Some interesting stuff about movies in this week’s Entertainment Weekly. The “Spideman” poster which shows the Word Trade Center towers has been pulled, even though the buildings don’t appear in the film. Paramount is digitally erasing the towers from the Ben Stiller male model comedy “Zoolander,” and postponing “Sidewalks of New York” with Edward Burns. Indefinitely postponed is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Collateral Damage,” where Ah-nuld plays a firefighter who battles Columbian terrorists after losing his family in a building explosion.
Now, I’m the first person to cheer the lack of another stupid Schwarzenegger vehicle polluting the theaters. But come on, people. Will the sight of the towers in a “Friends” episode cutaway (or even in a Microsoft Flight Simulator flyby) cause us to shriek in pain? Are we that fragile? Are we that unable to differentiate entertainment from reality? I don’t think so. And treating us like children who need to have our eyes shielded from even the most inocuous mention of this tragedy is an insult – especially from a national media that bombarded us with days of wrenching reality footage.
I don’t have a problem with avoiding scenes showing the twin towers for a while… but digitally erasing them from the skyline sounds a bit like cutting the faces of your dead relatives out of family portaits.
well, I dunno, last night I watched the season premiere of THE PRACTICE, and I must admit, even though its Boston, and I’m in NY, each time they did an aerial shot, it f***in’ freaked me out, no kidding………
Did you see the return of the “Real World” on MTV and since it’s the “back to New York 10th anniversary” season, every show has a disclaimer before it that says something like “We have chosen to run the rest of the show unedited in tribute to this great city” or some crap like that. Although I have to admit, seeing the pre-WTC attack NYC made me edgy. It was too much like watching the Titanic sail off on its maiden voyage.
I noticed the towers on Friends – which I had never paid attention to before. I think seeing images of them does serve as an instant reminder of what happened, and for some, this could be traumatic. I don’t think we should simply use the rubber-stamp tool and paint over them…it sounds wrong to me. I think Melissa’s painting has the towers in it – we certainly don’t want that to change.
i think it’s a little (no, a lot) like coming home from a loved one’s funeral & cutting their pictures out of the family album. the loss makes the memories, wherever we find them, that much more precious. of course it is painful at first.