Pajiba

Oh, holy $h!t. I think I just found that most human experience: diarrhea. Can anyone out there just tell a f*cking story without resorting to emotional manipulation? Extremely overwrought, incredibly cliched.

I saw this trailer in front of 50/50. It was the only decent trailer that we saw that evening. At least I thought so. The Main Squeeze thought that *all* the trailers sucked. I know that I am easily manipulated by exactly all the shit they threw at me in this trailer, which is why I want to see it. The trailer itself got me close to tearing up. So yeah, TK we should see this together. I'll bring the tissues.

I am usually on board for overly sentimental movies, serious Tom Hanks, and anything Sandra Bullock, but the trailer for this movie just makes me roll my eyes. This is exactly the type of contemporary literature I hate, and I suspect that the incredibly annoying protaganist will be all the more annoying on the big screen.

What happened on September 11th, 2001 was and still is a terrible historic tragedy, not a means to propel an otherwise crappy story. This douchey book was enough to make Wally Lamb and Nicholas Sparks gouge out each other's eyes with a melon baller. If the movie is a faithful adaptation pets in homes across the nation will be avoiding their owners for a while to keep from being kicked.

Now who else in here finds the use of a factual even where 3,000 very real persons to push a schmaltzy fiction along to be just a little nauseating? It was a ham-fisted effort when it was done for both Reign Over Me and Remember Me as in both those cases the story would have worked just as well if they had inserted any other tragedy. Does it matter any more if someone dies in the WTC Towers instead of say a house fire, a traffic accident or medical ailment? No it doesn't. And the fact that these movies borrowed Rudy Giuliani's 9-11 Express Card instead of just letting the stories stand on their own is testament to pathetic trend in marketing. The fact they used that event was a cheap and lazy effort, and if this trailer is any indication there's more of the same here.

Ok, I don't normally get angry about movie trailers, but I'm going to make a special exception here. Extremely Loud is one of the best books I've ever read - Jonathan Safran Foer is a genius. Now most people will associate this tripe with his book. Don't be fooled by the trailer: the novel is truly fantastic.

United 93 has, so far, been the only decent 9/11 movie.

BilboGeek-

It isn't that 9-11 in and of itself is being used...not exactly anyway. It isn't that the subject matter is completely off limits so much as how it's being used. And since you mentioned it, yes I actually do bristle when any movie takes history and reshapes it or treats it like so much set dressing. Perhaps there is a way to respectfully implement this into a work of fiction, but as of yet I haven't seen it done and I highly doubt this adaptation will succeed at it either.

What I find objectionable is that this story isn't about what actually happened that day or any of the real people involved or any of us who watched it as it happened or lived in the world afterward. Instead we have a very corny and I would argue poorly written story with 9-11 shoehorned into the background as though what happened were no more tactile than any other faux-reality show. It feels like someone is trying to profit off the emotional connection by using it to push their crappy little tome. We're not talking about a worldwide war or something that took many years and actually involved countless people where an individual story can get lost in the shuffle. We are talking about a very specific event that involved a specific number of people.

It's not really about how the father died so much as how his son deals with it. Would a story about a son trying to learn more about his dead father be an interesting story by itself? In the right hands it should be enough. Any author worth their salt could write this without the 9-11 inclusion. Or if they wanted the character to die in a terrorist attack similar to 9-11, they could fabricate one to go with the rest of the fiction. But since the author instead chose to use the event as his own, I feel it cheapens the event by treating as a means to an end. I'm not saying they're trying to pass this off as factual, but I am saying there's something to be said by altering fact to suit your own agenda.

I don't think 9/11 is off limits for authors, but I haven't yet seen a good use of it. As others have pointed out, it tends to be window dressing that adds nothing to the story that a convenient car accident wouldn't.

Of course, some authors have written stories where the events of 9/11 are the focus, but those really don't work, or at least not yet. Ten years on, the events are still pretty raw. This isn't looking back on a war 40 or 50 or 60 years later, or dramatizing more recent tragedies that happened to other people in other places. We all have very clear memories of that day; we're still exposed to real-life accounts of survival and loss. There is plenty of drama and tragedy and heroism those accounts. Fiction can't top them, and when it tries, it feels cheap.

Art is about introducing new perspectives and causing you to think about things you hadn't before. I'm sure that in 50 years, novels about 9/11 will help people to understand and process the impact of those events. But I just don't know what a fictional account of 9/11 would give us at this point. And sticking it in the background as a catalyst for an unrelated story really does feel gross.

Interesting. I agree with all the objections given; they're all valid and understandable. My initial reaction to a movie involving 9/11, including this one, is to automatically cringe. I assume that any story, no matter how genuine, non-exploitative, or honest, cannot survive contact with the Hollywood bullshit machine.

But most of the objections take the approach that the author or director wanted to tell a story and then threw 9/11 in as a backdrop, a sort of 'suck people into the bookstore/theater for free' card. Which is absolutely a possibility, though I hope even someone in Hollywood would balk at that. I guess I thought of it more as the reverse.

I think an author or director could approach from a desire to tell a story about 9/11, for all the reasons people tell stories, and then try to build it around that. What could you do to make it speak to so many people's experiences? How can you handle an event that is so shattering without it being treacly? Every year I find myself watching the 9/11 documentaries that play on tv in Sept. in an effort to understand just what the hell happened. Every story I've heard has been intensely personal, yet they're all about the same day, the same event. How could you tell that story? Is there a right way? Is it even possible, ten years on? Is it possible in book form, but impossible to translate to film because of the film industry?

I still contend that having a character die in 9/11 is completely different than having them die in a car crash. It will resonate with the reader differently, it will affect your characters differently, it will set your story in a different direction. If it does not do those things, and the author simply needs a dead character, then perhaps the author should either reassess their writing or come up with another explanation.

I have no idea if this will be a good 9/11 film or a bad one. I haven't read the book yet, so I don't even know how much merit the original material had. Judging from the trailer, and the fact that the main character (and possible narrator) seems to be a small boy, I'd guess they're only going to try to tell part of the 9/11 story rather than attempt to create an entire comprehensive picture and then cram it into two hours. From here, that sounds like a good approach. I'd be interested to see what everyone thinks once it comes out.

I myself dabbled in pacifism once. Not in 'Nam of course.