Let's go to the movies

Whew. When I decide to take the weekend off before tackling my final papers, I do it in a big way. This weekend included: a healthy night of intoxication with my graduate school crew; a walking tour of the Freedom Trail (concluding with Magnolia taste-alike cupcakes from Lulu's in the North End); Date #3; and seeing three movies, an extraordinary feat for a girl who usually sees about six movies a year.

All of these movies are fairly new, so I thought I would deviate from my usual over-sharing of personal information to grace you with my reviews!

Thank You For Smoking
I saw this as part of Date #3, so I confess to being a little distracted by the awkwardness of the whole "arm around the shoulder" maneuver, but I remained relaxed enough to pronounce this movie thoroughly enjoyable. Aaron Eckhardt perfects smarminess as the public relations spokesman for tobacco industries. It was less political than I expected it to be, and there's this subplot involving Katie Holmes that might have been more effective had Katie Holmes not been involved, as Katie Holmes has reached that magical point in her career where her Katie Holmes-ness and the whole Tom Cruise fiasco is inseparable from the roles she plays onscreen, but overall it's worth seeing. J.K. Simmons plays the same role he plays in every single movie he appears in (a Hey! It's That Guy! if there ever was one, you probably know him best as J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies).

Akeelah and the Bee
This is possibly the single most predictable movie I have ever seen...but that only detracts from it a little bit, because if ever there were a movie that gets in your face and says, "If you dislike this movie, you're a heartless bastard," this is it. Keke Palmer (where have you seen this girl before? Could it be on...Law & Order: Special Victims Unit?) plays Akeelah, an 11-year-old girl from South Central Los Angeles trying to make it to the National Spelling Bee.

So, I had some problems with this movie. First, my advisor would absolutely take issue with Akeelah's spelling coach, played by Laurence Fishburne, who refuses to let her use words like "ain't" and "dis" on the grounds that she has to speak 'correctly'; any English professor worth his salt, particularly an African-American one, would argue that what we perceive as "proper grammar" is socially constructed. In the same vein, this movie is ostensibly about presenting an image of African-Americans from South Central that defies stereotypes; meanwhile, though, Akeelah's main rival in the bee is a token wealthy Asian-American from Woodland Hills whose father could not be more of an unfortunate caricature if he tried. Lastly and perhaps most damagingly, the image of South Central L.A. is the whitewashed one that's always presented in these types of feel-good movies, where the gangbangers and downtrodden alike have their spirits uplifted by a bright young girl who defies the odds.

If you're only going to see one spelling bee movie in your life, this shouldn't be it; save that for Spellbound. Still, the movie has its moments: "Spelling bees are serious shit," one character deadpans, and as someone who once owned my own tattered copy of the Scripps-Howard Paideia and never misses coverage of the national bee on ESPN, I agree. (Side note: I got such a kick out of the fact that Jacques Bailly, the official pronouncer of words at the national bee, appears as himself in this movie.)

United 93
(Side note: Before the movie began, one of the onscreen ads was a Cherokee ad that read something like: "The movie you are about to watch may not contain any explosions. We apologize in advance." Poor taste! Poor taste!)

This is an intensely emotional movie. When the screen went dark at the end, there were a few seconds of utter silence in the theater (the phrase "deafening silence" has never seemed so apt), broken only by the sound of soft weeping down the row from me.

I had no idea what to expect from United 93, and it turns out that it wasn't what I expected. A lot of the movie focuses on what was happening on the ground -- at the FAA, the military and various flight control centers around the country. (What was happening on the ground, as it turns out, assuming this movie is at least somewhat accurate, was a whole lot of chaos; I'm sure I'm not the only one who watched it with a sick feeling growing in my stomach as the minutes ticked by. Interestingly, nine members of the military and FAA in command on September 11 play themselves in United 93. Most of the cast members are unknowns, but Jeremy Glick -- the only person in the movie who seemed vaguely familiar to me -- is played by the actor who is married to Mariska Hargitay and has appeared on...Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; apparently after watching this show, no actor will ever appear unfamiliar to you again.) Unlike the Discovery Channel special that reenacted Flight 93 and the made-for-TV movie Flight 93, United 93 doesn't go into a whole lot of detail or back story about who the passengers were -- which makes a growing kind of sense to me, as that information is available elsewhere.

What it does do is depict the morning of September 11, 2001 in chilling and minute detail, with every ordinary event infused with burgeoning dread. I started to wonder what the hijackers were thinking about that morning as they sat in the Newark terminal amongst the people they intended to murder later that morning; I started to cry when a young woman in Coach casually applied some lip balm as she waited for takeoff.

Some of what happens in this movie bears an uncomfortable resemblance to action films that feature hijacked planes, only in United 93 there is no Harrison Ford and no decisive force of reason or action. The movie doesn't dwell on grand heroics or even on tearful goodbyes, although it could have; I would go so far as to say that it resists the urge to martyr the passengers of Flight 93 by portraying them as heroes who willingly went to their deaths. And by not doing this, it doesn't sanitize everything that is so horrifying and heartbreaking about Flight 93; it doesn't flinch from it, it doesn't amplify it, it bears witness to it in a way that is devastating. The final few moments are among the most difficult of anything I've watched on screen, but they are also impossible to turn away from. Watching the passengers' final, desperate assault on the cockpit, I wondered: What were they fighting for?

United 93 is a film that builds for two hours to a crescendo and then shatters abruptly; the film never returns to those control centers on the ground, where much of the first half takes place. This is because, of course, what is happening on the ground no longer matters. Whatever the passengers of United 93 were fighting for, we all know how the story ends: in utter silence, and soft weeping down the row.