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Marie Antoinette, World Trade Center

Marie Antoinette

I'm all for Sofia Coppola doing whatever she wants, and I'm all for Kirsten Dunst continuing to be in movies. However, I don't think Kirsten has the correct face shape for the 18th century. I just don't buy her in that era. So the whole thing feels like playing dress-up. I'm loathe to further encourage Gwyneth Paltrow's belief that she actually was born in Victorian England, but she's really better suited for this.

Also, I think Kirsten needs to come up with a new thing to do with her eyelids. Her dreamy, half-lidded, "bedroom eyes" look can be effective, but whenever I see it in a new movie, it seems like the director said "play [this or that emotion]" and then Kirsten phoned it in with the eyelid thing. That's got to be a let down. Shouldn't the point of acting be creating new traits and behaviors unique to each character? (Of course, in this case she's doing it in a nude scene – so all is forgiven.)

World Trade Center

Maggie Gyllenhaal is in this, and she's excellent and has pretty unassailable taste in scripts. Also Maria Bello, I think. (It was a quick shot.) I think the script for this movie must be very, very compelling. The best script any of these people has read in years. (I understand that it's the only script Danny Nucci has read in years.) Because it would have to be a spectacular screenplay to justify etching yourself into the most unnecessary and ill-timed movie in history. I'm not overly sentimental about the events of 9/11 (an unfortunate byproduct of the Bush administration waving it about as a justification for any crazy thing they decide to do). But I don't see what anyone from my generation (or any preceding one) has to gain from reliving the day in a Hollywood movie. Documentary, sure. Summer movie, no.

No one should be proud of computer-generating a smoldering WTC back into the New York skyline. No one should be proud of dressing up as the brave men and women who risked their lives on the scene that day. The stories of those people are their stories, and the way we respect them best (for now) is to tell them without embellishment, editing, or artifice – just tell them. I'm not saying we should never have a movie about this. Titanic was great. Or Saving Private Ryan. But now isn't the time.

This relates to a movie conundrum that's always plagued me. You only get one shot at a certain movie idea every decade or so. So, you have to be careful with the idea when you're granted the awesome responsibility of bringing it to the screen. There won't be a competing 9/11 movie, so if this one sucks (as Oliver Stone's involvement all but guarantees), then you've just got a sucky movie as Hollywood's remembrance of 9/11. And that's not exactly going to endear us to the red states.

None of these are particularly convincing reasons why there shouldn't be a 9/11 movie right now – but the fact remains, they're all much better than any reason why there should.

4 Comments (Add your comments)

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Bee BoySat, 6/14/08 12:57am

Ordinarily, it's my policy to delete comment spam – and swiftly – but I have to leave these two because they're so adorably daffy to read. And they're probably a sign of things to come. Most of us are familiar with semi-gibberish passages like this in our e-mail spam, but I've yet to encounter them in the comment spam here at onebee. They're generated by a Markov chain process, which selects words or groups of words at random from a text and places them alongside other groups of words next to which they frequently occur. The result is random enough to be unique, but organized enough to seem like it might be real text.

There's something kind of charming about the resulting word salad, like the babbling of an infant who has not yet mastered the language. So I kept the spam, but neutered it by deactivating the links.

You can make gibberish of your own with a Markov chain synthesizer. I fed it this year's Oscar column and got fun results like the following:

I've lost twice out there, standing pretty Holocausty, it wasn't dreary enough, or for Best Director award often seems to be fun for Juno. You can't say it, but my point: Ruby Dee is an absolute lock when compared to be something like something I'd be on Julie Christie this time.

Watch your ass, Julie Christie! I'm gonna be on you this time!

BrandonSat, 6/14/08 10:24am

Then you are a mile away and you have their shoes.

(Shakes head wistfully) Don't I know it.

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