolutions. It would have been so easy to demonize these religious fanatics, with their shouts of “Allahu Akbar” (God is great). Instead, Greengrass humanizes them, though only enough to let us know they are human. Early on, he focuses on Ziad Jarrah, who will pilot the plane after the other terrorists have taken it over. A welldressed, well-educated young man from a well-off, well-respected Lebanese family, Ziad may have had some reservations about his mission—but did he really come close to aborting it, as he appears to do here? Or does Greengrass simply want to show us that the terrorists, though fanatically devoted to their cause, are also nervous as hell?
No one else is, of course. At first, September 11 was just another day for the passengers and crew members of Flight 93—an easy day for the crew, given that only 37 of the 182 passenger seats were taken. (“Love these light loads,” one flight attendant says to another.) And Greengrass seems mesmerized by the sheer banality of the airplane’s routine: the pre-flight checklists, the last-minute boardings, the inevitable delay, which puts United 93 on its “fourth plane” timeline. The dread, there from the beginning, slowly builds as everybody prepares for takeoff. They don’t know they’ve been recruited for a Jihad vs. McWorld showdown—although there have been hard-to-detect omens, like the word “FLAMMABLE” emblazoned on the plane’s side. And elsewhere in the sky, an American Airlines jet has veered off course.
    Greengrass splits his time between the cockpit and cabin of United 93 and the various command centers that were watching a nightmare unfold before their eyes via blips on a screen. The Tom Clancy-like jargon contributes to the reality effect, as does the use of actual airline personnel: two pilots, a flight attendant and Ben Sliney, who reprised his role as the FAA’s operations manager. (It was his first day on the job.) As for the passengers, they’re played by largely unknown actors, most of them members of New York’s theater community—a departure from the usual disaster-film practice of hiring faded movie stars. And, since Greengrass doesn’t individualize the passengers very much (he doesn’t give them character arcs, or even names), we don’t get to know them any better than they get to know each other.
    Compare that to Flight 93, A&E’s entry in the 9/11 docudrama sweepstakes, which aired in January. Though brutal by made-for-television standards, it found a silver lining in the phone conversations by which the passengers and crew first figured out what was going on, then bid adieu to their loved ones. In contrast, Greengrass doesn’t make us privy to the other sides of those conversations, safely on the ground. And it’s nice to be spared the heartstring-tugging sentimentality. Instead of a series of snapshots, like Flight 93, United 93 is a group portrait: folks caught in a situation so frantic that there’s little time to decide who’s a hero and who’s a coward, whatever that means under the circumstances. As far as this movie’s concerned, the passengers and crew were (wait for it) united in their decision to fight back.
    And maybe they were. What’s more important, as far as drawing lessons from the events of that fateful day goes, is the lack of communication among the various control centers. In their defense, few had ever imagined commercial jetliners being used as missiles. Then again, why hadn’t they? And why were so many of their debriefings courtesy of CNN? With Ben Sliney at the helm, the FAA’s command center in Herndon, Virginia, comes off smelling like a rose. And the air-traffic controllers in cities as far-flung as Cleveland seem to have had their jobs down. But the military chain of command appears to be made of paper, the links held together with glue. Who has shoot-down authority? And where are the planes to execute it? From United 93, you’d swear that Dr. Strangelove himself was in charge.
    And so it’s left to the citizen-soldiers gathered at the back of the plane to defend themselves. By this point, Greengrass has done such a masterful job of capturing the confusion spreading up and down the Eastern Seaboard—the fast-spreading fog of war—that you may not notice exactly how the rebellion arises. Yes, Todd Beamer gets his “Let’s roll”—but it’s without the exclamation point. And there’s less a sense of Americans heroically taking matters into their own hands than of cornered rats biting at the heels of those who are preparing to stomp the life out of them. Did this ragtag band of John- and Jane-Q.-Publics put together a plan and execute it? Did they storm the cockpit? Did they try to grab the controls from Ziad Jarrah, who downed the plane rather than have it taken away from him? Nobody knows for sure, hence the need for “a believable truth.”
    Still, Greengrass has been nothing if not generous in his interpretation of the available evidence. And when you think about it, what difference does it make whether this citizens brigade got inside the cockpit or not? Knowing they wanted to, and/or were about to, Ziad cancelled his flight a mere 20 minutes from Washington, D.C. Alas, he cancelled everybody else’s flight, too. But by forcing his hand, the passengers saved hundreds, if not thousands, of soccer lives. Or, as Los Angeles Times reporter Terry McDermott put it in Perfect Soldiers, his book about the 9/11 hijackers: “Flight 93’s passengers, armed with cell phones and pitchers of hot water, were able to effectively defend the nation’s capital in a way the national air-defense system could not.” President Bush, applying his reading skills to “The Pet Goat,” wasn’t the only one caught off-guard that day.
    But he’s had plenty of time to catch up, and United 93 may be just the movie he’s been looking for, because it can be read as a call to arms. The passengers and crew were, as Greengrass has said in interviews, “the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world,” having been told over the phone what happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And they didn’t exactly take the news lying down. But can this possibly be what Greengrass, who’s Irish, is up to? Rallying the troops? Strengthening our resolve? Or does he simply want to memorialize the victims, record a key moment in our country’s history? Either way, United 93 is the ultimate thrill ride—less fly-on-thewall filmmaking than fly-in-the-air filmmaking, the camera buzzing all over the place. But it’s so expertly shot and edited that we never lose track of where we are.
    And we never lose sight of where we’re going: to a newly dug grave in rural Pennsylvania. If it weren’t for the fact that Greengrass secured the approval of each and every victim’s family (not one of which has had a bad word to say about the movie), the whole thing might seem exploitative—Airport with a snuff-film ending. The difference, of course, is that Airport wasn’t based on an actual hijacking, whereas United 93 is a meticulous re-creation of one of the darkest hours in aviation history. Five years later, 9/11 is finally starting to slide from topical to historical. Yet this is the first feature film to tackle the subject head-on. It may not be ripped from the headlines, but the headlines are still so fresh in our minds, it might as well be. Everybody said 9/11 was just like a movie. Well, here’s the movie it’s just like, for better or worse.

Akeelah and the Bee (PG, 112 minutes) In case you hadn’t noticed, Hollywood is in the midst of a red-hot spelling bee craze. In the wake of Spellbound and… um, Bee Season, comes this drama about an 11-year-old girl from South Los Angeles who tries to make it to the National Spelling Bee. The story is, as expected, cute and inspirational. It’s also predictable, emotionally simplified and filled with clichés. Think The Karate Kid with a little girl taking over for Ralph Macchio, Laurence Fishburn doing the Mr. Miyagi thing, and words instead of crane kicks to the head. (Devin O’Leary) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6

American Dreamz (PG-13, 107 minutes) Paul Weitz’ satiric jab at our country’s military-entertainment complex imagines an “American Idol”-like TV program with the president of the United States (Dennis Quaid going way too easy on George W. Bush) as a guest judge. Hugh Grant does a passable impersonation of Simon Cowell, but it’s not enough to make up for the fact that Weitz shows no ability to take this thing over the top, where it belongs. (Kent Williams) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6

An American Haunting (PG-13, 90 minutes) Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek star in this historical horror film about the Bell Witch, the very same rural legend that gave birth to The Blair Witch Project. Sutherland and Spacek are a pair of landowning parents in 1817 Tennessee who find themselves besieged by a nasty poltergeist. The film looks classy and has a few lightweight scares, but director Courtney Soloman (Dungeons & Dragons) doesn’t know quite how to take full advantage of his fine cast. Like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, this one feels more like a made-for-TV drama than a full-on horror story. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6

The Benchwarmers (PG-13, 80 minutes) A trio of dorky dudes (David Spade, Rob Schneider and Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder) try to make up for their pathetic childhoods by forming a three-man baseball team to compete against standard Little League teams. This one’s only funny if you like the lamest of output from Adam Sandler’s drinking buddies. (It’s written by Alan Covert, who gave us the glory of Grandma’s Boy.) (D.O.) Playing at Carmike Cinema 6

Capote (R, 114 minutes) Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood told the story of a Kansas farm family that was slaughtered by a pair of excons, and Bennett Miller’s quietly enthralling Capote gives us the story behind the story, the years-long ordeal during which Capote had to use every trick in the reporter’s notebook to get people to talk to him. As Capote, Oscar winnter Philip Seymour Hoffman is simply brilliant, conveying both the tenderness and the toughness of a man who never recovered from his greatest work. (K.W.) Playing through Thursday at Jefferson Theater

Friends with Money (R, 88 minutes) Nicole Holofcener’s bittersweet comedy about a group of Los Angeles friends (Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack and Jennifer Aniston) who occupy different rungs on the ladder of success is strangely refreshing, with its cold stare at the ravages of middle age. You may not buy these women as friends for life, but Holofcener goes deep inside female insecurity. (K.W.) Playing at Vinegar Hill Theatre

Goal! The Dream Begins (PG, 118 minutes) A football-loving (“soccer loving” to you and me) Mexican immigrant living in Los Angeles gets spotted by a scout for England’s legendary Newcastle United team. The usual sporting trials and tribulations follow, capped off with the typical stand-up-andcheer ending. If you’re a massive fan of European soccer, you’ll be mightily impressed with cameos by the likes of Alan Shearer, David Beckham, Milan Baros, Raul Gonzalez, Zinédine Zidane, Titus Bramble and Sven-Göran Eriksson. And if you have no freaking idea who Sven-Göran Eriksson is, I’m guessing you won’t be watching this movie. (D.O.) Coming Friday; check local listings

Good Night, and Good Luck (PG, 93 minutes) When Edward R. Murrow, America’s most respected broadcast journalist in the 1950s, went after Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the man who’d whipped the country into a frenzy of anti-Communist paranoia, it was one of the golden moments in the history of television, and George Clooney, who directed, cowrote and stars as Murrow’s producer, has created a lively, artful profile in courage. We aren’t given much personal information about Murrow, but David Strathairn’s quietly confident performance has just enough charisma to help us understand why men and women would be willing to follow him off the edge of cliff. (K.W.) Playing through Thursday at Jefferson Theater

Hoot (PG) Hollywood finally gets around to following up Carl Hiassen’s infamous novelto- movie Striptease with, oddly enough, this adaptation of the writer’s award-winning kids’ book. A young boy (Logan Lerman from “Jack & Bobby”) moves from Montana to Florida where he joins forces with a few other kids to stop an evil land developer (Tim Blake Nelson) from destroying the habitat of some endangered owls. Luke Wilson shows up as the clueless but good-natured sheriff. Sun-damaged crooner Jimmy Buffet (who produced this film) also makes an appearance. The film has a good ecological message, but isn’t much fun for the adults. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6

Ice Age: The Meltdown (PG, 91 minutes) Gee, that was a pretty short ice age. Seems that the Earth is now warming back up again, and our heroes, the mastodon, the sabertoothed tiger, the sloth and the squirrel thing, must find a new home to live in. Queen Latifah, Jay Leno and Seann William Scott add their voices to the cast this time around. If your kids were entertained by the first one, they’ll be entertained by this one. (D.O.) Playing at Carmike Cinema 6

Inside Man (R, 129 minutes) Spike Lee tries his hand at a more mainstream thriller with this intermittently successful heist drama. A gang of bank robbers led by Clive Owen takes over a bank in Manhattan. Hostage negotiator Denzel Washington is called in to handle the situation. Naturally, there are lots of twists and turns along the way as the bank robbers scheme to get out with the dough. Do they have a secret plan? Will it be patently obvious to most viewers? Washington does good work (and Jodie Foster drops by for a short time), but Lee isn’t quite prepared for this sort of adrenaline-filled cinema. At least he avoids some of the more egregious genre clichés. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6

Just My Luck (PG-13) Lindsay Lohan, backsliding to her lame Disney days, stars in this juvenile romantic comedy about a Manhattan girl with the greatest luck in the world. After a chance encounter with a cute but down-and-out young man (Chris Pine, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement), she realizes that she’s swapped her fortune for his. From the director of Mystic Pizza, Miss Congeniality and My Favorite Martian. If you’re 14 and female, this will be a very profound movie experience. (D.O.) Coming Friday; check local listings

Lucky Number Slevin (R, 109 minutes) Scotsman Paul McGuigan (Gangster No. 1) contributes this crazed crime story about a case of mistaken identity that leaves a downon- his luck slob (Josh Hartnett) stuck in the middle of a gang war between Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman (scary). To make matters worse, he’s being pursued by an infamous assassin (Bruce Willis). Our boy Slevin’s situation is slightly ameliorated by the attentions of Lucy Liu, but the body count continues to rise. At times the film becomes wrapped up in its own twisty cleverness—which is wedged somewhere between the filmy smartness of Hitchcock and the showy self-awareness of Tarantino. Still, it’s a hell of zippy ride. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Seminole Square Cinema 4

Mission: Impossible III (PG-13, 126 minutes) J.J. Abrams (the guy behind “Alias” and “Lost”) takes over as director for this third outing. Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Laurence Fishburne, Keri Russell, Billy Crudup and Philip Seymour Hoffman (doing bad guy duty) make up the impressive cast list. Unfortunately, it’s scripted by the guys who wrote The Island. As in previous Impossible outings, the plot is baroque to the point of nonsensical. The explosions look pretty, though. (D.O.) Playing at Carmike Cinema 6

Russian Dolls (NR, 125 minutes) Cédric Klapisch follows up his 2002 hit L’Aubere Espagnole with this multilingual sequel, which picks up with a group of students five years after their college graduation. On the cusp of 30, our characters are marginally more mature and now find themselves more centered on work and romance. The original cast (including Amelie’s Audrey Tautou) returns. The film itself is warm and occasionally amusing, but the script remains frustratingly superficial. In English, Russian, French, Spanish and Italian with English subtitles. (D.O.) Coming Friday; check local listings

RV (PG) Steve Martin must have been busy, because it’s fallen to Robin Williams to star in this pathetic, plotless excuse for a “family” comedy. Williams stars as a hapless dad who tries to pass off a business trip to Colorado as a family vacation. Along the way, the annoying clan has lots of wacky misadventures in a rented RV. That’s it, folks. Williams was starting to get annoying on screen, now he’s just sad. Go rent National Lampoon’s Vacation instead. It’s pretty much the same movie, only 20 times funnier. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Seminole Square Cinema 4

Scary Movie 4 (PG-13) David Zucker (who pioneered this sort of spoofy genre back in 1980 with Airplane!) returns for yet another outing in the Scary Movie franchise. Anna Faris returns as well as the intrepid reporter trying to find out why so many wacky things are happening. There are send-ups of Saw, The Grudge, War of the Worlds, and others too numerous to count. Expect plenty of cameos as well, including a fairly clever sequence involving Shaquille O’Neal and Dr. Phil. The rest revolves around the usual lowbrow sex and potty humor that the kids so dearly love. (D.O.) Playing at Carmike Cinema 6

The Sentinel (PG-13) Kiefer Sutherland, taking time off from his TV gig as a government agent in a frantic race to save the president from assassination, signs on for this theatrical thriller as a government agent in a frantic race to save the president from assassination. Michael Douglas is Sutherland’s foil and former mentor, a disgraced special agent to the White House, who is being framed in the murderous conspiracy (or is he?). Eva Longoria (“Desperate Housewives”) tags along for eye candy. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Seminole Square Cinema 4

Silent Hill (R) For those of you who already have BloodRayne and Doom on DVD (or, more likely, PSP), here’s the latest videogame to make the leap to the silver screen. Radha Mitchell (Pitch Black) stars as a woman searching for her sick daughter in the creepy, fog-enshrouded environs of a mysteriously deserted town. (Deserted, of course, except for all the demons, monsters, ghosts and what-have-you.) At least Uwe Boll (Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead, BloodRayne) is not involved. French director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) lends some polish to the rather predictable goings on. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6

Stick It (PG-13, 103 minutes) The rather rude title is meant to lead a certain air of attitude to this film’s subject, the world of competitive gymnastics. Seems we’ve got a rebellious teen (“Life As We Know It”s Missy Peregrym) who gets herself enrolled in an elite gymnastics program run by legendary trainer Jeff Bridges. Naturally, our gal brings some of her street-smart ‘tude to the balance beam, making this the Bring It On of gymnastics movies. Unfortunately, it’s already been brought. (D.O.) Playing at Carmike Cinema 6

Thank You for Smoking (R, 92 minutes) Based on Christopher Buckley’s satiric novel about a tobacco-industry lobbyist (Aaron Eckhart) who seems to feel good about what he does for a living, Jason Reitman’s refreshingly un-PC film lets both sides of the smoking/ anti-smoking debate have it with both barrels. Encompassing a trip to Hollywood as well as a kidnapping, the movie gives off a caffeinated buzz, capturing the book’s slightly giddy tone. (K.W.) Playing at Regal Downtown Mall 6

United 93 (R, 111 minutes) Reviewed on page 49. Playing at Carmike Cinema 6

The Wild (G, 94 minutes) Despite the fact that this computer-animated toon features a group of animals (including a lion and a giraffe) escaping from the New York City Zoo and making a madcap trek to the wilds of Africa, Disney would like to inform you that this is nothing like last year’s Madagascar. Which, of course, it is. The voice cast (including Kiefer Sutherland, Janeane Garofalo, Eddie Izzard and William Shatner) has fun at least, and there are enough fart jokes to keep the kids laughing. (D.O.) Playing at Regal Seminole Square Cinema 4