We should be making movies about September 11 and the War on Terror, Lileks says, and I see his point- after all, I took a whole course in college about World War II movies that were made during World War II (“Casablanca,” the “Why We Fight Series,” etc.)
Here’s James:
Just tell the story as it happened that day, and people would cram the theaters by the millions. Just like they went to see “The Passion.” And with the same emotions, I’d bet: from the opening moments the audience would have the same sick clot in their stomachs, the same old throb of dread we all felt during “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan.” This wasn’t pleasant, but it was important to see it, and know.
It’ll happen eventually, once more time has passed, but unfortunately the man behind ‘Schindler’s’ and SPR won’t be the one to do it- Steven Spielberg has promised that he will never make a film about any of the events of September 11.
Though if you believe Matt Zoller Seitz, we’ve already had dozens of 9/11 movies. New York Press film critic Seitz has a fascinating essay this week about how all sorts of movies- from “The Passion” to “Walking Tall”- have been informed by the attacks, even if it doesn't seem that way on the surface. It’s more excellent work from Seitz; contrast that with his NYP colleague Armond White, who in the first paragraph of his “Kill Bill Vol. 2” review refers to the film’s soundtrack as “the sounds of cultural retardation.”
White pretty much takes any small detail about any movie he doesn’t like and shoehorns it into a critique of the overall moral bankruptcy of American film culture; if Olivier the art teacher from “Six Feet Under” had been a film critic, he’d be Armond White.
Posted by Stephen Silver at April 15, 2004 06:07 PM