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World Trade Center, 2006. Written by Andrea Berloff, directed by Oliver Stone. Starring Nicholas Cage, Michael Pena, Jay Hernandez, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Armando Riesco, and Donna Murphy.

When I first heard that Oliver Stone was directing a film called World Trade Center, I was actually quite excited, in a pugilistic sense. Why, the old guy’s dusting off the gloves, ready for a skirmish again, eh? Ol’ Stone hasn’t made a decent film in years, and maybe it would take a maniac like him to bring a oddball humanity to this story, to show us the utter madness of ground zero. True, I was hoping we weren’t going to have his usual conspiracy tales, a fictionalized Fahrenheit 9/11, with visions of President Bush ignoring warnings of impending doom, secret Pentagon meetings, jet fighters shooting United 93 out of the sky. Even if that were the case at least we’d get some of his usual bravado, or so I naively thought. JFK, Platoon, Salvador, Wall Street, even Nixon are brimming over with crackpots and their theories, and Stone manages to either cast nutcases in the lead (James Woods, Eric Bogosian, Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe, Anthony Hopkins) or draw out edgy performances from actors who are normally dull as stale bread (Kevin Costner, Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas). He is, or was, a filmmaker with tremendous passion, a man who seem consumed by whatever story he was wrestling with. Alas, this passion has faded. The pugilist is at rest.

World Trade Center is an unbelievable bore. It is maudlin and feeble. It fails so miserably at understanding the odd nature of heroics, fails to come to grips with the strange horror of relatives who can only wait for their loved ones, fails to even do the simple task of making the events of that day terrifying and confusing. World Trade Center is an abject failure.

The story is simple: two officers of the Port Authority Police Department, John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) are among a group of first responders to attend to the victims of the WTC attacks. We see, at first, them going about their day, the lazy commute to work on this gorgeous day, everyone all chummy and happy, New York a Guernica on the verge of destruction. For a few minutes the day unfolds and then the news begins to leak out that the towers were hit, and the action, such as it is, begins. The officers arrive at the scene, moving slowly through the chaos, amazed at what they’re seeing, reminded again and again that they have no plan for something like this. But bravery reigns and some of policemen and firefighters rush in. The towers collapse only two of their crew to survive, a good twenty feet below the surface of the rubble. The film details their conversations as they try to keep each other alive, a good two hours of hopes and hallucinations as they await rescue. In addition, Stone cuts away to the families struggling to cope with the possible loss of their loved ones.

Forget for the moment that Stone has chosen an odd story to capture the whole of September 11. Odd, because although McLoughlin and Jimeno’s story is incredible, it is hardly surprising–these stories have been all the rage, in the news and on the bestseller lists for almost five years now. Give Paul Greengrass credit, in United 93, for having the bravery to attempt an original story, one that was riveting in part because we were seeing something had not seen or heard before.

That aside, a good filmmaker might still have captured this day and all its visceral horror. If I seem a bit blase about the bravery of the two men, it’s only because Stone seems utterly freaked by his material and the need to honor the heroes of the day with hollow (and ultimately false) imagery. What happens on-screen did not occur that day: no police officers stood around, lips tight, nostrils flared, asking, in a solemn voice, if there are any volunteers to enter the buildings. No one paused, staring at the burning towers, eyes thinned, and then slowly respond, jaws tight with determination. Nor did McLaughlin then nod with pride and mumble “OK”. Cops don’t act that way, not in their daily routine and not when the tallest skyscraper in the city has a pair of jumbo jets buried deep inside them. In Platoon, Stone understood that bravery is a response to the sudden explosion of events, it is the need to become a part of this something larger, and doesn’t entail people standing around for cheap photo-ops. Has he lost the understanding that you glorify these men and women by simply showing them at their best, and not making statues of them?

Nicholas Cage is utterly out of his league, which seems to be his modus operendi in half his flicks. Cage can’t seem to get his head screwed on straight. I’m not aware of a better actor who makes so many dunderheaded choices. But all the actors and actresses are wasted here, from Maria Bello’s uber-mom to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s sitcom-tragic wife. Grief and endurance are bizarre creatures, especially with children involved, but Oliver Stone treats the day’s suffering with slo-mo and soft focus, making World Trade Center appear as if it were an Irwin Allen film for the Hallmark Hall of Fame.

Oliver Stone has been accused–rightly in some cases–of making propaganda, and World Trade Center is another exercise in propaganda. The stone-faced Marine (played by Michael Shannon, who is actually a very good character actor), who abandons his worthless job to pray over the book of Revelations and head off to ground zero (and then to two tours in Iraq), is one example of his bellowing nature. The guy is unreal, again slowly going about his response to this tragedy, muttering “we’re at war” and “we’ll need a few good men”. So, too, are the shots of the citizens of the world weeping over the footage of that day’s events. There’s no doubt that the world was with us that day, just as there can be no doubt that millions of people cried that day. But a filmmaker who relies on footage of people crying simply doesn’t trust his source material to elicit that response in us. And if Stone is trying to show the goodwill that we as a nation have squandered since 9/11, he is doing so with not a trace of the irony necessary to provoke such feelings.

But his message is not what troubles me. As a piece of propaganda, World Trade Center is what it is. But WTC’s crime is that it is dull and tedious. Stone has never been a Leni Riefenstahl, but he’s not even his old entertaining self. Like most propagandists, Stone doesn’t want us to think, he wants us to feel. And yet, instead of provoking feelings, he bludgeons us with images so static–like soft-focus flashbacks of Cage sawing wood with his kid or laughing over pregnancy test results–that one can only emerge from the theater tired and cranky. The only thing he left out were saving dogs and cats in danger… a plot line that might actually make a better film than this one.

World Trade Center is not worth watching on any level, unfortunately. If you’re serious about cinematically honoring the heroes of that day you have good fortune in the fact that United 93 has arrived the same year. Or watch Munich or Cache. One honors the victims of 9/11, the others are comments on terrorism, but above all, they won’t put you to sleep.

“You can waste your time on the little lies, but Americans have shown they are even more gullible when you hit them with the whoppers.”

There was in interesting piece in the Strib this morning, from the Associated Press, noting that half of all Americans still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That proportion has actually increased from about a third who believed the administration’s fiction a year ago.

So, you ask yourself: despite all the evidence and reporting to the contrary, why are Americans seemingly getting even stupider?

One could surmise that those who believe the world was created in six days about 6000 years ago could be made to believe anything, of course. One could also suggest that it’s possible that some of us just haven’t progressed far enough along the evolutionary track to have discerned the difference between fact and fable–whether we’re talking about quantum mechanics or Donald Rumsfeld’s pronoucements.

Speaking of Rumsfeld, who testified last week before Congress that he’d never been “overly optimistic” about Iraq, well here’s another swamp we’d like to sell you.

Isn’t it great we have a press that actually does research to get the facts, rather than the lazy he said/she said crap that passes for reporting these days.

Too bad nobody’s reading newspapers anymore.

Tonight is, of course, Summer Music and Movies, which is turning this wretched day into the best one of the week. By now my hyperactive thrill for this series should be well known by all half-dozen of my readers, so I’ll spare you the hyperbole, and boil it down :

Perfect Weather + Perfect Movie + Loring Park + Whatever food and drinks and company you bring along = the ideal summer moviegoing experience. I know nothing of the band Stnnng, except that they play before the movie, and I trust the good folks at the Walker. Bringing Up Baby is a masterpiece, and if you haven’t seen it, you should.

Little Miss Sunshine and (briefly) Talladega Nights and The Descent.

Little Miss Sunshine, 2006. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, written by Michael Arndt. Starring Abigail Breslin, Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, and Alan Arkin.

Now showing at the Uptown Theater.

Greg Kinnear looks like a nice, square guy. He’s from Indiana, the nation’s suburb, is the son of a diplomat and has a brother who works for Billy Graham. The guy pledged a frat, speaks fluent Greek, donated money to Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign, and graduated from the University of Arizona. You couldn’t cast Greg as a villain, give him a role as a coal miner, or a salty dog on a whaling ship. Kinnear doesn’t have the ability to play a respectable president, what with his buggy-eyed way of responding to trouble and his aw-shucks method of tossing up his hands in frustration. It goes without saying that Kinnear is a limited actor.

Jimmy Stewart was also a limited actor, but he remains, in my opinion, one of the finest in American history. Thing is, Stewart knew how to fit into the roles he was given and make them utterly his own. Most importantly, Jimmy had a stretch in the mid 1950s where he challenged himself and his public persona with some of the most bizarre roles in Hollywood’s golden age (most notably Vertigo and Winchester ’73). I mention this because Kinnear has become the closest approximation of Jimmy Stewart we have today, a respectable actor who works within his contexts and makes some startling movies. Kinnear is handsome, he can be wholesome, and he possesses the ability to show the everyman as a simmering, frustrated, yet friendly fellow. He has fabulous comic timing, and will take on films from Auto Focus to Little Miss Sunshine, a range of movies that probably won’t do to increase his appeal to middle America. Greg Kinnear could be our most underrated actor.

He’s precisely what makes Little Miss Sunshine a success, limited though it is. Cram a VW van full of six wonderful actors working in tandem with one another, and you’ve got something. There’s Kinnear, Steve Carell (the heart of the movie), Alan Arkin (always a joy), the underrated Toni Collette, and newcomers Abigail Breslin and Paul Dano. While the direction is often workmanlike and the script a poor mix of moderately funny lines mixed with dead jokes and fish-in-a-barrel wisecracks, this ensemble works like the Minnesota Twins on a win-streak: unbeatable and fun to watch. Little Miss Sunhine will not garnish any awards for its cast, even though it could be the best acted film so far this year.

The facts: Frank (Steve Carell) retreats to his sister Sheryl’s (Toni Collette) home after attempting to take his own life. His despondency peaked when his male graduate student, whom he was in love with, left Frank, the top U.S. Proust scholar, for he number two Proustian. Frank’s ill behavior in response to this crisis also cost him his job and nearly his life.

Sheryl lives with husband Richard (Kinnear) and their family. Theirs is a suburban nightmare, a house whose interior looks last updated in 1987, messy, crowded with people who are tense and frustrated with life and one another. There’s Dwayne (Paul Dano), who is enduring a vow of silence because of his admiration for Nietzsche, and who longs to join the Air Force. Alan Arkin is Grandpa, addicted to heroin, kicked out of his nursing home, who teaches the titular Little Miss Sunshine, Olive (Abigail Breslin), her pageant moves. And Richard is struggling to sell a nine-step motivational program that he created. He is an abject failure, a goofy Willy Loman who is a giant pain in the ass to everyone. Collette’s Sheryl is just trying to keep the family together.

Young Olive gets news that she has been given a spot in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California. Because Frank cannot be left alone, he is forced to come along, as is Dwayne, who is given the job of watching over his suicidal uncle. Grandpa has to tag along because he trained Olive. Because plane tickets are far too expensive, the family hits the road in a yellow VW bus. Along the way their clutch goes, the horn gets stuck, they run afoul of a porn-loving cop, and all hell breaks loose at the pageant.

The screenwriter, Michael Arndt, does a ham-fisted job of getting this group into the van and driving across the country. The film is light on its feet and sharp when the family’s at home, but veers into every imaginable cliche on the road. Not to mention the implausibility and cruelty of the plot: every single dream that Little Miss Sunshine’s characters have is crushed in the course of the film. The only two who don’t have a dream–Grandpa and Sheryl–die or have no real personality. Perhaps the greatest weakness of this film is the latter: Toni Collette, another underrated actress with amazing range (she can be luscious in Japanese Story, poignant in Sixth Sense, and funny here) has no character, whatsoever. She seems to lose her focus after the first ten minutes.

And Arendt takes cheap shots at an easy target in the pageant, giving us a Southern shrew in charge of the whole mess and a creepy pageant judge who seems a pale shadow of Fred Willard. Since the film isn’t even really about beauty pageants, this comes off as cruel and witless. As a screenwriter, Arendt is so unfocused you can hardly say that the film is about anything–the dad trying to be a success, the kid hungering for meaning, the suicidal uncle, all of these are merely conflicts to create resolution and a few knee-slappers. Little Miss Sunshine has an episodic, HBO TV feel about it, as every conflict is resolved in half hour increments, and the cathartic end is forced.

This is a shame, because the actors are working these characters for all they’re worth. Kinnear is just golden, struggling to keep his smile pasted on, bringing real dignity to an inglorious character who is forced to eat shit all the way through the movie.

It is the sheer joy these actors bring to this weak material that makes this film work, and work fairly well. Don’t come to this movie expecting to be floored or even to double over with laughter. But do come to watch six actors doing what they do best.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, 2006. Directed by Adam McKay, written by McKay and Will Ferrell. Starring Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jane Lynch, Gary Cole, and Amy Adams.

Now playing everywhere.

Talladega Nights is yet another feature-length skit-style flick with a former Saturday Night Live cast member, in this case Will Ferrell. It has moments of sometimes sublime laughter, most often those times when Ferrell has to match wits with Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a ridiculous gay French driver. Unfortunately, most of the jokes are awful; many, including what begins as a hilarious scene of Grace at the dinner table, labor on to cringe-inducing moments of painful unfunniness. Clearly, Ferrell and his director/co-writer Adam McKay wanted to skewer the NASCAR circuit–an easy target, in my opinion–but also felt that they needed NASCAR-lovin’ fans to turn out in droves. So the film, while steering clear of true skewering, eventually falls into the tar pit of actual caring, that awful moment in mainstream American comedy where the laughs are set aside and lessons are learned.

Most egregious in this film is the fact that, once again, we get to see a pair of great comedienne’s talent wasted. Molly Shannon has been reduced to playing shrewish bit parts that undermine both her sexiness and her ability to toss out dialogue with wit and verve, and Jane Lynch, so well used in Christopher Guest’s mock-documentaries, has her style and grace smothered in a caricature of a Southern-fried Grammaw.

Characters come and go, the plot is a mess, and probably eighty percent of the jokes are lame as the Jeff Gordon-is-a-homo types that NASCAR fans adore.

The Descent, 2006. Written and directed by Neil Marshall. Starring Shauna Macdonald, Natalie Mendoza, Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, Nora-Jane Noone, Molly Cayll, Oliver Milburne, and a cast of men and women who are the creepy crawlies.

Now playing everywhere.

While waiting in line for The Descent, a young man asked me what I was going to see. When I told him, he shuddered and said, “Oh, man, there’s no way I can see that shit. I live by myself, and those things scare me in the night!” He went, instead, to see Miami Vice, and although I admire his concern over his sleep and mental stability, he made the wrong decision.

It’s nice to be scared again, and to the point where I was grabbing my wife’s arm and fighting to keep my eyes on the screen. The Descent is about a pack of six friends who meet in a remote cabin in North Carolina to go spelunking. There’s an important, though worthless, subplot in which the main character, Sarah (played by Shauna Macdonald), lost her husband and child a year earlier in a car accident scene reminiscent of Verhoven’s The Fourth Man. Sarah had been out white-water rafting with two friends, Juno and Beth (Natalie Mendoza and Alex Reid) who were with her at the hospital when she learned of her loss.

Two years after the tragedy, Juno gathers Sarah and Beth and three others to go caving and try to pick up the pieces after the car accident. The early parts of the film, where usually horror films will waste with needless backstory and filler, seem like something written by Jon Krakauer, full of little clues, arrogance and ignorance meeting to create a disaster.

I’ll thank my lucky stars for The Descent, a film that eschews the usual CGI garbage, and sex-starved teens and cheap scares for genuine frights. The frights are USDA Grade A because the director, Neil Marshall, understands that darkness and confusion, noises and only a dollop of actual violence are what make us frightened.

Impressively, Marshall has assembled a group of seven young actresses whose job entails acting frightened but responding to their fears with intelligence and strength. There’s screaming, and I’ll say that references to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley are somewhat unfounded: Ripley is not an extremely well-written character in much of the Alien films (all overrated but the first), whose mythical status and toughness are as subtle as a decapitation. The women in The Descent are people who are educated, who are fit, who work together at first, and who are allowed (unlike Weaver’s Ripley) to be genuinely terrified but not lose their smarts and bravery in the face of this. They have jealousies and rivalries and a plot twist that isn’t a mammoth surprise but is a welcome diversion from the direction the film is going.

The Descent has a few rough spots, a couple of cheap scares that are unnecessary. But it is great because the dull spots are brief, there is no gaping implausibility (the bane of all horror films), and none of the characters is especially stupid, wandering into dark places just to check out a noise in a closet. Better still, unless you live in a cave, you don’t have to come home and wonder if creatures are hiding under your bed. But you might have a hard time sleeping.