A (Blessedly) Short-Term Memory

New York is in Hollywood's crosshairs again.

If you happen to be standing around in the subway these days, you might've noticed not one, but two movie posters for films - I Am Legend and the upcoming Cloverfield - that use a ravaged NYC as a shock-tastic marketing ploy as well as a catastrophic plot point.

This has struck me as odd. Most of us may not remember anymore, but after 9/11 New York was a sensitive topic. Just a teeny bit. People all over the country claimed to "be New York" and "love New York"; as cheesy as it sounds there was extraordinary national unity, much of it centered around the plight of metro-NY citizens who had suffered losses or witnessed unimaginable destruction on that day.

Entertainment, too, was itself a sensitive topic. The frivolity of it all! Who, in those serious times, could seriously think about entertainment? Our sensibilities - our society's sensibilities - would be altered by 9/11. The industry, on a whole, was entering an existential crisis. Look at the kinds of things Entertainment Weekly was reporting just two days after the attacks - this is how reactive we were:

Questions remain about such upcoming films as Ben Stiller's ''Zoolander,'' a comedy about a male model who uncovers an assassination plot; ''Serendipity,'' another Manhattan-set romance, and ''The Last Castle,'' about a prison riot led by a jailed general. Bombing and terrorism figure prominently in the plots of three new TV series about CIA agents. Promotions have been yanked for the Ocotber 30 debut of ''24,'' which features the bombing of a Los Angeles-bound jetliner. The first episode of ''The Agency'' contains a reference to terror suspect Osama bin Laden, and the lavish Washington party for its premiere next week has been canceled. A five-hour ''Law & Order'' miniseries planned for later this season, which would deal with a terrorist act in New York, is also up in the air. Then there's next summer's action blockbusters, including ''Spider-Man,'' whose trailer and posters have already been pulled because they prominently feature the World Trade Center's twin towers, and ''The Sum of All Fears,'' the Tom Clancy adaptation that has terrorists rigging a nuclear bomb to blow up a crowded football stadium.

Of course, it turned out to be more a hiccup than a seismic shift in the zeitgeist. Escapism, it seems, is better medicine than CNN.

Then, in 2004 - many terrorist movies and TV episodes later - Hollywood got back into the New York-wrecking game with a spectacular specimen of summer fare, The Day After Tomorrow. In that ridiculous(ly fun) romp through death, destruction, and monumentally bad-ass climate change, the city gets it good. Smacked around. Uninhabitable. (See movie poster at right. Hey, it almost looks like the Cloverfield poster... with snowflakes instead of bullets!)

So. We're back where we began, or, at least, where we were before, in the era of Independence Day (a rousing spectacle in its own right). And I don't really have a problem with it, despite how I say it's "odd" that we've reverted after such earnest soul-searching and serious contemplation of our vulnerability, and after such mourning.

I mean, I figure I'll be the first in line to see Cloverfield. How eerie and foreboding is that poster?

My point? We were serious back then. Wounded, together, humble. And it's funny that to appreciate that time - to appreciate what now seems like a fleeting moment - it somehow helps to see it in relief, next to the cartoonish, grotesque, irresistible fantasies we recoiled from just six years ago.

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Read & Watch: This is almost hard to relate to now, but I think it's good sometimes to try to remember how things felt.

EW's great issue, "What Lies Ahead," just three days after the attacks.

Jon Stewart's return on the Daily Show (click here to go to site and view larger), one week and two days after the attacks. Funny and moving.

"Arsenal of Passion and Rhetoric"

In EW a couple of weeks ago, regular back-page columnist Mark Harris made an inspired plea to readers: Go see No End In Sight, the latest documentary related to the Iraq War to make it to the big screen. Others have included Control Room (on Al Jazeera; good but maybe a little "Rah Rah Jazeerah!" and Why We Fight (not exclusively about Iraq but revealing in its discussion of the so-called military-industrial complex). Sadly, I'm poorly versed on this subject -- among others, I wanted to see The War Tapes and Gunner Palace but never have yet.

Here's the first graph, in which Harris, ironically, really gets you juiced to see it by talking about the persuasive limits of the written word:

For those of us who love movies and write about them for a living, there's almost nothing more frustrating than seeing a film that you admire tremendously, and knowing that whatever your arsenal of passion or rhetoric may contain, it's probably not going to be enough to convince anyone to go. The most powerful and intelligent movie I've seen this summer deserves a much larger audience than it's getting. It's called No End in Sight, and it's a documentary about the war in Iraq ...

Go See It

Tonight I saw "Once," which has been getting great reviews. It's Irish, a musical of sorts (mostly guitar and singing) set in Dublin, and really good. I don't really want to ruin it by talking about it, so here's a quick user guide:

* MetaCritic review.

* New York moviegoers

* San Diego moviegoers

* Philadelphia moviegoers

* Washington, D.C. moviegoers

* Pittsburgh moviegoers (it hasn't yet arrived in Pittsburgh, but keep checking!

You Should Have Been There

Some good "culture" this weekend.

1) See The Lives of Others, critical darling and this year's Oscar winner for Foreign Language Film. The plot is clear, intense, and exciting, but it's not just an intrigue/thriller kind of movie; it's driven as much by the main character as it is by the plot. And it's as good as they say it is.

2) Robert Moses at the Museum of the City of New York, and the Museum's Timescapes exhibit.

First, the Timescapes film. It's a great 22-minute short film covering the entire history of New York, from 1609 to present. It's overwrought and simplistic at times, but you won't find a better 22-minute history of New York City that really gives you a sense that tens of millions of stories have been lived here. Think Ric Burns' 16-hour, eight-DVD New York documentary condensed into a half-hour TV show.

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photo from Metacritic.com