FLYING UNITED, PART II

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, a critic whom I do not normally associate with trenchant criticisms, has said it even better than Robert Wilonsky has:

"Doesn't seem to matter that United 93, written and directed with bruising brilliance and healing compassion by Paul Greengrass, is a monumental achievement that stands above any film this year. According to the polls, audiences intend to shun it. It's too soon, we're told, for a movie to take on 9/11. It's too speculative to watch a re-enactment of what might have happened that morning on United Airlines Flight 93 -- departing Newark for San Francisco -- when thirty-three passengers and seven crew members rose up against the four knife-wielding hijackers who killed the pilots and took control of the plane. It's too hard to watch brave people lose their lives as they force the plane to miss its presumed target in D.C. and crash into a Pennsylvania field. To which I ask: Are American audiences always to be coddled by fantasy? Is harsh reality forever out of bounds at the multiplex?
If so, we're in a sorry state."

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Five years ago, we were told that the best sacrifice we could make for our country in the wake of September 11th was to go shopping. Now, we are being tols, that the best sacrifice that we can make to honor what happened on September 11th is to avoid coming to mental grips with it altogether..... and to go shopping. Provided, of course, we don't consume any product that actually makes us THINK about September 11th. How small we've become.