Some evenings you just feel more isolated from your culture than others

Being the fourth in my intermittent series of posts that might also be called "Why I don't want to see it." In these I talk about movies that I find myself with surprisingly little desire to see, despite the fact that they're well-reviewed, have a story or a kind of story that has been of interest to me in other formats, or both.

I always feel the need to draw the perhaps-thin distinction that I am not criticising these films, because I haven't seen them. I'm just talking about my response to what I have seen about them.

Tonight I'm talking about World Trade Center, directed by Oliver Stone. By RT consensus, this is

...a visually stunning tribute to lives lost in tragedy, World Trade Center succeeds unequivocally, and it is more politically muted than many of Stone's other works.

Maybe. But when I've seen ads for it, all I can think is that they've taken one of the most unforgettable events in recent American (hell, world) history in recent memory and turned it into dumb, Hollywood horseshit.

Part of my problem may be feeling that if this was a film that needed to be made (and I consider that a pretty big "if") then it should have been cast with absolutely no movie stars whatsoever. Because as long as I'm looking not at a police officer who risked his life trying to save others, but at Nicholas Cage...dumb, Hollywood horseshit.

And if this is a film that needed to be made I guess I would rather it had been made in handheld, almost "cinema verite" fashion rather than the apparently mythologizing way it has.

And what does it tell us about the five years that have followed that I'm also worried about how Bush supporters will exploit this film if it succeds?