beyond the pale

Okay. Look, man. You’re supposed to be one of the most acclaimed directors in America. You’re supposed to know what you’re doing. Supposed to be brilliant, aren’t you? People seem to just throw money at you to make movies and yet — when was the last time you made a friggin’ decent movie? When? WHEN??

Uhm, we all know it wasn’t Alexander. Except that I thought that movie was a comedy. SO hilarious.

And well, I’m sorry, Stoney, it clearly wasn’t your most recent effort World Trade Center, which MB and I watched last night at my brother and sister-in-law’s. Bad enough we had to endure The Banshee, who is quickly and seriously going south in every personal way possible, but then we ended that wretch 2006 with you, Mr. Stone, taking the single worst thing that’s ever happened on American soil and managing to make what I think is one of the single worst movies I’ve ever seen.

I’m still reeling from it all. So deeply sucky. I mean, you took an actor the caliber of Nicolas Cage — never mind that I think he’s a bit of a weirdo in real life — and buried him under filth and grime and rubble for over two hours, making him virtually unrecognizable, and forced him to grunt things to his also-trapped police colleague like, “You die; I die,” and “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep” and “Tell me about your wife.”

The movie — which does a very poor job of establishing relationships between people — was more a series of disconnected vignettes: Here’s the obligatory pregnant wife, wringing her hands. Back to the rubble. Nicolas Cage tells the other dude not to fall asleep. Back to a wife, being visited by cops. “We don’t know where John is, Donna.” Back we go to the rubble. There’s a flash fire. Back to the family. “Get Allison some medicine for the baby …. just in case.” Back to the rubble. There’s a Lord’s Prayer being muttered. (Wait, no. That was me.) Flashbacks to happier, non-rubbly times. Hallucinations of soft focus wives and such. All so ponderous, so plodding. And for the first half of the movie, the four of us kept saying, “Now, who’s that?” “Is that his wife?” “What’s that guy’s name?” and stuff like that that you shouldn’t have to ask each other if the movie’s doing its damn job.

MB was continually drifting off next to me on the sofa, so I kept just poking him, “Whatever you do, don’t fall asleep.”

And you know it’s bad when you all start making stupid, innappropriate jokes like that in the middle of a movie about something so serious. For awhile, uhm, a long while, really, the phrase “Tell me about your wife” became the entire theme of our evening.

Seriously, dude, NOTHING really happens in this movie. Considering all that happened that day — that our world as we know it basically changed forever, and considering how much we all felt — how we couldn’t think of anything else or watch anything else or talk of anything else for weeks on end — I can’t get over that this movie made me feel absolutely nothing but irritation and impatience for it to be over. The event deserves so much better. YOU are capable — I think, anyway — of so much better. Basically, you’re not living up to your potential, Mr. Stone, and as someone who is also not, ah, “living up to her potential” I consider myself somewhat of an expert on this.

Look. I don’t know what to tell you, man. Quit trying to make such self-consciously meaningful movies and tell us a damn good story for a change.