Monthly Archives: April 2006

Movie Review – United 93

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(disclaimer: I had no idea Sgt Mom was also planning to attend this and write about it today)

I went to the 150pm show today (earliest showing at my local theater). I wanted to go to a weekday showing, so the theater wouldn’t be crowded. There might have been 2 dozen of us in the room – certainly no more than 3 dozen. I sat by myself in the very back row, directly under the projectionist’s window.

I’m just now getting home from all my other Friday stuff, but I sat in a parking lot about 430 and wrote my thoughts down, so I wouldn’t lose them. My thoughts/reactions are pretty much divided into 2 sections – the emotions I felt, and other thoughts.

Emotions first.

I remember the first time I saw the movie “HAIR”. I was in college, so probably about 21, and totally unfamiliar with the story. I knew it took place in NYC, and that one of my college roomies had been an extra in the Central Park scene. I also knew it was about hippies. I didn’t know it was about love. I didn’t know it was about friendship, and the sacrifices a friend will make. And I most definitely didn’t know how it ended.

I remember sitting in the campus theater, watching it end, watching time tick by inexorably, desperately hoping the blonde guy would get back from his date in time to trade places back with Treat Williams, who was pretending to be him. I remember watching Treat Williams marching onto the transport plane, knowing he couldn’t survive on eday in combat, and I remember his grave marker.

It’s been almost 25 years since I saw “HAIR,” and I’ve only ever seen it the one time. There are lots of details I don’t remember (character and actor names, for instance), but I remember the stunned disappointment – -no, it was grief — when the blonde guy didn’t get back in time, and Treat Williams went to war in his place.

I saw a movie today that left me with a similar feeling, even though I knew in advance how it would end.

I’ve known the ending of this movie for almost 5 years, and still, I sat there holding my breath at the end, watching time tick by inexorably, and hoping against reality for the happy ending.

There wasn’t enough time, not enough airspace, for United 93 to have a happy ending. They were too close to the ground, moving too fast.

The movie faded to black, and the theater was silent, as it had been throughout.

I had told some friends earlier this week that I considered it a movie about heroes and heroism, and it was.

But more than that, it was a movie about ordinary people, doing what they could in extraordinary situations. From Air Traffic Control to FAA to NORAD, to passengers and crew, it showed reactions to crises, both good and bad.

Yes, it brought back memories. Yes, I shed some tears. There was a point, early on, where it showed the 2nd plane hitting the towers, and I was back in 2001, watching it for the first time.

It reminded me of that horrible day, and the wonder I felt when I first heard about Flight 93′s bravery. It’s good to be reminded of that. I’m glad I went, even though it was a hard movie to watch.

I drove home in silence.

************************

Other thoughts:

I grew up in the era of disaster films. Poseideon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Airport 1 through 1,000,000, etc. I even have vague memories of some TV movie about a huge pile-up on some California coastal highway. And of course there was Jaws 1 through 1,000,000, as well.

In each case, these films of my childhood/adolescence worked hard to give you backstory, and/or build sympathy for the characters. And dont’ forget the music. Shoot, the music *was* Jaws.

United 93 did none of that (well, there were a couple spots where the soundtrack stole my attention from the film, but only a couple). Instead, it gave us a slice of life. There was no attempt to identify the passengers as they boarded, no recognizable stars (at least, none that I recognized).

We saw people sitting at a terminal gate, boarding the plane, etc., much like the flyers I see on my business trips. Much like the flyer that I was, back in 2001. Air Traffice Controllers, FAA personnel, etc., were never specifically identified, other than their location. We were watching people who knew each other – who worked with each other on a daily basis, and it was like we walked into a conversation that was already ongoing.

I’ll let the more knowledgeable folks comment on the NORAD scenes. I’ve not been in a command post since my first year in the Air Force, and that was only for one exercise.

It was a movie about facing the unface-able, a movie about coming together, about keeping going when you’d rather curl up in a corner and hide.

It felt balanced to me. It showed devout muslims who looked just like any other people – not monsters. One was a little more zealous than the other 3, and one a little less thrilled. All were nervous, and perhaps a little scared about what they were doing. It did not inflame my emotions, or leave me hating all muslims, or all Arabs (or our gov’t, for that matter).

Instead, it reminded me that we are handicapped by our imaginations. We had a hard time realizing/believing that the planes had been hijacked, because it had been almost 20 years since our last hijacking. We didn’t think about using planes as weapons, because we wouldn’t fly a commercial airliner into a civilian building, and so it’s hard for us to believe someone else would.

I know that a lot of what they showed on the plane is speculation. But it felt believable. And even though I knew how it ended before the first reel was loaded, it still had me on the edge of my seat.

It was well-done, and worth watching. But if I had seen it first-hand, it would be hard to watch, if not impossible.

Also, if you have a hard time hearing movies in theaters, you may want to wait for the DVD and use the subtitles. I had a hard time hearing in some spots.

How Americans Die: United 93

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Several years ago, I lamented on this very blog, how no movies had come out of Hollywood post-9/11 that told our stories of heroism in the ongoing war against the forces of militantly jihadist Islam. I can’t find that particular entry among four years worth of tri-weekly posts, since I can’t remember what I called it, but I remember pointing out that the dust was barely settled on our WWII defeats at Bataan, and Wake Island, before Hollywood had rushed out stories focusing on the heroic resistance, and our national resolve.

Where were our stories in this new war, where was Hollywood— did our current entertainment moguls feel above the vulgar business of telling our stories, and processing our heartbreaking experiences, defining who we are, and what we are fighting against? Of course, pace the Danish Cartoons experience, it might very well be that our movie moguls and stars are as fearful as anyone else of a car-bomb at Wolfgang Pucks’, or the oh-so-subtle gentlemen from CAIR parked in the outer office, and just as prone as the national big-media to surrender pre-emptively, and refrain from producing anything that would piss them off… or encourage the great unwashed American public to embrace their inner Jacksonian.

I felt obliged to go and see United 93, since it was exactly the sort of movie that Hollywood ought to have been producing; they should have done about thirty to fifty of this sort (well, counting TV movies and film releases together), and started at it three or four years ago. Well, it’s nice that someone in Hollywood finally gets it… a couple of years late, but better than not at all. I did not go to it, expecting to have a good time: the ticket-taker said automatically as he tore my ticket in half.
“Enjoy your movie,” and I replied
“Well that wasn’t exactly my plan.” Poor man, there is probably a picture of him next to the definition of “prematurely aged, hopelessly out-of-touch, fashion-challenged movie geek” in some vast cosmic dictionary.

The theater where I watched it was eventually half-filled. It was the mid-afternoon showing, on a day when most people in San Antonio have had a half day, or maybe the whole day off because of the Battle of Flowers Parade (explanation of this in another post— it’s just a local holiday, ‘kay?) No idea of it would have been a typical or atypical crowd, but I did notice that everyone was fairly quiet before the movie began, and near to silent when it ended. It’s not a movie you go to for laughs, jollies and temporary forgetting of your current problems.
It opens to the sound of Muslim prayers, in the darkness before dawn on an ordinary day. Only the unsettling image of the hijackers shaving and dressing themselves, and being extraordinarily diligent about their early prayers strikes any sort of ominous note— that and the image of four weedy, dark-haired men, sitting uneasily amongst the people they intended to murder— gives a hint of what happens next.

It’s all one of those prosaic, ordinary working days, people going to work, doing what they do every day of their working life, everything routine, banal, swapping the ordinary sort of work-related remarks, small stuff, chit-chat, all about work and what is expected during the course of an ordinary working day. The Air Force has got an exercise on, that’s the only out-of-routine thing happening. And everything is so ordinary about taking an early morning flight to the west coast, all those plain, unglamorous, lumpish people on the same flight. I had begun to think that Hollywood was incapable of making a movie with ordinary-looking people in it, but on this occasion, the temptation to cast the blindingly-attractive actor sorts was resisted, with the result that United 93 has a very documentary feel about it, with no one in it that you remember having seen in another role, and another show. (The air traffic control staff played themselves— which lent enormously to the documentary feel.) No one is really named, aside from the pilots, and some of the air control staff, and some of the Air Force people— there is no distracting back-story for any of the characters… it is all just the story of the morning of 9/11, quick and brutal and to the point.

It all happens in something very much like real time; all the ordinary stuff on an ordinary morning; sitting around in the gate area, until called to be seated, the cabin staff going by, towing their bags and laughing amongst themselves. If you’ve traveled by air in the last thirty years, it’s all familiar, down to being dragged to pay attention to the safety briefing, although it’s something you have heard a hundred times before, and that is the gripping part— we’ve all been there, we can see it happening, and to people very much like us.

It’s a very claustrophobic movie; there are very few outdoor shots, aside from some establishing views of airport runways, and a couple of long exterior shots of the New York skyline, taken from inside a flight control facility. Otherwise, it’s all interiors, very tight and very close, almost painfully intimate, as 9/11 starts to get very weird and very un-ordinary. The jolting moment when the air controllers watch the second aircraft slice into the WTC tower is shattering… just as shattering as it was—or so I have been told— as it was to people watching on that awful, shattering day. (I wasn’t one of them, I came late to the party, and was listening on radio.)

The last twenty minutes or so are very intense, extra-claustrophobic, in the confines of an aircraft cabin. (I may very possibly never fly commercially again. ) The passengers and surviving cabin staff huddle in the back of the aircraft, stealthily make phone calls, work out what has happened, deduce what will probably happen to them, decide to resist, cobble out a desperate plan; the last few minutes are a mad, disjointed frenzy, filmed on a shaky hand-held camera. A few grace moments: a middle-aged woman making a last tearful call to her family on her cell phone cuts it short, and hands the cell phone to the very much younger woman in the seat next to her, saying “Call your people”. An elderly woman on another cell phone calmly gives the location and combination of the home safe with her will in it, a married couple clinging to each other as the aircraft pitches violently— whatever happens at the last, they will be together.
And so it ends, as everyone who was paying attention that awful day would know, in rural green and golden fields— seen from the cockpit, growing horrifyingly more distinct, and a handful of passengers battering down the cockpit door with a catering cart. United 93 ends in a black screen and sudden silence, and then I realized how the tension had been ratcheted up to an almost unbearable degree. My heartbeat was hammering as if I had just done a 5 mile run with the Weevil, and the theater was entirely silent. No, this is not a movie you could be said to enjoy… but it is a movie with something to say… which is that when Americans die, and they are given sufficient warning, a fair percentage of them will choose to go down fighting.

(Which is, I hope, the message that Osama Bin Laden will take, when someone sends him a DVD of United 93, to whatever his current hiding place is. We’ve got your message, Wierdy-Beardy-Boy, and the answer is—no sale.)

Time Flies…

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The past two weeks have been whirlwind that has precluded any time spent on blogging. It seems like every year at about this time a number of work projects simultaneously reach critical mass, and this year has been no exception. The legal activity that brought me to Munich in February has the next important date in July, and everything takes ten times longer to reach consensus and submit filings because of the language differences. I will be also in D.C. in two weeks on a patent matter that has required tons of preparation. I am amazed by the fact that one can easily get patents for the most inane things (cf. U.S. 5,446,036 – Method of Exercising a Cat – claims using a laser pointer to stimulate Fluffy), but have to fight the patent office for years to patent things that are actually original and useful. I do plan to take a day or two to actually see the Washington sights, with the Air and Space museum at the top of my list. I am hoping for an invite for dinner with GW and Laura. I hate to be so forward as to openly ask, but I am fairly certain that he checks The Daily Brief several times per day and he is so good at picking up subtle hints. It’s not so much that he is my hero or anything, but my letters over the past couple of years to certain blue state senators, while not bringing on the black helicopters, have most certainly eliminated me from their A list.

Speaking of stimulating Fluffy, we are presently battling a coon problem (again). It seems that Rocky and his clan have moved into our yard, and they have found nightly amusement in sitting just outside the bedroom screen windows watching our cats have apoplectic seizures. I have always aspired to a cabin-in-the-woods existence, so they don’t bother me as long as they stay on their side of the window. Real wife, however, takes a different view. So I called our local animal control officer who brought out a live trap and baited it with cat food (if there are a lot of neighborhood cats that can accidentally be captured, he confided to me that Fruit Loops will also work well). We had our first winner by 10:00 p.m. last night. Because the trap was by necessity located in the fenced portion where the dogs take their morning constitutional, I moved the prisoner to the area near the back door. Officer Rick (not his real name) came by this morning and removed the hapless creature. Unfortunately, this mean a death sentence because if you try to relocate them they (a) will return and (b) may transmit rabies or other diseases to new areas. I also suspect another dynamic at play because Officer Rick actually wears a uniform of sorts with patches and metal badge-looking insignia. He has indicated to me during previous coon purges that people in his position have certain authority with respect to firearm usage and game laws – not on the level of a Cliff Claven postal complex mind you, but still a little unsettling. Red Haired Girl suggested that a regime of vitamins and TLC might tame the bandit, and looking closely at it made the suggestion seem plausible as it seemed pretty calm. I have no doubt though that any attempt to give the critter a cuddle would have brought on an immediate change of temperament.

Well, the dogs are in for the evening so it is time to reset the trap. Tonight I am including a few grapes with the cat food, mostly out of guilt. After all, it’s just one more example of humans encroaching on native species’ habitat.

P.S., anyone from PETA, Greenpeace, ACLU, etc. that feels compelled to comment are welcome to try the approach offered by Red Haired Girl (cuddling, TLC); on the one condition that I get to watch that first special encounter.

Radar

Home On the Range (A Fisking)

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Oh give me a home,
Got that covered. We got into base housing within a week and I still feel icky that I get this many square feet because of my rank and one son while airmen with a pregnant wife have to wait until she actually has the baby to get a decent place to live on base. Off base seems nice but it’s expensive. Something about a jumping mouse living where developers want to build. Sigh.

Where the buffalo roam,
I don’t know about roam, but there’s plenty of buffalo in the meat section of the commisary and at WalMart. Tastes a lot like beef, but buffer.

And the deer and the antelope play,
Haven’t seen any deer myself but the antelope sure are feisty. What’s interesting is when they decide to head straight for the road en masse and don’t look like they’re going to stop. Since they’re protected on base, they have the right of way and I guess it’s your fault if they hit you. The First Sergeant says that he’s never seen that pushed, but for the love of all that’s holy, don’t YOU hit one.

Where never is heard a discouraging word,
Oh give me a freaking break. It’s an Air Force Base for goshsakes!

And the skies are not cloudy all day.
Well not all day. That seems to be true. It may be cloudy one minute and clear the next and then raining like hell in another few minutes and then there was the snow storm earlier in the week that came right after a 75 degree day…but no, not cloudy all day at all.

On an entirely different track and while I’ve still got your attention…it could happen… When did airmen get both so dumb and so smart? Seriously, there are some amazingly smart young folks that I’m meeting, but there are also some incredibly stupid ones wandering around. And what’s all this “Sir.” stuff? When did that become normal? I was only on J-Staff for eight years but there’s an entire generation of young folks, both smart and stupid, calling me “Sir” with a big smile on their faces.

And in the name of Mohammed on a Moped (PBUH) when did Lieutenants get so damn YOUNG? I swear one I talked to today doesn’t have to shave more than twice a week yet.

But I digress. It’s good to be back on the front range of the rockies. Comforting. Amazing skies. Prarie dogs frolicking happily on the road right before a semi flattens them into furry pizzas.

Sighhhhhhhhhhhh Home.

An Acute Shortage of Care

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So, one of NPR’s news shows had another story, banging on (yet again) about the plight of the poor, pitiful, persecuted Palestinians, now that the money tap looks to be severely constricted; no money, no jobs, no mama no papa no Uncle Sam, yadda, yadda yadda. (It’s sort of like an insistent parent insisting that a stubborn child eat a helping of fried liver and onions, with a lovely side helping of filboid sludge. You will feel sorry for these people, the international press, a certain segment of the intellectual and political elite insist— you must! You simply must! It’s good for you!) I briefly felt a pang, but upon brief consideration, I wrote it off to the effect of the green salsa on a breakfast taco from a divey little place along the Austin Highway. (Lovely tacos, by the way, and the green salsa is nuclear fission in a plastic cup. Name of Divey Little Place available upon request, but really, you can’t miss it. It’s painted two shades of orange, with navy blue trim.)

It may have been a pang of regret, barely perceptible, for the nice, sympathetic person I used to be. I used to feel sorry for the Palestinians, in a distant sort of way, the same way I feel about the Tibetans, and the Armenians, and the Kurds, and the Chechens (well, once upon a time, say before the Beslan school atrocity) and the poor starving Biafrans and Somalis, and whoever the international press was holding the current pity party for. Really, I used to be a nice person. I really did feel kindly, and well-disposed to those parties, and I wished them well, since all of them (and more) being victims of historical misfortune.

My appreciation of Palestinian misfortune didn’t diminish the way I felt about the state of Israel, particularly— like I should jettison my preferential feelings for the only state in the middle east with more than a cosmetic resemblance to a fully functioning democracy, the only one with a free press, the one hacked out and fought for by survivors of the 20th century’s most horrific genocide? Oh please. Yes, there are things to criticize Israel but it exists, it has a right to exist, don’t google-bomb me with comments to the contrary, I’ll delete them without a second thought. The right to ride a bus or cross a street or go to a grocery store or a pizza restaurant without running an excellent chance of being perforated by bits of scrap metal and nails coated with rat poison is one of those non-negotiable things.

And no, that really is one of those non-negotiable and bottom-line demands; right up there with being able to go to work on a sunny September morning, without having to make an unenviable choice between jumping from the 102nd floor or burning to death. Or being able to take your kid to school on the first day of the new term without being taken hostage, and having to watch your kid drinking their own pee in 100 degree temperatures. After a certain point has been reached, I really don’t give a rodent’s patoot about the righteousness and worthiness of your cause, or how much you have been persecuted and for how many centuries, blah, blah, blah. And no, I don’t want to argue about American hegemony, sponsored terrorism, or responsibility for x deaths in fill-in-the-blank-here because of our nasty/bad/counterproductive/policies here, there or wherever. Pay attention; the topic is me, my personal feelings and I, and that charming little body of international residents upon the world stage who describe themselves as “Palestinian”.
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Caption This One Winners (060420)

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“Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army”

Wow, it was nice to see so many of you stop by and comment, but it really makes it difficult to pick just a couple winners.

My favorites:

1. Sgt Schultz: “Fly, my pretties! Fly, fly!” I’m in the middle of Wicked and that just struck me right.

2. B. Durbin: “Fly! Be free!” I laughed for an hour at that Mork and Mindy episode.

3. Last but not least, the Nostalgic Geek Award goes to Dean with: “Today’s military is much more powerful thanks to Captain America’s Super Soldier Formula!”

We’re moved in, mostly out of boxes, the only casualties being a busted piece off our headboard and an MIA iPod.

A long post is coming once I find some more oxygen, we only changed altitude by about a mile…you’d think I was getting older or something.

So….

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Just when things are getting really complicated, that’s when you can depend on the Great Bird of the Universe to turn the gain up to 11.

Through a series of interesting circumstances, involving an Easter-time acquisition of a pet by a newly-wed couple not entirely comfortable with having to pay any attention to another small being, a bit of total soft-heartedness on the part of Sgt/Cpl. Blondie (and a lot of soft-headedness on my own part) I now have another dog, in addition to the Lesser, but Known Weevil.

So much for sticking with the Known Weevil, in preference to embracing the Weevil You Know Nothing Of.

The Weevil I Know Nothing Of is a tiny, pure-bred, black and white shitzu female puppy, of the sort that my sister Pippy always described as a “barking cat”. She is about five weeks old, very affectionate, and a little bit clingy, but as clever as a cat about doing all those winning, “awwwww!” moment moves.

The Known and Lesser Weevil is intrigued, not hostile, but has a predisposition for pinning down the puppy with one great clumsy paw, and trying to play— she tries this with Percival and Sammy, and they just bash her in the nose with a barbed paw, but the puppy does not have this retaliatory capability, and yelped piercingly. Until the puppy is older, and more worldly wise, their playtimes will be closely supervised.

The cats are still adjusting, although Sammy has just pissed on the floor. But that may be because the litter-box is in a most insalubrious condition.

Oh, and the puppy has been ceremoniously christened “Spike”, in order to give her something to live up to. Do they make those metal-barbed collars in a size to fit a shitzu, I wonder?

Dog Posting

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Ok, I just have to share this, because it made me laugh out loud.

I have an old italian greyhound, Jessie. She’s estimated to be about 13 (I’ve had her for 2 years this month, she lived with her previous owner 9 years, and is probably a puppy mill rescue, meaning she was most likely 2 when she went to the previous owner, so I’m estimating her age at 13, having arbitrarily assigned her a Jan 1 birthday).

chair best

Anyway, the poor old dear is half-blind thanks to cataracts, half-deaf thanks to old age, and on prednisone and enalapril thanks to liver problems and a heart murmur. The cataracts obscure almost the entire eye, and Doc says the prednisone probably exacerbates them. Last summer we decided she was half-blind. This spring, I’ve noticed that she doesn’t seem to notice me if I’m more than three feet away, so I’m figuring she’s probably 3/4 blind at this point.

Her meds make her terribly thirsty, but if she drinks too much water too fast, it makes her vomit. So I try to limit her water intake, while also making sure she gets all the water she needs. She’s also a greedy-guts.

So I was just watching her walk over to the water dish and start to drink. And drink. And drink. Sometimes it seems that she doesn’t even stop to breathe, she just keeps lapping it up. So I walked over, picked up the water dish, and put it out of her reach. She looked at me when I came over, with that slightly worried, quizzical expression she does so well, and as soon as I sat down again, she lowered her head to where the water dish had recently been, to resume drinking.

Maybe you had to be there, but it was so cute (and somehow sad at the same time) to see her sniffing the area where the plastic bowl had used to be, trying to figure out how the water had magically disappeared.

It really did make me laugh out loud.

Always Remember

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Americans are often accused of thinking we are the only warriors in a battle – we know we’re not, but sometimes we forget to say that out loud.

If you’re on the other side of the international date line, it’s ANZAC Day. So thank you to the Aussies and Kiwis who fought (and died) for freedom. The battle for freedom didn’t end in 1918 – it’s on-going and never-ending, and the Aussies and Kiwis didn’t hang up their rifles then, but have continued to join the rest of Freedom’s allies around the globe.

If you’re not sure what ANZAC Day is, or why it matters, you can read more about it here. And I’m sure that we have readers who could enlighten us further, as well. For now, here’s a brief quote from the linked page:

What is ANZAC Day?
ANZAC Day – 25 April – is probably Australia’s most important national occasion. It marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The soldiers in those forces quickly became known as ANZACs, and the pride they soon took in that name endures to this day.

As you take a moment to remember the brave souls from Australia and New Zealand, pop over to Rude1′s RamPage and read his take on why it is our duty to remember our combat veterans.

Update: I was just re-reading Rude1′s post, and thought I would share a portion.

It is not the job of the combat vet to remind society of what they did, it is the responsibility of society to remember the sacrifices of the combat vets and to honor them. The combat vet doesn’t want sympathy. All he wants is acceptance and possibly a thank you.

Reading that reminded me that I had the privilege and the honor last week to say “Welcome Home” to 2 VietNam vets who were attending the class I was teaching. I love it when I get the chance to do that.

h/t Shayna (from the comments to this post about her friend Eugene)