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Up From the Ashes Oliver Stone's strenuously apolitical World Trade Center.
WORLD TRADE CENTER
DIRECTED BY OLIVER STONE.
PARAMOUNT. PG-13.
HALF NELSON
DIRECTED BY RYAN FLECK.
THINKFILM. R.
QUINCEAÑERA
DIRECTED BY
RICHARD GLATZER AND WASH WESTMORELAND.
SONY PICTURES CLASSICS. R.
WHAT A STRANGE, SOBERING TRIP it must have been for the sponidicully talented blowhard Oliver Stone and the solipsistic role stylist Nicolas Cage to efface their outsize personalities and make a film like World Trade Center. No speed-freak editing. No lefty tub-thumping. No conspiracy theories. Just a celebration of American valor in the face of devastation. Why not accentuate the positive?
Their film is gripping-and should be: It has its tentacles around you from its stark title on. It's a title that means so many things to so many people. The mass murder of civilians in the world's greatest metropolis. The arrogance of Western global financial markets. And now, an uplifting tale of two people who weren't vaporized along with nearly 3,000 others. It is, as the ads say, "a true story of courage and survival."
The men arc two of New York's (and New Jersey's) Finest: Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin (Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña, the beleaguered Latino lock-smith in last year's Crash), part of a team that's going into Tower One to rescue trapped in-habitants. In the underground concourse, McLoughlin improvises: There's no plan, and he can't even confirm that the second tower hits been hit. He certainly has no inkling that the random explosions and groans of steel he hears arc harbingers of the implosion to come.
Those sounds are probably the scariest thing in the movie-the death rattles not just of one of the world's tallest skyscrapers but of American impregnability. Stone and his cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey, view that terrible morning with the heightened clarity of grief; the cops and firemen who move in and out of the frame-amid pieces of paper that flutter down like confetti-already seem like ghosts.
The opening makes yon think World Trade Center might be a Towering Inferno kind of disaster picture, but Stone backs off from spectacle. There's almost no carnage. We don't see the planes hit-only the shadow of one over the Port Authority. The collapse of...