The other Bleeding Edge

Fri Sep 10 22:00:27 UTC 2021

Thanks,
Nice article.  Now I’ll have to see the film.
David Morris

On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 5:37 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
> ‘25th Hour’: The Best 9/11 Movie Was Always About New York
>
> While other directors edited out the twin towers from movies at the time,
> Spike Lee worked the tragedy into a story originally about other things.
>
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> [image: Edward Norton makes his way past a flag, one of many reminders of
> how the city looked after 9/11 in “25th Hour.”]
> Edward Norton makes his way past a flag, one of many reminders of how the
> city looked after 9/11 in “25th Hour.”Credit...Touchstone Pictures
>
> By Jason Bailey <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jason-bailey>
> Sept. 10, 2021Updated 11:02 a.m. ET
>
> When Spike Lee came under fire
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/arts/television/spike-lee-911-conspiracy-theorists.html>
>  last month for including 9/11 conspiracy theorists in his HBO
> documentary series “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½,” historians and others
> expressed disappointment that Lee had seemed to give credibility to
> long-debunked claims. (He subsequently edited them out
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/arts/television/spike-lee-911-edit.html>.)
> But for those of us who’ve followed Lee’s career, and its intersection with
> that seminal New York event of 20 years ago, the initial decision was
> especially baffling — as Lee also directed what many consider the
> quintessential film about post-9/11 New York City.
>
> “25th Hour” is not a “9/11 movie,” at least not in the way that “United
> 93” or “World Trade Center” are. In fact, the attacks were not part of the
> David Benioff screenplay that Lee signed on to direct, nor were they part
> of Benioff’s original novel
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/22/books/books-of-the-times-he-s-young-he-s-good-looking-and-he-s-going-to-jail.html>
>  (which was published in January 2001). But Lee is an intuitive
> filmmaker, open to improvisation and adjustments — and, as “NYC Epicenters
> <https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/nyc-epicenters-911-2021>” reminds us,
> he is a documentarian who saw his city in a moment of mourning, melancholy
> and transition, and wanted to capture it.
>
> Most of Hollywood did not feel the same. In the weeks following the
> attacks, feature films with terrorism plotlines, including the Barry
> Sonnenfeld comedy “Big Trouble” and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle
> “Collateral Damage,” were delayed and drastically re-edited. Films still in
> production, like “Men in Black II” and “Lilo & Stitch,” were rewritten to
> remove echoes of 9/11. Skyline shots with the World Trade Center were
> edited out of the not-yet-released “Kissing Jessica Stein,” “Igby Goes
> Down,” “People I Know” and “Spider-Man,” and a sequence of that superhero
> trapping a helicopter in a web between the twin towers — the centerpiece of
> a popular teaser trailer — was deleted as well.
>
> Most controversially, some filmmakers chose to leave their skyline shots
> intact, but to erase the Twin Towers with digital effects. And thus the
> World Trade Center was wiped from “Serendipity,” “Stuart Little 2,” “Mr.
> Deeds,” and Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander,” which hit screens less than three
> weeks after the attacks. The director’s publicist explained at the time
> <https://ew.com/article/2001/10/05/september-11th-removing-wtc-picture/> that
> he made the last-minute decision to remove the towers because the film was
> an escapist comedy and seeing the buildings “would defeat that purpose.”
>
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>
> Spike Lee disagreed. “You could not even show an image of the World Trade
> Center. I said, we’re not doing that.” With filming on “25th Hour” planned
> for the following winter, Lee set about weaving 9/11 “into the fabric” of
> the existing story, as his star, Edward Norton, explained on the audio
> commentary: “It was like looking at it through the angle of another story,
> but the melancholy that the city was full of in that year afterward. I feel
> like the impact of 9/11 emotionally is all through this movie.”
> Image
> [image: Spike Lee added a shot of the “Tribute in Light”
> installation after reading about it.]
> Spike Lee added a shot of the “Tribute in Light” installation after
> reading about it.Credit...Touchstone Pictures
>
> “25th Hour” is the story of Monty Brogan (Norton), a white-collar drug
> dealer whom we meet on the last day before he is to report for a seven-year
> incarceration. That night, he hits the town with his childhood pals (Philip
> Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and his live-in girlfriend (Rosario
> Dawson), ostensibly for one last blowout, but also in an attempt to come to
> terms with the choices — and thus, mistakes — he’s made in his life.
>
> So the explicit references to the tragedy are minimal. There is the
> opening credit sequence, featuring the “Tribute in Light” art installation,
> in which 88 searchlights combined to create two beams representing the
> fallen towers (Lee said he filmed it the very night he read about it in
> The Times
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/04/nyregion/from-88-searchlights-an-ethereal-tribute.html>);
> accompanied by Terence Blanchard’s moving musical score, these images say
> far more about the tragedy than any news footage or expositional dialogue
> could. Occasionally, ephemera of that autumn — American flags, makeshift
> memorials, wanted posters of Osama bin Laden — pop up in the background.
>
> One scene, lifted almost verbatim from the novel, finds Monty delivering a
> lengthy, angry, profanity-laden monologue into a mirror, meticulously
> insulting New Yorkers of every imaginable race, religion and class (before
> landing on his family, his friends and finally himself). Bin Laden and Al
> Qaeda were added to the list of his targets.
> Editors’ Picks
> There’s a GameStop Book, Already
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/books/review/the-antisocial-network-by-ben-mezrich.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=569578688&impression_id=46b6bb90-127f-11ec-868e-837e3e756502&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls&region=ccolumn&req_id=740233792&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article&region=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
> Can TV Get Big Again?
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/arts/television/future-tv-blockbuster-shows.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=799005547&impression_id=46b6bb91-127f-11ec-868e-837e3e756502&index=1&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls&region=ccolumn&req_id=740233792&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article&region=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
> My Colleague Is Secretly Holding Two Jobs. Should I Expose Her?
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/magazine/overemployed-work-ethics.html?action=click&algo=identity&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=546453104&impression_id=46b6bb92-127f-11ec-868e-837e3e756502&index=2&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls&region=ccolumn&req_id=740233792&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article&region=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
> Continue reading the main story
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/movies/25th-hour-spike-lee.html?action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article&region=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending#after-pp_edpick>
>
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>
> Most poignantly, Lee relocated a scene between Hoffman and Pepper to an
> apartment overlooking ground zero, and placed the actors in front of a
> large window to view workers sifting for human remains. “New York Times
> says
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/18/nyregion/ground-zero-air-quality-us-agency-not-protecting-public-health-officials-say.html>
>  the air’s bad down here,” Hoffman notes; Pepper disparages the paper (“I
> read The Post”) and insists, “E.P.A. says it’s fine
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/28/nyregion/no-serious-health-risks-for-public-near-ground-zero-epa-reports.html>.”
> (The federal agency was later revealed
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/nyregion/21dust.html> to have misled
> the public.)
> Image
> [image: In one scene, characters look out over workers at ground zero.]
> In one scene, characters look out over workers at ground zero.Credit...Touchstone
> Pictures
>
> Some of the film’s initial critics found these additions to be an
> intrusion — A.O. Scott deemed them
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/movies/film-review-confronting-the-past-before-going-to-prison.html>
>  “obtrusive” and “a little jarring.” But as the years have passed, the
> value of what Lee was capturing has become clear. On the film’s fifth
> anniversary, the film critic Mick LaSalle called it
> <https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/9-11-FIVE-YEARS-LATER-Spike-Lee-s-25th-Hour-2469808.php>
>  “as much an urban historical document as Rossellini’s ‘Open City,’
> filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Rome.”
>
> But Lee didn’t just capture the way New York looked in those uncertain,
> shellshocked months after 9/11. His film captured how the city felt, the
> strange quiet that fell over the streets, the overwhelming melancholy that
> embedded itself in our collective DNA. “25th Hour” was not the story of
> those attacks, but it was a story about one way of life coming to an end,
> and another, far less certain one looming on the horizon.
>
> “We were very careful how we were going to portray Sept. 11 because we
> know it’s still very painful and that it will always be very painful for
> those who lost people,” Lee said upon its release
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/movies/film-box-office-he-wants-not-a-drink.html>
>  in December 2002. “But at the same time, we couldn’t stick our heads in
> the sand and pretend like it never happened.” And that instinct, that
> insistence on documenting the city we lived in rather than the city we
> imagined, is what makes Spike Lee one of New York’s essential filmmakers.
>
> Jason Bailey is the author of the forthcoming book “Fun City Cinema: New
> York and the Movies That Made It,”
> <https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419747819/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_AN4FVWVY8FGVGNFJE3W1>
>  a history of the city and movies about it. He is also the host of the “Fun
> City Cinema” podcast <https://pod.link/1525341222/>.
> A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2021, Section C,
> Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Movie for a Moment
> and a City. Order Reprints <http://www.nytreprints.com/> | Today’s Paper
> <https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper> | Subscribe
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>
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 5:36 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A little cut/paste work would be helpful for those of us hitting that
>> unforgiving paywall.
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 5:33 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/movies/25th-hour-spike-lee.html
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>
>>