United 93
Taking a break from the De Palma-fest to go see a current release.
Actually, turns out there is a De Palma connection to this project. Among the many unknowns and non-professionals, Gregg Henry shows up as a guy in a military outfit talking on a phone in some room somewhere.
The movie is certainly gripping, an enormously polished piece of filmmaking by a supremely talented director, but it is also something other than entertaining. One-third of the way through, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see this happen. Two-thirds of the way through, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this dramatised, reduced to an action-movie anecdote. When the guy behind me shouted “Beat that fucker!” as the passengers took over the airline, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be in the theater.
I could be wrong (the experience is quite upsetting), but dramatically, the message of the movie seems to be: the government is incompetant, the military is incompetant, the airlines are incompetant, even the airplane staff is incompetant; if you want to be saved, you have to save yourself.
Maybe that’s why the studio only advertised on right-wing blogs for opening weekend.
The “common folk” band together and take back the airplane, not to prevent it from crashing into the Capitol, but to try to land it themselves. Needless to say, they fail; the plane crashes seconds later.
A downer in every sense of the word.
Full disclosure: my wife and infant son were on United 93, not the one that crashed, but the same flight, same plane, Newark to San Francisco, a few days earlier. One of the flight attendants was rude and unhelpful to her regarding her infant car seat. My wife was so angry that she demanded the woman’s name. The same flight attendant was on the United 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.
Femme Fatale
Utterly preposterous and totally heartfelt, excruciatingly dumb and achingly sweet, I feel like this is more like the valentine to humanity that De Palma wanted Mission to Mars to be.
The ending, I see now, is the fullest flowering of his fuzzy fantasy idea, where a dream isn’t always totally a dream. A grace note in his other movies, here it becomes the hook that drives the entire narrative.
Rebecca Romijn takes time out from the movie to strip down to her black underwear and do Melanie Griffith’s dance from Body Double. I assume De Palma’s quoting himself, but sometimes I just can’t tell he’s quoting himself of if he just forgot that he’d done that bit before. Presented with a physical prop like Romijn, I can see how one might forget.
Come to think of it, he quotes himself all over the place here; I just realized that he’s even got the “twin girls, one of whom speaks with a French accent” beat from Sisters.
Antonio Banderas, I never quite realized, is rather short. But Romijn is in heels, so.
I believe that Bill Gates might one day become United States ambassador to France, but I cannot believe that Bill Gates would fly commercial.
