Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
i still don't want to see it, but apparently it's a terrific piece of moviemaking, currently running at 92% over on Rotten Tomatoes.
here's what one of my favorite critics had to say:
[q]LAST IMPRESSIONS
“United 93” and “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.”
by DAVID DENBY
Issue of 2006-05-01
Posted 2006-04-24
“No one is going to help us. We’ve got to do it ourselves.” Those plain, unarousing words, spoken by a man ordinary in looks but remarkable in perception and courage, are a turning point in “United 93,” Paul Greengrass’s stunning account of how a group of airline passengers, almost certain of death, decided on the morning of September 11th to fight back against hijackers on a suicide mission. But Greengrass doesn’t build the moment as a turning point in any conventional way. The words of the anonymous passenger, a round-faced man who has been studying the hijackers ever since they made their first moves, are spoken firmly but without emphasis, and no dead air is placed around the statement to give it extra weight. The hijackers have taken over the flight at knifepoint and murdered a passenger in first class, and everyone else, appalled, has gathered at the back of the plane. By this time, both the passengers and the crew understand what is going on. Many of them have spoken by cellphone to friends and relatives, and they know that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been hit. The hijackers aren’t going to land and hold them hostage; they are going to slam them into another building. The only issue—for the flight controllers and the military people we see at other points in the movie, as well as for the people on board—is what can be done to take control of a situation both terrifying and unprecedented. Greengrass’s movie is tightly wrapped, minutely drawn, and, no matter how frightening, superbly precise. In comparison with past Hollywood treatments of Everyman heroism in time of war, such as Hitchcock’s hammy “Lifeboat,” or more recent spectacles, like “War of the Worlds,” there’s no visual or verbal rhetoric, no swelling awareness of the Menace We All Face. Those movies were guaranteed to raise a lump in our throats. In this retelling of actual events, most of our emotion is centered in the pit of the stomach. The accumulated dread and grief get released when some of the male passengers, shortly after those few words are spoken, rush the hijackers stationed at the front of the plane with the engorged fury of water breaking through a dam.
A fair amount of distaste for this movie has been building in recent weeks. Would the heroic event—which ended when the plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard—be exploited in some way? And why do we need to take this death trip? But “United 93” is a tremendous experience of fear, bewilderment, and resolution, and, when you replay the movie in your head afterward, you are likely to think that Greengrass made all the right choices. Born in England in 1955, he has directed, among other films, “Bloody Sunday,” a re-creation of the British Army’s massacre of Northern Irish protesters, in 1972; and “The Bourne Supremacy,” a franchise action movie in which a near-silent Matt Damon tears up Europe. What unites all three films is a dynamic use of the camera. It’s handheld and thrust into the tumult, yet somehow—and this is the essence of Greengrass’s art—we see what we need to see.
The movie begins slowly, with the morning prayers of the sweet-faced young men who will become the terrorists; the drowsy routine at Newark airport, where Flight 93, bound for San Francisco, began; the passengers amiably settling into the plane; the puzzlement at the Federal Aviation Administration command center, as first one and then another flight veers off course. When Flight 93 is hijacked, the passengers initially respond with panic, while the flight controllers on the ground, burning through their disbelief, try (without success) to rouse the military. Steadily, the editing becomes quicker, the language grows more terse and peremptory, and we begin to pick up details in a flash, out of a corner of the camera’s eye.
The hijackers kill the pilots, but Greengrass doesn’t show us their deaths; we just see their bodies being dragged across the cockpit, from the point of view of a flight attendant in the middle of the plane. Rejecting standard front-and-center staging, Greengrass works in half-understood fragments. When the passengers revolt, the violence is not an artfully edited fake but a chaotic, flailing scramble, and it’s not performed by charismatic types displaying their prowess. In a story of collective and anonymous heroism, we don’t want Denzel Washington leading the charge or Gene Hackman wrathfully telling the military to get on the stick. Greengrass uses real flight attendants, air controllers, and pilots, and mixes them in with little-known or unknown actors. As an ensemble, the players are stolid, but in a good way—they exhibit a combination of incomprehension and intelligence, befuddlement and alertness, that feels right. They live within the moment without overdefining it.
Flight 93’s departure, scheduled for 8 A.M., was delayed. By the time the plane got off the ground, the attacks on the World Trade Center were only a few minutes away. In the movie, once the flight is aloft Greengrass sticks to real time, and the passing minutes have an almost demonic urgency. This is true existential filmmaking: there is only the next instant, and the one after that, and what are you going to do? Many films whip up tension with cunning and manipulation. As far as possible, this movie plays it straight. A few people made extraordinary use of those tormented minutes, and “United 93” fully honors what was original and spontaneous and brave in their refusal to go quietly.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/060501crci_cinema
[/q]
here's what one of my favorite critics had to say:
[q]LAST IMPRESSIONS
“United 93” and “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.”
by DAVID DENBY
Issue of 2006-05-01
Posted 2006-04-24
“No one is going to help us. We’ve got to do it ourselves.” Those plain, unarousing words, spoken by a man ordinary in looks but remarkable in perception and courage, are a turning point in “United 93,” Paul Greengrass’s stunning account of how a group of airline passengers, almost certain of death, decided on the morning of September 11th to fight back against hijackers on a suicide mission. But Greengrass doesn’t build the moment as a turning point in any conventional way. The words of the anonymous passenger, a round-faced man who has been studying the hijackers ever since they made their first moves, are spoken firmly but without emphasis, and no dead air is placed around the statement to give it extra weight. The hijackers have taken over the flight at knifepoint and murdered a passenger in first class, and everyone else, appalled, has gathered at the back of the plane. By this time, both the passengers and the crew understand what is going on. Many of them have spoken by cellphone to friends and relatives, and they know that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been hit. The hijackers aren’t going to land and hold them hostage; they are going to slam them into another building. The only issue—for the flight controllers and the military people we see at other points in the movie, as well as for the people on board—is what can be done to take control of a situation both terrifying and unprecedented. Greengrass’s movie is tightly wrapped, minutely drawn, and, no matter how frightening, superbly precise. In comparison with past Hollywood treatments of Everyman heroism in time of war, such as Hitchcock’s hammy “Lifeboat,” or more recent spectacles, like “War of the Worlds,” there’s no visual or verbal rhetoric, no swelling awareness of the Menace We All Face. Those movies were guaranteed to raise a lump in our throats. In this retelling of actual events, most of our emotion is centered in the pit of the stomach. The accumulated dread and grief get released when some of the male passengers, shortly after those few words are spoken, rush the hijackers stationed at the front of the plane with the engorged fury of water breaking through a dam.
A fair amount of distaste for this movie has been building in recent weeks. Would the heroic event—which ended when the plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard—be exploited in some way? And why do we need to take this death trip? But “United 93” is a tremendous experience of fear, bewilderment, and resolution, and, when you replay the movie in your head afterward, you are likely to think that Greengrass made all the right choices. Born in England in 1955, he has directed, among other films, “Bloody Sunday,” a re-creation of the British Army’s massacre of Northern Irish protesters, in 1972; and “The Bourne Supremacy,” a franchise action movie in which a near-silent Matt Damon tears up Europe. What unites all three films is a dynamic use of the camera. It’s handheld and thrust into the tumult, yet somehow—and this is the essence of Greengrass’s art—we see what we need to see.
The movie begins slowly, with the morning prayers of the sweet-faced young men who will become the terrorists; the drowsy routine at Newark airport, where Flight 93, bound for San Francisco, began; the passengers amiably settling into the plane; the puzzlement at the Federal Aviation Administration command center, as first one and then another flight veers off course. When Flight 93 is hijacked, the passengers initially respond with panic, while the flight controllers on the ground, burning through their disbelief, try (without success) to rouse the military. Steadily, the editing becomes quicker, the language grows more terse and peremptory, and we begin to pick up details in a flash, out of a corner of the camera’s eye.
The hijackers kill the pilots, but Greengrass doesn’t show us their deaths; we just see their bodies being dragged across the cockpit, from the point of view of a flight attendant in the middle of the plane. Rejecting standard front-and-center staging, Greengrass works in half-understood fragments. When the passengers revolt, the violence is not an artfully edited fake but a chaotic, flailing scramble, and it’s not performed by charismatic types displaying their prowess. In a story of collective and anonymous heroism, we don’t want Denzel Washington leading the charge or Gene Hackman wrathfully telling the military to get on the stick. Greengrass uses real flight attendants, air controllers, and pilots, and mixes them in with little-known or unknown actors. As an ensemble, the players are stolid, but in a good way—they exhibit a combination of incomprehension and intelligence, befuddlement and alertness, that feels right. They live within the moment without overdefining it.
Flight 93’s departure, scheduled for 8 A.M., was delayed. By the time the plane got off the ground, the attacks on the World Trade Center were only a few minutes away. In the movie, once the flight is aloft Greengrass sticks to real time, and the passing minutes have an almost demonic urgency. This is true existential filmmaking: there is only the next instant, and the one after that, and what are you going to do? Many films whip up tension with cunning and manipulation. As far as possible, this movie plays it straight. A few people made extraordinary use of those tormented minutes, and “United 93” fully honors what was original and spontaneous and brave in their refusal to go quietly.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/060501crci_cinema
[/q]
i think the fact that it's leading off TriBeCa helped me decide on wether to see it or not.
