Author: kim

Yesterday evening we drove into Manhattan, parked right off of Spring Street, and walked the few blocks to the firehouse. They found our names, nydeborah‘s and mine, on the guest list and welcomed us inside. Servers zigzagged through the crowd and foisted upon us some of the tastiest hors d’oeuvres I’ve ever tasted — delicate little crab cakes, sandwiches made from paper-thin breads and cheeses, the tiniest pigs wrapped in the tiniest blankets — and made sure our free hand was always wrapped around a glass of wine or a cocktail. They showed us around the splendid New York City Fire Museum, where, among its collection of fire-related art and artifacts dating from the 18th century to the present, a restored 1921 Type 75 American LaFrance fire engine proudly bore the name Brooklyn. With great reverence, they escorted us into the room housing their 9/11 memorial, where faces are put to the names of the 343 firefighters who lost their lives that day.

Then they took us upstairs to the third floor to see what we were there for in the first place: a special screening of three National Geographic Channel documentaries devoted to 9/11 that begin airing this Sunday evening:

• Inside 9/11 [Sunday, 27 August]: Nominated for a primetime Emmy and updated to reflect new information from this past year, this four-hour miniseries traces the timeline that led up to the deadly attacks, spanning decades and circling the globe to reveal a clearer picture of the events.
• Triple Cross: Bin Laden’s Spy in America [Monday, 28 August]: Playing out like an espionage thriller, Ali Mohamed, a radical ex-Egyptian Army officer, became a CIA asset, joined the US Army, and served the FBI as an informant — then triple-crossed all three in the name of his true allegiance: Osama bin Laden.
• The Final Report: Osama’s Escape [Tuesday, 29 August]: How did Osama bin Laden walk away from a brutal barrage of bombs and gunfire by US forces during the battle at Tora Bora? A penetrating look at how this infamous terrorist eluded the world’s most powerful military machine in Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Seven hours of material had been expertly edited down to 90 or so riveting minutes for this preview. And when all was said and done, despite the horrible imagery (the planes hitting, the aftermath, the posters advertising the missing) and sounds (the explosions, the screams, the sobbing), which have long been seared into our collective psyches, what haunted me most was the image, both fanciful and frightening, described by survivor Louis Lesce, a no-nonsense career counselor attending a two-day class on the 86th floor when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower:

“The ceiling fell, collapsed. And I remember the resumés starting to fly out of the room. I’m sitting there and a resumé just passes me by and stays in the middle of the air, so much so that I could read the name, and then it floated by.”

When the screening was over, the audience sat stunned, silent, filled with our thoughts of that morning. I remembered turning on my car radio, back in Salt Lake, and hearing that the second plane had just hit. I remembered getting to work and not doing anything but watching, with Lou and Larry and Steve, the news on TV until the towers came down. I remembered the long walk back to my office. I remembered lying awake in bed that night, scared of how things were never going to be the same again. I’d felt alone for a long time, but never as alone as that night, where the dark seemed darker.

Then the audience snapped out of it and broke into enthusiastic applause.

I’m glad these brilliant documentaries, executive produced by the impressive Jonathan Towers, brought back all these memories. They should. Don’t miss them.

Without any Why We Fight rhetoric or any Michael Moore high jinks, sans Nicolas Cage or Oliver Stone, Towers simply lays out the facts and keeps the viewer glued to the screen. We get to think — instead of being told what to think.

Inside 9/11 ends with the November 2001 wisdom of Osama bin Laden. Still basking in the glow of 9/11, unperturbed by the bombs bursting in the distance, he summed up the Gordian knot that is life as we now know it:

“We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”

The onscreen image of bin Laden fades and only his superimposed words remain, hanging in the air like a name on a resumé floating past Louis Lesce almost five years ago.

Bob the Gambler, Frederick Barthelme’s fine 1997 novel about Ray and Jewel Kaiser and Jewel’s teenaged daughter RV, concerns itself with the introduction of a fourth member into their pieced-together Mississippi family: gambling, and its effect on their love for one another.

Barthelme knows loss. The one-after-another death of his parents in the mid-Nineties, on the heels of the death of his big brother Donald in 1989, made it possible for Barthelme and his brother Steven (both of them college professors and, like Donald, writers) to gamble away more than $250,000 — most of their inheritance.

Anyone familiar with the allure of gambling will easily understand Ray and Jewel’s beautiful and twisted illogic when they risk all they have — and all they don’t. Barthelme’s accomplishment here is that he makes it possible, too, for his non-wagering readership to comprehend how Ray can, on one hand, cherish a quiet night at home in front of the TV with Jewel and RV, and on the other (the hand holding two queens), risk losing it all.

Along the way, the Kaisers acquaint themselves with other artistic treatises on the subject — most notably Jean-Pierre Melville’s amazing film Bob le Flambeur (providing not only the book with its name, but also RV’s nickname for her stepfather) and Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, whose protagonists’ ill-fated systems and schemes are somehow lost on Ray and Jewel.

Bob the Gambler is infused with Henry James’ “felt life.” Just as there’s no doubt that at some point Bruce Cockburn encountered a bullet hole in “Peggy’s Kitchen Wall,” equally convincing is Barthelme’s elegy to an addiction that promises something (and it’s not money) for nothing.

Barthelme’s writing has always been about gambling: seeing how long he can draw out his sentences, his passages, the moments between his characters, until they reveal more than is on the page. Like Peckinpah’s best slow-motion shots, meaning is not found in the action, the action resides in the meaning.

Writing in the same seductive tones as the addiction itself, Barthelme is clearly best friends with the fleeting yet inveigling sensation that comes from beating the odds: the feeling that he’s somehow, if only for a moment, managed his own destiny.

When this film first opened in Manhattan, its run was so short that, by the time I read about it, it was gone. So it was with considerable delight that I discovered the film had returned, this time to Brooklyn, last week. 

Edmond seemed to have everything going for it: a script by David Mamet, based on his 1982 play of the same name; starring the incomparable William H. Macy, always marvelous but especially so in Wayne Kramer’s wonderful 2003 film The Cooler; and director Stuart Gordon, who did HP Lovecraft proud with his adaptations of Re-Animator and From Beyond. On the surface, this film seemed like a winner. 

Therein lies the problem: Edmond is all surface. 

Edmond is the same character at the end of the film as he is at the beginning — but it’s not Macy’s fault. The way the story is written, we don’t know if the racial epithets Edmond spews are a sudden eruption or part of his daily routine, whether he’s at the tail end of a journey toward violence or whether it’s a destination he’s inhabited for some time. It’s not a one-note performance but a one-note character, devoid of any sense of what, if anything, has been lost. Just as Gordon’s direction plods from one scene to the next, Edmond is a dead man walking from the first shot to the last (where he becomes a dead man lying down). Because we are not permitted to experience his fall, but rather just follow his somnambulistic walk on the wild side, there is no tragedy. We, like Edmond, feel nothing. 

Unlike Cape Fear‘s Max Cady, who promised, “You’re gonna learn about loss,” Edmond offers no such lesson. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker’s famous obvservation, the film runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

Similarly, a litany of usually fine actors are put through their paces so quickly and without distinction that often they’re gone from the screen by the time we realize who they were: Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator), Dule Hill (fine here in a role that’s about as far from The West Wing‘s Charlie as he can get), Joe Mantegna (always amazing, but especially so as Dean Martin in The Rat Pack), Denise Richards (the Charlie Sheen-Denise Richards divorce), Julia Stiles (so memorable in Mamet’s State and Main), Mena Suvari (the American Beauty herself), Rebecca Pidgeon (also fine State and Main — and married to Mr. Mamet), and Debi Mazar (not used nearly enough in Entourage). Despite all this thespian firepower, the only onscreen chemistry occurs in the scene between Macy and Stiles in her character’s apartment, when, for a fleeting moment, it seems as if she and Edmond might have found in each other a twisted kindred spirit. Alas, even that spark is extinguished before it can ignite anything else.

A gentleman, a few rows ahead of us, served as spokesman for the sparse audience when the film faded out and the lights came up. “That’s it?” he said. Indeed.