Guardian:

30 Rock star Alex Baldwin has been blasted by a 9/11 widow after he claimed airlines use the tragedy as an excuse to hassle passengers.

He made the claim during a defence of his actions after he was kicked off an American Airlines flight earlier this week.

His eviction followed following a hot-tempered bust-up with a flight steward who had asked him to switch of his mobile phone.

Angry Cheryl McGuinness Hutchins has branded the Thomas and the Magic Railroad actor’s words ‘inappropriate
Mrs McGuinness Hutchins is the widow of an American Airlines co-pilot who was in the cockpit of the first plane to hit the World Trade Centre.

She said: ‘I absolutely think [Baldwin's statement] was an inappropriate comment to make.

‘I believe airlines used what happened on 9/11 to increase security and protect passengers as much as possible – not to make travelling inelegant.’

And she criticised the staunch Democrat, who has frequently boasted of his intention to run for political office, for not accepting he was in the wrong after allegedly being abusive towards staff on the flight.

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IMBD description:

A nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist, searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks.

But of course he’s a nine-year-old pacifist. And according to Wikipedia, he’s also a nine-year-old vegan. Why would he be anything else? So precious.

Hard to get behind a protagonist in desperate need of a good slap.

But maybe by the end of the flick, the kid sees the light…

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What a straw man response. No one is accusing Bennett of not loving his country, we’re criticizing his insulting, provably false, and immoral statement that what happened on September 11, 2001, was our fault — that we brought it on ourselves.

Man alive, you spend 70 years building a legacy and then do something like this.

ABC News:

One day later, the 85-year-old singer took to his latest stage, Facebook, and wrote, ” There is simply no excuse for terrorism and the murder of the nearly 3,000 innocent victims of the 9/11 attacks on our country.”

Bennett also cited his World War II experience as shaping his position that “war is the lowest form of human behavior.

“I am sorry if my statements suggested anything other than an expression of my love for my country, my hope for humanity and my desire for peace throughout the world,” he said.

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Prepare to be horribly disappointed.

One comment I read put it best: Too bad Frank Sinatra isn’t alive to kick his ass.

ABC News:

[On his radio show, Howard] Stern then asked Bennett about how America should deal with terrorists, specifically those responsible for the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

“But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bennett said.

In a soft-spoken voice, the singer disagreed with Stern’s premise that 9/11 terrorists’ actions led to U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“They flew the plane in, but we caused it,” Bennett responded. “Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop.”

Following seconds of silence, Stern said that his guest was “making some good points.”

Before leaving, Bennett recalled an evening in 2005 when he was honored at the Kennedy Center. Meeting President George W. Bush at the event, the singer said that the commander-in-chief shared his opinion about the Iraq War.

“He told me personally that night that, he said, ‘I think I made a mistake,’” Bennett said.

Bennett believed that the president made this revelation because “he had a special liking to me.”

Bush told a lib crooner he made a mistake in Iraq?

Looks like Bennett also left his credibility in San Francisco.

Yeah, this will sell albums.

Just got this video and wish I’d known about it sooner. This beautiful, heartfelt tribute opens with Robert DeNiro’s stirring words and closes with Five For Fighting (John Ondrasik) singing a moving acoustic version of his hit “Superman.” 

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On a couple of occasions, I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ondrasik play live and his ability to mesmerize a crowd using nothing but a piano and his voice is something you never forget.

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The artistic community is always ready to stand against censorship – and we know that because it constantly tells us so.  If you want to drape an American flag across a walkway to make a statement by letting goateed hipster art aficionados traipse across it, you’re a bold visionary.  If you want to write a novel about shooting a Republican president, you’re courageously speaking truth to power.  If you want to smear pachyderm dung on a painting of the Virgin Mary, you’re bravely facing down the forces of religious bigotry.

Hell, you not only have a right to do it, but you have a right to have it federally funded through the NEA by the very taxpayers whose collective mind you intend to blow by getting so darn real.   It’s right there in the Constitution, amid the emanations and adjacent to the penumbras.  Oh, but if you accurately depict the acts leading up to the murder of nearly 3000 Americans, you’ve got to be stopped.  After all, the artistic elite can’t let you upset the Krugman-esque party line that 9/11 was really about Bu$Hitler and Company’s wars for oil or something.

The artistic community is anti-censorship right up until the second it decides it wants something censored.  Then it piles on.

A little background.

Steve Reich is a Pulitzer-winning composer who lived a few blocks away from the World Trade Center when the planes hit on September 11, 2001.  He was out of town at the time, but his family was home.  They barely escaped, but the experience was so emotionally traumatic that it was only as the 10th anniversary of this monstrous crime approached that he was able to finally express his feelings through his art.  You would think the artistic community would praise him – well, you would think that if you had not been paying attention and still believe that it possessed the capacity for shame at its own rank hypocrisy.

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Editor’s Note: Please welcome Kate O’Hare to the pages of Big Hollywood. As a longtime fan of her television coverage, it’s a real privilege to have her as part of the family. — JN

Perhaps the most direct TV reaction to 9/11 was the FX drama “Rescue Me,” starring Denis Leary as Tommy Gavin, an out-of-control member of the FDNY’s fictitious Ladder 62/Engine 99. It aired its finale on Sept. 7, but I wasn’t there.

I was there when the show began strong in 2004, with Tommy dealing with stress of 9/11, both the horror of the event and the guilt over surviving when his cousin and best friend, Jimmy Keefe, didn’t. It was irreverent, often profane (as much as ad-supported basic cable could bear), raucous and full of moments of dark humor and heroism. I once asked some Los Angeles firefighters about it, and they said it was tame – so I never doubted its veracity in portraying the secret lives of the FDNY.

But, as many Hollywood things do, it went too far, too weird, too vicious, too strange – especially in its portrayal of Tommy’s faith, which vacillated between “Father Ted” and “The Omen.” And it was way too hard to believe that women would fall that hard for Tommy Gavin, over and over again (they may fall for Leary, but he doesn’t just wear Denis Leary’s face, he IS Denis Leary, famous comic and actor).

Having been in New York in Oct. 2001 and seeing the memorials everywhere to the fallen firefighters and police, and then joining them again in Manhattan for the first St. Patrick’s Day Parade since the Towers fell, I wanted so badly to keep loving “Rescue Me.”

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It’s well known Hollywood is a liberal town so I went into all of their 9/11 specials with caution. I was expecting jabs at President Bush, Republicans, or even sympathy for radical Islam. I’m shocked, literally shocked. The majority of the specials managed to put politics aside and concentrate on truth and the celebration of those who survived and died on September 11, 2001. The people came first, which is how it should be. There were many specials, but I’ll pick the best of the best.

My personal favorite was President George W. Bush’s interview on NatGeo. It was handled beautifully. We couldn’t hear the questions, but I’m going to safely assume National Geographic just asked him vague questions to allow him to tell us what he went through — his thoughts on 9/11 and the days after. It also gave gave Bush an opportunity to explain why he stayed with the kids that day in the classroom. He explained that as a leader he needed to show calm and strength during the crisis.

YouTube

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Another great special aired on the Discovery Channel and covered the building of the new towers and the memorial. This special took us behind the scenes. The most significant part would be the tridents from the original building going into the new building. It just slipped right into place and one of the men said, “It wanted to be home.” We also learned that vehicles damaged on 9/11 have been inside a hangar at JFK for the past 10 years and they’ll finally see the sun again when unveiled at the memorial.

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The A&E original film “Flight 93” (2006), begins by showing pilots and flight attendants going through their normal, early morning preparations for flight. It shows travelers of all walks of life passing through airport security en route to the planes they would board for flight that day. There are smiles on some faces, scowls and consternation on others. And between the two pilots of flight 93 there is an obvious light-heartedness, all of which communicate that it’s just another day where average Americans step through the routines of life.

But it wasn’t an average day, as we all know, and the movie communicates this by interweaving clips of terrorists as they prepared to board flight 93, as well.

Emotions are stirred as the viewer watches names on plane tickets being checked at the gate. Interspersed with names like Tom Burnett and Todd Beamer are others like Ahmed Al Haznawi and Ziad Jarrah.

Right before flight 93 lifts off, viewers are informed that American Airlines flight 11 has been hijacked. Following takeoff, while flight 93 is still climbing, the viewer hears flight attendant Amy Sweeney (flight 11) on a cell phone describing where the terrorists aboard her plane had been sitting before they attacked. She talks hurriedly, and then is cut off by the impact of her airplane slamming into the World Trade Center.

News coverage of the second tower being hit is then worked into the film, and the tension is palpable.

The movie shows family members at home, who have been watching the news, wondering if their loved ones were on the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center.

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MANY THANKS TO OUR 9/11 CONTRIBUTORS

As always, Big Hollywood’s contributors came through in a big way. We can’t thank those who contributed to yesterday’s series of posts commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity enough. In fact, we received so many excellent pieces that we decided to extend the series into this week rather than pile them all into a single day.

So stay tuned for more.

ANALYSIS: WEEKEND BOX OFFICE

#1. Contagion $23.1 Million Opening

On almost 4000 screens with an Oscar-winning director and four Oscar winners in the cast (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, and Kate Winslet), “Contagion” was only able to scrounge up $23 million.  With a $60 million budget (which doesn’t include advertising costs), director Steven  Soderbergh’s star-studded thriller will have to gross somewhere around $150 million just to break even

Now can we declare the movie star dead?

And when will Hollywood wake up and realize that Matt Damon insulting half the country on a regular basis effectively destroys the most important quality a movie star can acquire: audience goodwill.

#2. The Help $8.6 Million, Total Domestic $137 Million

This $25 million adult drama with no “sure-fire” bankable stars has thus far grossed a whopping $137 million.

This not only proves that a good story that’s well executed and acted can find an audience, but also how hungry people are for this kind of theatre experience.

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As someone who lost a friend in the Towers (Port Authority officer Donald Foreman ), I still have a hard time thinking of 9/11 without gritting my teeth in anger. I do remember in those early days after the attacks thinking that the entertainment industry did a good job embracing the public’s heartache and sharing messages of hope and patriotism. I watched David Letterman’s return to the air and tried to laugh with him, but my pain was too raw and he somehow did not come across as sincere.

On the other hand, I was very moved by Jon Stewart’s monologue and there was no doubt about his pain.

It didn’t take long, however, for the entertainment industry to jump on the Bush derangement syndrome bandwagon and every film, show or play to be tainted with liberal hate.

Jon Stewart should take a look back on his feelings that day and tone down his contempt for all things conservative.

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I pray for those who lost so much on September 11, 2001. We are still not able to openly say “Radical Islam is our enemy,” and therefore I fear for our country.  There is this illusion that we are “too big to fail,” and yet we are more vulnerable than we have ever been in our very brief history. I only hope that those who gave “the last full measure of devotion” will not curse us from the grave!  God bless America.

As I watch documentary recollections of 9/11, I remain of the opinion that it will be a nearly impossible task to contextualize the atrocity in any form of popular culture.  That’s not to say it can’t happen, but to do so will require a master artist creating a work that transcends any living work.

Some may ask why it should even be necessary to do so.  The reasons are plentiful.  Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it.  The human experience is intrinsically connected to the search for meaning, from which our collective purpose can be divined. In short, by seeking to understand, we become that much closer to each other and to God.

But there is a greater reason still.  You’ll find much of it contained in David Milch’s discussion of his intriguing (though flawed) HBO series John From Cincinnati.  Mr. Milch postulates that the media has abdicated its moral responsibility (fans of Big Journalism have known that for some time), and that television has created a surrogate existence for us, detaching us from emotional reality.  Specifically:

I think that the media have infantilized the expectations of the audience because of the lack of some sort of transcendent informing vision. I believe that the surrogate existence that is provided by television has come to supplant the genuine emotional life of the populace…the assault on the collective sensibility of 9/11 was such as to give the audience so much fear that the only way that they could be placated was with a television series [The Iraq War…which had] everything to do with the habituation of the viewing public to the shaping of human experience in distorted forms for which the media is responsible…we wanted to be narcotized in our reaction to the assault on the World Trade Center…There is a different drama which is enacting itself in our country right now and it has to do with a failure to acknowledge the necessary moral and imaginative predicate that has become an entirely virtual existence, which is, you know, people spend more than half their waking hours watching television. Just think about that for a second. That has to shape the neural pathways…”

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Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center was wildly disappointing. This film could have been the defining film of our times, but it ended up being nothing more than a generic disaster film. It’s a missed opportunity, which I think was brought about because Oliver Stone lost his nerve. But can there even be a defining 9/11 film in this day and age?

I’ve experienced several historical events, but nothing quite like 9/11. I lived in D.C. when 9/11 happened and I used to drive right past the spot where the American Airlines jet crashed into the Pentagon. That particular day I passed by twenty minutes before it happened. I still remember the morning DJ joking about “some idiot who slammed a Cessna into the World Trade Center” (“how can you not see the World Trade Center?”), and I remember the horror in his voice when he learned it wasn’t a Cessna. Then there was actual panic and confusion and people talked about the Capitol being destroyed and the White House. It took me six hours to get home, fifteen minutes away, as they closed the bridges and soldiers set up road blocks.

I also remember the shock and disbelief that this was happening in our country. And I remember feeling sick upon seeing people jump to their deaths in New York. All of this is vividly etched in my brain as it is for so many of us.

When I heard that Oliver Stone would do a film about 9/11, I had high expectations. Stone is a leftist nut, but he had undeniable talent at one point. Platoon was brilliant, as was Wall Street. Platoon was so good it literally broke the Vietnam spell in our country and ended the tension between the public and the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Wall Street (ironically) inspired an entire generation of kids to become Gordon Gekkos. Heck, even The Doors was great and turned me into a fan of the group. So I expected something pretty incredible from World Trade Center, even if it was likely to be liberal.

In fact, I expected something that would mirror the shock, the disbelief, the panic, and the horror that people felt. I expected something that highlighted the selfless bravery we saw on our televisions that day. I expected something that caught both the grand scale of what this meant to the country and also something that captured the personal effect this had on so many people and so many families.

Instead, I got a remake of The Towering Inferno.

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A couple weeks ago my good friend and gifted songwriter/musician Andrew (BigDawg), Co-Founder of BigDawg Music Mafia, and I were tuned in to “America Akbar” on Radio Jihad Network, a weekly internet radio show hosted by our good friends Gadi Adelman, a counter-terrorism expert, speaker, and author; and his lovely co-host/producer Reese Ccup.  During the show, a gentleman named George called in to share some of his thoughts about 9/11 as he was one of the firefighters there that day who lost so many of his brothers when the towers collapsed and is personally suffering from health issues brought on from the Ground Zero toxins.

Reese wanted George to hear a song they often play on their show that Drew and I had written in 2009 called “A Hero’s Creed” – a tribute to all the 9/11 first responders and our military members fighting the war on terror.  There was a line in the original version that said “Eight years have passed…no attacks on our land…we owe it to those who heed the call.” Sadly, since the new administration moved into our nation’s capital, we can no longer say that.

We needed to update the song, so we did.  Somehow, however, through a slight miscommunication regarding our updating of the song, Gadi was under the impression we were working on a brand new 9/11 tribute song and would have it ready in time for his 9/11 Tribute show on 8 Sep.  We knew we had to write a new song for Gadi’s show.

YouTube "Stairs To Heaven" by Lisa Mei Norton & Andrew (BigDawg)

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It did not take long for us to come up with the concept for the song:  a young girl who lost her father – one of the 343 firefighters who died when the towers collapsed – who is now a young woman looking back with sadness on all that she lost that day and a determination to follow in her Dad’s footsteps and serve her country in uniform…knowing one day she would meet him again.

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The Bloomberg terms for this year’s 9/11 Memorial are not only wrong, they are spiritually, metaphysically and, even in Karl Marx’s terms, dialectically “unbalanced”. Bloomberg is courting an even worse disaster than 9/11.

To bear false witness against God, of all defendants, to blame Him for 9/11, branding Him and his representatives as persona non grata without a full trial is literally demanding God’s complete abandonment of New York City.

Is preventing clergy from participating in the 9/11 Memorial excluding God Himself?

Yes.

Why?

Try excluding a single State’s representative, Senator and/or House member, from a Congressional Ceremony Honoring Abraham Lincoln.

Try it, and may God have mercy on you.

The Almighty, if you haven’t noticed, runs a Democracy as well or better than Washington does.

God has also been known to take sides in American Wars.

Particularly the domestic wars of her Revolution and the nightmares of 1860-65.

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The world is full of bad people but the good news is that here in America our First Amendment makes it easier to spot them.

Via NBC:

The  festival, “9/11 Reclaiming the Truth, Reclaiming our Future,” is organized by the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance, a group that formed shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The lineup of films and speakers kicked off at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland this afternoon, and will continue on Sunday at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco after a march from Justin Herman Plaza to the theater.
   
Similar events are being held in Seattle and in Toronto, and a portion of those events will be broadcast live in the Bay Area as part of the film festival.

The slate of films includes “Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup,” “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out,” and “We Were Also Killed on 9/11: First Responders.”

“We’ve had rallies every year,” said Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance co-founder Carol Brouillet. She said the group organized its first film festival in 2004 and has had similar events every year since.

She said the main goal of the festival is to inform attendees about “the disparity between the official version and the actual events.” …

The rub below the fold:

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AFP:

For many people, the images of commercial airliners hitting the Twin Towers, and of Manhattan engulfed in a huge dust cloud as they collapsed, looked like a Hollywood apocalypse-style movie.

But despite that — or maybe in part because of it — 9/11 has not generated as large a number of movies as previous epochal events such as World War II or Vietnam.

Industry insiders say experience shows that 9/11 movies just don’t work at the box office — adding that the attacks may even have pushed Tinsel Town to produce even more escapist movies than it normally would.

In the decade since, only two Hollywood studios have produced films directly inspired by the most deadly attacks ever on US soil: Universal with “United 93” by Paul Greengrass and Paramount with Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center.”

This despite an initial surge of Hollywood interest following the September 11, 2001 attacks in Washington and New York.

“There was certainly an enormous amount of interest in 9/11 and the wars that happened afterwards,” said producer Bonnie Curtis, who has worked on films including Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.”

“I think that creatively, a lot of people started working on a material that normally wouldn’t even exist without the event itself,” she told AFP.

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What to make of this…? Something Alec Baldwin might enjoy…?

Via Comic Book Resources:

Rick Veitch wants you to think about things. Specifically, the writer/artist wants readers to think about the events of 9/11. Set to debut nearly 10 years after the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, “The Big Lie” from Image Comics features a physicist named Sandra who goes back in time to save her husband from perishing in the World Trade Center buildings. Veitch teamed with longtime collaborator Gary Erskine on inks as well as editors Thomas Yeates and Brian Romanoff who got the ball rolling on the project and saw it through to completion. CBR News spoke with Veitch about what he wants readers to come away thinking after reading the miniseries, how Uncle Sam comes into play and the problems Sandra encounters in her quest to save her husband. …

“If you are an American of my age, 9/11 was a major event; emotionally and politically” Veitch said. “How can an artist not want to explore it? ‘Can’t Get No’ was a flutterball about the emotional side of 9/11. ‘The Big Lie’ is a fastball aimed straight at the politics.”

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MIRAMAX TO LAUNCH FACEBOOK STREAMING VENTURE

While Miramax already has a deal with Netflix, this is still a fascinating move on the studio’s part. Warners, Universal and Paramount have already moved onto Facebook, as well.

On a less horrifying scale, Netflix is legally doing to the film and television business what Napster did to the music biz. Napster created an entire generation (and the most important generation to music-sellers) who got used to getting their music for free. The industry has never recovered and likely never will. What Netflix (and Redbox) have done is gotten us used to paying next to nothing for our home entertainment. Higher-priced outlets like Hollywood Video went out of business and Blockbuster Video’s been forced to offer similar pricing in a last chance effort to save itself from a fire sale.  

Studios would love to use a social media monster like Facebook to go directly to the public and marginalize the Netflix’s of the world, but I just don’t think it’s going to work. They might pick up a few pay-per-view hits along the way, but will it make up for the cost of advertising and the start up — not to mention the effort? I doubt it.

Hollywood can keep trying, but if I were a betting man I’d bet that the Netflix genie is out of the bottle and that in five years you either deal with the Streaming Devil or find yourself on the sidelines.

PIXAR ANNOUNCES TWO NEW NON-SEQUEL FILMS

This is wonderful news.

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