Ten years after New York was hit by an unbearable act of savagery, the gloves have come off in Hollywood.
A new movie genre has emerged that’s bound to dazzle and nauseate every breathing American, particularly New Yorkers still suffering from post-traumatic stress.
I’ll call it . . . 9/11 porn.
Osama bin Laden would have loved this.
The Internet and TV have been ablaze for a month with unavoidable advertisements for “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” a movie that does for the monsters who brought down the World Trade Center what “Triumph of the Will” did for a guy named Adolf.
Opening tomorrow from The Bronx to Des Moines, it’s a tale about love, loss and the abject exploitation of the dead and the living. Unlike grieving, real-life relatives of the souls who perished on 9/11 — folks who wouldn’t honor this movie by accepting free popcorn — I went to see it.
This movie tells lies.
It stars a weird 11-year-old overprivileged Manhattan boy, Oskar Schell (“Jeopardy” whiz kid Thomas Horn), who’s afflicted with a form of autism, likely Asperger’s syndrome. His condition is presented as nobly as the disability of the John Nash character in “A Beautiful Mind” — minus the brilliance and charm.
The schmaltzy flick is a kind of “Rocky” for an entitled, self-absorbed and self-mutilating boy. Except the triumph the child experiences is over moviegoers, who plunk down significant bucks to see this rot.
The movie concerns the boy’s quixotic attempt to hold on to his dad (Tom Hanks), who was murdered in the Trade Center. Yes, I wrote “murder.” But you won’t hear that word uttered by anyone in the film, because 9/11 is presented here as a kind of cosmic accident. Like lightning.
The message isn’t “love one another.” It’s “sh-t happens.”
The kid spends months combing New York, from borough to borough, searching for a mysterious lock that, he’s convinced, can be opened only by a key he believes his dad left behind for him to find.
The horrid boy curses out his doorman, played by an underutilized John Goodman (“Succotash my ball sac”), and cruelly abuses his mom (a weepy Sandra Bullock).
Appearing in every last frame of the film, the kid becomes the movie’s only identifiable terrorist. He tells his defeated mom, “I wish it were you in the building instead of him.”
“So do I,” she replies.
Nothing is spared in the quest for emotional blackmail, cheap thrills and a naked ploy for an Oscar.
In flashbacks, people dying in the towers are heard on the telephone — coughing, gasping and ripping the phone from the hands of one another.
Bodies fall from the buildings, however briefly. This unbearably brave act — humans choosing their method of dying — was too painful to dramatize. Until now.
But the most outrageous falsehood promoted in the film is the thing it leaves out. The word “terrorist” is consciously never said. Nor is “murderers,” “butchers” or “Muslim extremists.”
In a climactic scene, Bullock tells her son that 9/11 “made no sense.” This is the biggest lie of all.
For 9/11 made perfect sense. It was an act of barbarity committed by people bent on destroying this city, this nation.
Denying this is worse than insensitive. It glamorizes reality.
Families of 9/11 victims have uniformly rejected the film without seeing it.
“It’s all about the almighty dollar. These people would sell their mother down the river,” Rosemary Cain, who lost her firefighter son, George, said of the filmmakers.
“Everyone in the buildings was a hero.”
The movie ends in true Hollywood style. The boy, however improbably, finds the lock he seeks. But it has nothing to do with him or his father. Just another cosmic accident. The mother and child, even more improbably, come to terms with their grief and decide to get along. Until next time.
Who owns 9/11? Hollywood can’t be faulted for taking on a day of horror that destroyed so many lives, as the world watched in real time.
But dishonesty is worse than insensitivity.
It will make sure this happens again.
Big Bro weighs in at gym class
The nanny state is hungry for your kids.
Schools in Bay Shore, LI, are set to wire up students with electronic monitoring bracelets, like criminals, so Big Brother can tell if they’re doing jumping jacks between Twinkie binges. This spring, the suburban hamlet becomes the first place in New York where students and their twisted gym teachers may keep track of kids’ heart rates remotely. Something about fighting obesity. It smacks of control.
And the program could invite bullying, should fat kids’ data fall into the wrong hands.
Already, the devices are thrust on students in St. Louis and South Orange-Maplewood, NJ, where a child’s grade is partly based on the rate his or her heart pumps blood. I guess giving lessons on exercise and nutrition is too hard for teachers whose own hearts could use a boost.
I wonder if these devices will turn up in Bloombergistan.
Hypocrisy hits home
You’d think Occupy Wall Street would be eager to help a guy like Wise Ahadzi, an out-of-work single dad of two from East New York. Wrong!
Ahadzi says OWS hypocrites broke into his empty house last month, declared it foreclosed upon by a bank and handed it to a “homeless’’ family, The Post reported. But Ahadzi, who still owns the place, says he’s been trying to move back into the house since it went in and out of foreclosure in 2009. But when Ahadzi asked Occupiers for help, he says he was told to get lost.
The family who won the great Occupy house lottery, by the way, is headed by Alfredo Carrasquillo, a community organizer who works with OWS. While the house is renovated for its lucky tenants, Occupy squatters sleep on mattresses on the floor.
Give this poor man his house back, thieves!
Capt. Coward
Too bad they no longer hang cowards.
Healthy men pushed aside old ladies and small children to board life boats on the Costa Concordia, as the captain abandoned the cruise ship he wrecked, like a scared rat. “It’s dark out there!’’ Capt. Francesco Schettino whined to the Italian Coast Guard.
“Instead of letting passengers get into lifeboats, the crew went in first and [was] saying not to let [passengers] in,’’ Karen Camacho of Florida told USA Today.
Think of the bravery displayed by firefighters and average New Yorkers on 9/11, who gave their lives to save others. Italy has much to be ashamed of.
Occupy O.J.
Look who’s joined the 99 percent!
O.J. Simpson’s sumptuous Florida home has gone into foreclosure after the famously freed killer stopped paying the mortgage from the Las Vegas prison he calls home. Thieves. Freeloaders. Sexual predators. Occupy Wall Street should start a collection for one of its own.