The Torture Twelve

Speaking of being pissed off...

Yesterday, late in the day, the U.S. Senate approved the reprehensible and un-American Military Commissions Act of 2006. This is the one that allows for the suspension of habeas corpus, which has been, as so many others have noted, a crucial part of civilized jurisprudence since the Magna Carta was adopted in 1215. It took a long time before I really understood why habeas corpus is important, but it's the Bush administration that has really hammered the lesson home. See, when you've suffered a terrorist attack and, in your national mood of panic, have arrested hundreds of people for the crime of being Muslim, a petition of habeas corpus is the mechanism by which those people arrested have the right to challenge their arrests. (In Latin, it literally means "You have the body.") It prevents the government from simply tossing people in prison and forgetting about them.

To pick only one example, if lawyers hadn't appointed themselves to argue on Jose Padilla's behalf, he would almost certainly still be held in a military trial without any rights whatsoever--and Padilla is an American citizen. The current legislation strips habeas rights from non-citizens, who already have less rights to begin with. Now there are those who will argue that non-citizens don't deserve the rights of citizens--and in truth, the original Greek definition of a citizen did indeed specify a set of rights--and obligations--that were reserved only for those born in that city-state, rights that were specifically excluded from non-citizens such as, for example, slaves. But the concept of human rights is one that only ever grows, and in the 2000 years-plus since the demos was first exalted in Athens, the idea has expanded, slowly but irrevocably, until we in our lifetime have a far broader view of citizenship than the Athenians did. Slaves, for instance. We're not real fond of the idea of slavery anymore.

It is a common truism among civil rights advocates that the truest test of an idea is when it is applied to the worst among us. That's why the ACLU always finds itself abused for defending the rights of, say, Ku Klux Klan members to march through a town. Defending the rights of a white supremacist in no way means that you are defending the point of view of that white supremacist; it simply defends Voltaire's assertion that "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (Actually it wasn't Voltaire, but let's not get bogged down just now.)

So the whole idea that Democrats want to "coddle terrorists" by protecting their right to habeas corpus is not only wrong, it is willfully dishonest, election-year pandering of the worst kind. Hastert and Boehner know it isn't true, but as fear-mongers of the first order they know that it scares a few voters their way and that is the only thing they care about. This new Military Commissions bill actually legislates this sort of fear-mongering, while depriving thousands of human beings of basic civil rights observed by civilized nations around the world (a class of nations that used to include the United States).

And, to my utter disgust, twelve Democrats actually voted for this monstrous legislation. Salon is referring to them as "the Torture Twelve," and I think it's a good name for them. Senators Tom Carper, Tim Johnson, Mary Landrieu, Frank Lautenberg, Joe Lieberman, Robert Menendez, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Ken Salazar and Debbie Stabenow--these are the dozen representatives of the so-called opposition party who, for craven political reasons, have willfully abandoned a whole host of bedrock American principles.

I am particularly ashamed to see Joe Lieberman's name among the Torture Twelve. I have deliberately stayed away from those calling for Joe's head because I think the Democratic party mustn't succumb to ideological purity tests for its members (that's something Republicans do). So I kept out of the Lieberman-Lamont race, despite contacts from organizations like moveon.org suggesting that I support Lamont. It seemed to me that Joe had earned the right to be a Senator, he was "loyal" on all sorts of important issues and I wasn't about to penalize just because of his regrettable lapses with regard to the Iraq war. But this one, this is finally too much. Now, at last, I hope he gets defeated--because he deserves to be. Anyone who would vote in favor of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 deserves to be sent home, to be chucked out of their seat of power at the earliest possible opportunity.

I have already said as much to my own elected representatives. I sent e-mails just the other day, warning that if they vote for unlawful detentions, or for expanded torture rights, or for warrantless wiretapping, then I would never vote for them again, no matter what other positions they might hold. I have never before been a one-issue voter, but I am now. And while I believe that even a Bush-appointed Supreme Court will strike down this awful legislation pretty damn fast, I am nonetheless disgusted that it was ever passed in the first place.

It really is time to clean house in the halls of Congress.

The Hubbub

The robbery took about a minute. Following up has taken hours.

Monday night, of course, there were seven or eight phone calls to get credit and debit cards canceled, plus time on the internet adding fraud alerts to my credit reports, and so on. At one of the credit reporting agencies, the woman on the phone actually tried to hard-sell me one of their services. After listening to her entire spiel I said "You know, this is really the wrong time to be trying to sell me something." After which she actually tried to sell me harder.

Then there was the guy at one of the credit card companies. I called, said my card had been stolen and that it needed to be canceled. "Yes sir, I can take care of that right now for you." Short pause. "And sir, may I ask why you are canceling the card?"

I paused. Had he really just asked that? "Yeah, it's because the card was stolen. During the robbery portion of my evening."

So after all that I watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and then part of The Daily Show, and it took that long before I felt sleepy at all. Finally got only four hours of sleep, and then the next day realized I would have to take the day off from work. So I went to the Social Security office to replace my card (hey, you're not supposed to carry the card with you--but I don't think they told me that when I got the card at age 13, and I'd had that thing with me ever since), I went to the DMV to replace my driver's license, and finally everything seemed pretty well taken care of. There would still be some foofaraw once I got all the replacement cards, and had to notify various merchants of changed accounts numbers. But for the most part, the adventure was over.

(Except that yesterday I found myself in the Anger phase of my post-robbery mental adjustment, and it wasn't fun spending a whole day just plain pissed off, but that's a whole other story.)

Then this morning, I got a call from Bank of America's fraud department. The guy wanted to check on some charges, and he led with one from this week--definitely post-robbery--from a merchant I have definitely never used. How on earth had that happened? Turns out that when I called Monday night, BOA simply set me down for a replacement card and didn't cancel the old one. In fact the replacement has the same number as the old one.

Another hour of my life passed, because now I had to double-check my BOA business cards as well--and sure enough, the same foolishness had gone on there, too. No charges on those cards, but still, it looks like the rat-bastards did in fact get away with using one of my cards.

My only hope now is that I can get the name of that merchant to the police, and if one of the robbers actually went to this place to use the card, maybe the police can make some headway in tracking these piss-ants down.

Oh, and by the way--the card they used? It was one of those that had my picture on it. A friend asked, "Well did the robbers look like you?" "Yeah," I said, "I was robbed by Ed Begley Jr. No they didn't look anything like me."

And all of this at a time when the release of the movie is still churning forward and there are a billion things to do. With Marc flying out to Colorado today, I'm left to take care of all the things he would ordinarily do, plus my own stuff. Plus, now, the seemingly endless hubbub following the robbery. Hell, no wonder I'm feeling so damn pissed off.

By the Way...

Just a quick note that Zen Noir is shifting its Los Angeles screenings from the Westside Pavilion to the Beverly Center. Advance tickets are available here.

A little bit of good over here, a little bad over there. I suppose it balances, though frankly I could have done without the bit on Monday night.

Robbery

On Monday night, it came time to take one of my every-other-day walks. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was about to come on, but I left the TiVo to do its job and figured I'd catch the show when I got back. I meant to take the garbage out, but forgot; remembered just after leaving the apartment and almost turned back, to take those extra couple minutes to get it done, but didn't.

But the crucial decision was this one: on Sunday, I bought myself a new iPod, one of the new 80 gig models, because I'd been working hard and I deserved a present. Monday night, about to leave for my walk, I thought "Hey, I never take my iPod when I go for these walks, wouldn't it be fun to have music?" Even as I thought this, that little voice in the back of my head was shouting as loudly as it could, "There's a reason why you don't do that! Remember? Late at night? Why you don't--ah, hell, there he goes."

I have always prided myself on having good street awareness. I've done these late-night walks for years and years--when they took me through Boston's Combat Zone, I had no problems. When I walked down a pre-cleanup 42nd Street at 1:00 a.m. wearing a tuxedo, still no problem. (There was a pool of silence that moved with me as not-quite-seen people stopped and stared, but no one bothered me.) This sense of street awareness has everything to do with paying attention to what's going on around me--and being seen to be paying attention to what's going on around me. I'm very tall, I move fast, and my eyes look everywhere.

But the iPod, that alone changed my profile. Suddenly, I wasn't the tall guy with his eyes open, I was the shlub strolling down the street listening to his tunes. That's what the little voice in the back of my head was hollering about. I wish I'd listened to it. I wish I'd taken out the trash so that the timing of my night would have changed. I wish a lot of things. Instead, this happened:

The police believe that the two young men, both Latino but without noticeable accents, were driving by looking for easy marks. They spotted me, with the distinctive white wires from the iPod headphones trailing down. They took the next left, parked in an open space on Westgate right next to University High School, and started heading north on foot. I was heading west on Texas, and we reached the intersection at the same time. They gave a little, allowing me to pass in front of them, and at this point I had a tiny alarm bell ringing because something about them was a little off. I kept my eyes on them, and once they were behind me, I saw them turn, accelerate and separate.

Fight or flight. Here's another wish: I wish I'd picked flight, because it might have worked. Instead I turned toward them, and I was shouting an expletive and now so were they. But faster than I could blink, one of them was in front of me, one was behind me, and they both had knives. "Gimme what you got," they said, with a few curse words tacked on at the end. I didn't bother trying to fight anymore once I saw the knives, so I dropped the iPod to the ground and reached for my wallet. My fingers wouldn't grip it. "Hurry it up," they hollered, and a few more curses; and for emphasis, the guy in front of me put the knifeblade in my mouth. Finally I got a grip on the wallet, pulled it out, and in the one smart thing I did all night, instead of handing it to them I tossed it away from me.

The wallet landed on the sidewalk to my left, and by pure dumb luck that happened to be exactly the direction in which their car was waiting. They scooped up the wallet, left the iPod where it had fallen on my right, and as they ran away I had an utterly mad impulse to shout "Hey, what about the iPod?" Because after all, I only had $8 in my wallet and it just seemed idiotic not to take my day-old $350 iPod. But I said nothing, and instead reached for the cellphone in my pants pocket (nope, they didn't get that either). Even as they drove off I was already dialing 911.

And no, I didn't get a look at the license plate. The car was just far enough away, and they didn't turn on their lights till they were well down the block. I'm guessing these guys have done this a time or two before.

With the danger gone, I could start thinking again. While waiting for the police to arrive I called Marc Rosenbush and had him immediately starting canceling the Zenmovie debit and credit cards that were in my wallet (since we just had the party, I happened to have a lot of cards on me), so within ten minutes those cards were already dead. After filling out the police report (we did it at the site, instead of going to the station) I hurried home and started calling my personal credit card providers, canceling all of those cards. Within ninety minutes of the robbery, every card was canceled, the debit cards were useless, a fraud alert was out with all three credit agencies, and I knew for sure that there had been no activity on those cards before I canceled them.

The robbers, they got squat. Eight bucks. In exchange, if they weren't armed felons before, they are now.

If only all those cop-show cliches weren't so damn true. "It was dark," I found myself saying to the officer. "It all happened pretty fast, I didn't really get a good look at them." I've heard those lines a million times on TV, and always said to myself "Ah, but I'm a writer, I'm observant. If it ever happens to me, I will give a terrific description." Turns out, not so much. Because the knife as a weapon of intimidation is obvious; but its other function is to serve as a distraction. As soon as the knives appeared, they were all I could see. Where were the knives? What were they about to do? Why was one of them in my mouth? During all of that, I could spare no brainpower at all for what my assailants looked like. Consequently, my description to the police was probably no better than anyone's would have been. So much for my keen powers of observation.

Every once in a while I try to think of the Jean Valjean defense: maybe these guys live in poverty and they have no choice but to steal. Families to support and nothing has ever worked but crime. But then I immediately think this: pulling a knife on someone is simply beyond the pale. Whatever desperate motivations might lie behind their actions, pulling a knife, pulling two knives, makes all those motivations meaningless. They went way over the line, and if given the opportunity to testify against them, to send those two rat-bastards to jail, you can be damn sure I'll do it.

In the meantime, I revel in the fact that they got nothing of value. And then there's this, too: the iPod survived unharmed. Go figure.

Zero-Sum

When someone tells me they want to go into any of the arts, I always have a one-word answer for them: "Don't." My reasoning is this: the arts are, collectively and individually, brutal, cut-throat, vicious and nasty. On good days. There are certainly those people who are born to be artists and who will, therefore, pursue their craft no matter what I say, in which case more power to them--but if someone can possibly be talked out of a career in the arts, then by gum they should be.

How exactly, you ask, are the arts brutal, cut-throat, vicious and nasty? Here's one example.

The Los Angeles opening of Zen Noir went perfectly well. There was a bit of projector craziness at the Westside Pavilion, but these things happen, and because that particular audience included a lot of cast, crew and friends, they were in one of those jovial moods where a little bit of craziness just makes the party atmosphere swell. Certainly we were all having fun, as this picture taken just outside the lobby of the theater, showing your humble scribe peeking in, demonstrates.

And then the after-party, at a gallery in Santa Monica, was really great fun in a cool space, as we finally got to unwind from all the stress and worry. The film had opened in three theaters now, the numbers weren't bad, we'd already gotten one extension, we could afford to relax and have a nice night celebrating.

Time passes. Overall, our weekend numbers were a bit depressed, but that was because it was Rosh Hashanah and our theaters were in neighborhoods with large Jewish populations. Even with that, the manager at the Pavilion told us that of the four movies they had running, ours was doing the best this weekend. So it certainly seemed that we were likely to extend into a second week, at least there.

Instead, this morning there came the news that we had been booted from the Pavilion. The fact that we did the best of the movies playing there didn't matter because every movie playing there got booted. Even Lassie!

What happened? An increasingly crowded schedule, in part--no one really cares why a film's numbers were a little depressed, they just look at the fact that there's a bunch of new movies that might do better, and that's that. (Actually, now that I think about it, it isn't actually vicious or nasty, it's just brutal: it's hard cold business, the dollar triumphant, and of course that's true in any business. Still, they booted Lassie!)

But something else happened, something we couldn't do a thing about: The Science of Sleep.

Now bear in mind, I'm a big fan of Michel Gondry's work (Eternal Sunshine is easily one of my favorite movies of the last ten years), and when I saw this movie a couple months ago I really enjoyed it. Thus, when I looked at the calendar of films to be released on the weekend of September 22nd, and saw this one, a little part of me said "Oh, crap." Because if our audience was going to be attracted to weird, off-beat art movies, those same people would be just as attracted to a new Gondry film. More so, in fact, because Gondry is a proven entity, an artist whose work is always interesting.

As it turns out, the movie-releasing business is what they call in the investment world a "zero-sum game." If one person wins, it's because someone else lost. Science of Sleep averaged about $25,000 per theater, so it's going wide. And for it to move into a theater, something else has to move out. Our movie, like a whole bunch of others, is moving out. It's the nature of the business: one man's success is, almost without fail, at some other man's expense.

A tough business, but we're learning fast how this stuff works. We're already close to being able to announce a new theater in the L.A. area, we still have our opening in Denver/Boulder on the 29th, and having won the Moondance Festival there a couple years ago, we have high hopes as returning champions. So we're not dead yet, not by a long shot; still, there isn't a bit of this process that has been easy. Then again, if it were easy everyone would be doing it. Plus, there's the thing I haven't talked about yet: our audiences.

One woman at a screening came up to Marc and told him that her husband had recently died, and that the film had helped her deal with it a little better. People have even come up and hugged me after a screening, and I was just one of the several producers. Maybe we're not getting the sort of numbers that set Hollywood atwitter, but we're reaching people. Here and there, one or two at a time, we're reaching people.

And how much is that worth?

Best Review So Far

Now here's what we like to see.

The L.A. Times is one of the nation's biggest papers, there's a little picture from the movie on the front page of the "Calendar" section, and the review inside is the best one we've had so far. (Our distributor is very happy indeed.) More to the point, this is a review that actually reviews the film Marc made. All too often you get reviewers who wish the film had been something else, perhaps because they get too caught up in the idea of genre. The presence of "Noir" in the title, for example, causes them to believe that the film can only be This and This but definitely not This, when in fact the film uses Noir as a starting point and then veers way off in another direction.

(This is exactly why, as a writer, I've always hated the idea of genre: as soon as you label a work as being part of a particular genre, you either have to conform to the conventions of that genre--and your readers' heavy weight of expectations--or work very hard indeed to hack your way past all those conventions. My novel Thereby Hangs a Tale deliberately begins with four chapters written in vastly different styles, precisely so a reader will have any genre expectations thrashed out of them and can then approach the novel on its own terms.)

But Mr. Thomas, the Times reviewer, seems to have understood exactly what Zen Noir is--and what it isn't. He describes it as "a provocative, witty--and admittedly esoteric--experimental comedy." That's exactly right, and I think that helps prospective viewers: the movie isn't being sold as a mainstream noir, so--we hope--we won't end up with people who simply read a great review, walked in, and then were disappointed because they had been expecting something different.

Mr. Thomas is also complimentary toward a lot of the things that Marc is proudest of, like the crucial contributions from his collaborators Christopher Gosch (as Director of Photography) and Steve Chesne (who composed the fabulous music). He calls it "a high-styled film that is visually rich and stunning," and notes that "it could scarcely look richer or more elegant yet probably was made on a minuscule budget." Right all around--in fact, one of our earliest hints that we were doing a good job was that the people at the post house (the ones developing the raw footage after each day's shooting) started to comment on how great the footage looked, that there was a sumptuousness that belied its budget.

So here's hoping--we open in L.A. tonight, and now is when we see exactly what the power of a good review in a major paper can be. Will there be big crowds? Hope so. But more to the point, will there be big crowds walking away from the movie with the kind of reaction we saw from so many people in San Francisco? People for whom the film might just mean something? That's what we really hope for; that would be the best of all possible worlds.

One Weekend Down

Quite an experience, all told.

It's easy to get discouraged when your very first screening is early in the afternoon on a Friday, and you poke your head in to find that no, in terms of audience numbers, you have not yet begun to set the world on fire. But that was Friday afternoon; by Friday evening, when I sat down to watch the movie with the kids arrayed next to me, the theater was nearly full. And more importantly, it was full of receptive, discerning people who "got" the film and took the journey the film asks them to take. They laughed in the places we always hope people will laugh, and the Q&A afterward was lively and detailed. It made me extra happy that the screening the kids saw was clearly the best one so far.

What's remarkable is how well our distributor, Marc Halperin, was able to predict the entire weekend's numbers from just the first day's numbers. I won't reveal his formula, lest it turn out to be a state secret, but suffice it to say that what he predicted on Friday night for Saturday and Sunday was incredibly accurate. This, right now, is when we really begin to appreciate what a smart distributor does; this is the moment when he begins to orchestrate the release of the film, like a conductor with a baton in his hand.

The good news is that we made the first set of numbers we needed to make: we are able to extend into a second week in San Francisco. Advertising costs will drop a little, so we might be able to make some extra money even if our numbers only stay the same. And the best part about extra weeks is that if word-of-mouth does its thing, there might just be enough time for those numbers to grow.

So Los Angeles and Pasadena are next, this Friday. We're throwing a little party Friday night, all our friends are coming, and we have high hopes for a decent set of numbers here as well. If so, maybe we'll be able to extend the L.A. run as well, and then Denver/Boulder opens and it just grows and grows.

A very good start; but this isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. And I can't wait to see what happens next.

The Day Of

First screening of the first day (of the rest of our lives!) is in four hours. No, five hours, I just can't count. You'd think I'd be better at that by now.

I'm in San Francisco for the first time, which turns out to have been a good idea in all sorts of ways: because San Francisco is just plain fun, because the trip lends an extra sense of occasion to this first day, and because coming to a different place has lent that little extra sense of transformation to the experience. I am not in my comfortable every-day environment, I am somewhere else, doing this different thing, putting the movie before people who are entire strangers to me. A tiny little rite of passage; even when I go back to L.A. and return to my every-day environment, no matter how much the same it is, there is still that new fact: that I helped produce a motion picture that played in theaters across the country, and I know it did because, at least this little bit, I went out and saw it happen.

And then, yeah, with that new fact in my life, I go home and do the usual stuff and work hard on the next project. Just last night I worked on the "Beaudry" script, here in the hotel room. It felt like a very sound thing to do.

But of course, who wants to go through something like this without his people around? So I'm way-happy that my brother and sister flew out, and that Adam's girlfriend Lauren came as well. For them, it was a fairly outrageous trip: since Lauren is in school in Tallahassee, they all decided to meet in the middle of the state, in Orlando, and to fly out from there. So they did that drive, then had the long flight to L.A., arriving late Wednesday night; the next morning came, for them, another even longer drive, up to San Francisco. It was a long enough trip for me, and I didn't have to do any of the rest of what they did. And then, of course, they'll have the whole process in reverse starting tomorrow night.

Marc Rosenbush drove up yesterday as well, separately, dealing along the way with a bit of last-minute drama that added some bizarre suspense to the trip, but eventually it all got sorted out and then we were in San Francisco. He went off and met up with an old friend; we set out from our hotel and just kinda wandered, being tourists. The kids are much better at being tourists than I am, they're less self-conscious about it, unafraid to pull out a map in the middle of a street and try to figure out where the hell to go next, and completely happy staging goofy pictures in front of Grace Cathedral, or posing in front of one of those completely insane downhill ski-slopes of a street. (I'll get copies of their pictures later and see if I can post one here.)

Eventually we wandered over to Fisherman's Wharf, enjoyed the crowds, tried to get tickets for Alcatraz (they'll be able to go but I won't), tried to spot some sea lions but didn't (wrong time of year?), and had an unexpectedly great meal at Boudin's. Then they went out late at night, trying to find some nightlife, and I stayed in the room and worked on my script. A bit of club-hopping made them happy, and spending time with words (after a lovely day with the family) made me happy. Good things all around.

Tickets Now on Sale

Yep, that moment you've all been waiting for, when you can sluice through the internets and buy tickets for a screening of Zen Noir. Here is one handy place where you can make your important and eternally rewarding purchase.

So go ahead, if you live in the San Francisco area and you'll be in town next weekend, why don't you get that taken care of now. (Because as we all know, Now is all there is.) Satisfy that Buddhist-film craving you didn't even know you had. You know you want to.

Thank you.

Watching United 93

As I wrote back in April, I was deeply reluctant to go and see Paul Greengrass's United 93 in a movie theater. Just watching the trailer had been a nearly overwhelming emotional experience; I could barely stand the thought of sitting through a whole movie's worth, surrounded by strangers. It would be better, I thought, to do that privately, at home, once the DVD came out.

The DVD came out on Tuesday. The good people at Netflix zipped it right along to me, and I watched it last night. And I had just about the emotional reaction I'd expected to have. Except not quite...

Make no mistake: watching this movie is a harrowing experience. As I wrote before, Greengrass excels at immersive, you-are-there filmmaking, and he is a nearly perfect match to the material. After all, none of us can quite stop ourselves from queasily wondering what it must have felt like to be on that plane, and Greengrass answers this question for us, as closely as it can ever be answered. For the families of the victimes, of course, that "What must it have been like?" question was agonizing; so it was no surprise, then, that in the documentary about their reactions to the movie after a private screening, several of them remarked that it felt as if many of their questions had finally been answered.

Still, I have to wonder: is United 93 a work of art, or is it the cinematic equivalent of staring at a car wreck on the highway? In other words, is it enough to satisfy our morbid curiosity, or does a work of art need to reach higher in order to actually become art? (As Stephanie Zacharek noted in her Salon review in April, "...while 'United 93' offers a horrifyingly realistic evocation of pain and fear, it doesn't open itself out to any greater, more expansive truth.") On his DVD commentary (another advantage to waiting until the disk was released), Greengrass early on notes that one idea he wanted to bring out with this work was that two hijackings occurred on September 11th: one the hijacking of the planes that we all know about, but the other an attempt to hijack a religion, to try to hijack Islam itself, to say to the Muslim world "You must follow us and not your own conscience." That's a very interesting and useful thought; but I have to say, as a reasonably intelligent movie-watcher, I didn't pick up on that idea at all until listening to the commentary.

Maybe that's because the movie requires multiple viewings: the first time, you're so overwhelmed by the emotional whump of the story that you simply cannot think about it thematically. But if that's so, then the movie's emotional impact might actually work against it, because who on earth would want to watch this twice?

Now it may also be possible that some of the distance I felt had to do with the fact that, though Greengrass tried hard to cast unknown actors so as not to interfere with his audience's identification with the characters, I'm too much a student of actors for that to work. I recognized three of them right away, and as I mentioned before, I went to school with David Alan Basche, who played Todd Beamer. Having acted with David, and seen him in plays, and having caught most of his movie and TV work, it took off some of the edge when watching him in peril here. "David's doing a great job," I thought a couple times. But I don't think so--I know lots of actors, and I've never had any trouble responding appropriately to their work before. I might even argue that knowing David should have heightened my response to the movie: that seeing this guy I knew and liked in this most horrible of situations should have made me feel the story even more.

What I'm trying to get at here is a sense of subtle, but disquieting, disappointment. So much about the movie is so very good, and its emotional wallop is so undeniable, that it becomes that much worse to find that, having had a good sleep, I woke up and felt that nothing about the movie had lingered at all. It was almost as if I'd watched some Jerry Bruckheimer explosion-fest, something that made the time go by but meant nothing six hours later. That can't possibly be true with a movie as good as this one, can it?

Actually, a more apt comparison is with Apollo 13. The stories are nearly identical, up to a point: real-life events in which something goes very wrong, and the audience sees, intercut, the efforts of people on the ground and in the air (or not-air) to deal with the problem. The difference, of course, is that one story is uplifting--the heroic efforts succeed, and the crew are rescued--and the other story is not. The efforts on the ground fail, and despite a very valiant effort in the air, no one is saved. Being at heart optimistic, we naturally gravitate toward the happier ending, even if it does smack of wish fulfillment; but United 93 represents, unfortunately, what Greengrass flatly says it does in his commentary: the new reality. "We are all passengers on that plane now," he says (that's not a perfect quote, but close enough), "trying desperately to take back control of our own destiny."

Which, finally, answers my own question. The thing I had felt was missing from the movie, namely a point of view, an opinion about the story being told, is in fact there; but like I said above, as an audience we get so overwhelmed that you simply can't reach these sorts of conclusions upon first viewing. And believe me, it's essential that a filmmaker have an opinion about the story he's telling, even while trying to get the facts right for a story such as this. (The current furor over the mini-series "The Path to 9/11" represents the flip-side: a writer apparently indulged his point of view at the expense of the facts.) Greengrass was extraordinarily scrupulous in his fidelity to the facts, he exercised great care in refusing to sensationalize the violence, and he was smart not to try and over-explain the logistics or the jargon of the efforts on the ground; if he erred, it was in being just that little bit too scrupulous, too careful, too smart. His movie raises great questions, but it's so unsettling that I'm afraid most of them will slip past as we all cringe in our seats.

Closer and Closer

It's been a few days since I blogged, largely because I've been Doing Things. And when I'm not Doing Things, I've been just as busy Not Doing Things, i.e., Resting. But the movie opens in San Francisco in exactly two weeks, and we're already getting little tastes of what the experience might be like.

Over on MySpace, last week the movie got listed as one of the "top picks" on the homepage of their Film section; we'd had about 170 viewings of the trailer prior to that, and after it the viewings have increased tenfold. At more or less the same time, we started hearing from the zenmovie.com site host that they were very angry with us, because our bandwidth usage had suddenly spiked like crazy--again, all from people watching the trailer. And as a long-time patron of Apple's QuickTime trailers page, it was peculiarly satisfying to see our movie show up in their list recently (and optimized beautifully, I might add--it looks absolutely spectacular).

Marc Rosenbush went to a screening hosted by the San Francisco Film Society last week, and a few reviews started popping up on the internet within a day. Some were great, some not so; the ones that were not so great were clearly from people who just didn't connect with the film, and that's something I am perfectly okay with. Always have been: I learned a long time ago that there's no such thing as a story that everyone connects with, so the thing that really matters is telling your story the best you can, then stepping back and letting it find whomever it will find.

Obviously, that laissez-faire attitude is about to get a major test...

There haven't yet been any official reviews, but press kits just went out recently (after all that time doing stuff ourselves, it's kind of amazing that now there's this team of people, some of whom I've never met, who are now busy busy doing stuff like press kits, not to mention the whole process of actually getting the movie to the various theaters); Marc did an interview with someone from the San Francisco Chronicle that he completely enjoyed, and that should appear just before the opening; and we've got various events that we're trying to put together to celebrate the occasion. Seriously fun; seriously busy.

Onward, upward...