Breitbart Big Ho editor / Hollywood flop John Nolte dislikes the film “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” because – get this – it “exploits 9/11:”
The film’s biggest problem is that, to put it bluntly, it exploits 9/11. Thomas could’ve died just as easily in a plane crash or boat accident without a single element of the story having to change. For Daldry (working off a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer) to use one of the biggest crimes ever committed against this country as a “device” is truly repulsive and a symptom of a Hollywood bubble so impenetrable that a group of people with the power to make a multi-million dollar film actually thought it was okay to say 9/11 is all about …. me.
God, that’s funny, in a “Union Carbide Bhopal executive complains about worker flatulence” kind of way. Has there ever been a group that has exploited a national tragedy to silence opponents and enact a radical, ruinous agenda as efficiently as the modern GOP humped 9/11 for fun and profit? If so, I was mercifully not alive for it.
John Nolte, whose writing recalls the elegance of Nick Nolte’s mug shot, goes on:
According to [Director Stephen] Daldry and company, what 9/11 is about, though, is the opportunity for a nine-year-old “amateur inventor, Francophile, and pacifist” to trot off on a narcissistic journey of self-discovery while banging his precious tambourine and providing his precious voice over and meeting all the precious people in the precious city of New York. And in the film’s most racially patronizing scene, meeting a group of precious Christians who are of course, Black.
And there you have it in a nutshell, ladies and gents. Wingnuts despised New York City before 9/11 for the same reasons they hate Hollywood, and their grievances against it would match up point-for-point with the Talibans’. Except the Taliban probably don’t hate “the Blacks” as much.
[X-posted at Rumproast]
beltane
What does John Nolte have against Christians? Or is it they weren’t the proper type of Ayn Rand worshipping Christians.
Villago Delenda Est
Yes, it rivals the decision in Bush v. Gore in the annals of crimes against this country.
Cacti
@beltane:
What does John Nolte have against Christians? Or is it they weren’t the proper type of Ayn Rand worshipping Christians.
Dominionists hate christians who actually believe all that rubbish that Jesus taught about turning the other cheek, and loving your enemies.
dmsilev
That guy has more issues than Newsweek.
Satanicpanic
His frequent use of precious calls to mind a certain malicious cave dwelling literary character
g
I haven’t seen the movie, but find the trailers pretty maudlin. But I enjoyed the book a lot.
Complaining that it uses 9/11 is kind of like complaining that “Gone With the Wild” exploits the Civil War.
Yutsano
It’s too early for me to be this disgusted.
Buster
To be fair, a lot of critics found the movie’s (and, I assume, the book’s) use of 9/11 to be exploitative. I think the Onion’s AV Club may have given the movie an F for that reason. Not that right-wingers don’t exploit 9/11 and everything, but this is a very common criticism.
RossInDetroit
I’d say the Cold War. They were so addicted to having an Evil Empire to validate their pumping up of the military industrial complex that they didn’t even notice that the threat had been over for years.
c u n d gulag
Jeez, I hope nobody tells Ru9/11di9/11 G9/11ui9/11lia9/11ni9/11!
He’s got that date trademarked.
elmo
I don’t intend to see the movie, because I can’t enjoy anything about 9/11 – it just makes me so intensely sad. But I get the feeling that Nolte’s objection to it is precisely that – that it evokes sadness, about 9/11 and its effect on one particular family, instead of fury, followed by swelling trumpets and vengeful bomber squadrons.
As though 9/11 can’t be “about” one life tragically cut short – it has to be about national pride, revenge, and lots and lots of dead brown people. Making a big-budget movie full of explosions and revenge porn – not exploitation. Confining the story to the actual, you know, victims – that’s exploitation.
Sick bastard.
Linda Featheringill
@Cacti:
Yes. And if Jesus were to appear today, they would chase him down and execute him, one way or another. Because he would be a threat to society, don’t you see?
dan
That’s why when they latched onto 9/11 and said “We are all New Yorkers now” I wanted to punch them hard in the face.
Joseph Nobles
Left wingers exploit 9/11 to make a movie about how a kid can overcome adversity and thus inspire us all. Right wingers exploit 9/11 to invade a country and thus tank America’s credibility and budget.
Nolte is making this way too easy.
slippy
It’s amazing how hateful this sad little man is about someone else talking about 9/11. I think his entire reasoning appears to be that someone other than a rock-ribbed right-wing nutjob is talking about 9/11.
Of course, 9/11 didn’t happen in fucking Heartland America, so it’s interesting that the narratives that are now emerging around it are more urban and sophisticated than “I’m gonna put my boot up yer ass” tough-talking (and RACIST) horseshit.
Tom65
Because the use of 9/11 for any purpose other than promoting “America Fuck Yeah!” is a felony in Teabagger Land.
Rick Massimo
That wording tells me that he has no idea that the novel uses Sept. 11. Either that or Nolte assumes his audience doesn’t know that and is trying to profit from ignorance rather than dispelling it.
Given that that’s what the entire conservative movement has been based on going back at least to William F. Buckley’s publisher’s statement in the first issue of National Review in 1955, I’m going with the latter.
KG
I saw Remember Me a while back; it used 9/11 as a plot device. I don’t remember any outrage about that. It’s been over ten years now, it was a moment sketched into everyone’s minds…. It is going to be used in fiction a lot. Just like Pearl Harbor, Normandie, Vietnam. That’s what happens
rb
Use of 9/11 as scenery does get annoying and I have avoided this book and movie for that reason. But whatever: the entire right-wing mythology is one long orgy of 9/11 exploitation.
What I find more telling is the “of course, Black” comment. Yet another case of a rightwinger equating “less than 100% white” with “politically correct” or “precious.” Perhaps the scene in question is indeed condescending, but I wouldn’t trust Dick Nolte to be able to tell.
Also, coming from this clown, the description of a nine-year-old as “narcissistic” is almost crystalline in its irony and tone deafness.
TR
Asked for a comment, former Mayor Rudy Guiliani said “9/11, 9/11, 9/11 and, of course, 9/11. 9/11? Well, 9/11 and 9/11. Good day, and may 9/11 bless you.”
Buster
@Rick Massimo:
I don’t think it’s at all clear that Nolte doesn’t know this, but that’s sort of beside the point in discussing how the film uses 9/11. The filmmakers chose to make a film based on a novel that uses 9/11 as a plot device. So they’re responsible for how that plot device is used in their film and whether it’s used appropriately or not.
TR
This idiot is upset about a major work of fiction that exploits 9/11?
Man, nobody better tell him about the War in Iraq. He’d be pissed.
Jerzy Russian
@dmsilev:
I will put this in my little book for later use, if you don’t mind.
Cacti
@Buster:
Even if it’s the most crass, thoughtless, poorly used plot device in the history of cinema, it will never do the damage that Nolte’s political heroes wrought by using 9/11 as a foreign policy device.
Chris
@slippy:
Yeah, I’ve always wondered if that hurt their fee-fees. The fact that when our Great and Terrible Enemies wanted to hurt America and make an example of it in front of the entire world – they hit godless, librul, unamerican New York and Washington, not Smallville, Real America. Because contrary to what they tell themselves every day, no one actually gives a shit about their heartland and their oh-so-special “values” and “way of life.”
Hal
As Sarah Vowell said of wingnuts in 2008 on The Daily Show:
And my favorite:
norbizness
Thank goodness; I was worried that somebody I’ve never heard of was going to influence the viewership of a crap movie that came out months ago.
Buster
@Cacti:
I don’t want to get into all that, but I have noted that critics other than Nolte have made similar complaints about this movie. I haven’t seen it, ’cause it didn’t look like anything I’d be interested in as a film, but it isn’t just right-wingers criticizing this film on this issue. Nolte may be making his argument for reasons that aren’t legitimate, but whether or not this film’s use of 9/11 is exploitative is probably a legitimate topic of debate.
PurpleGirl
@Chris: When “Heartland America” was hit, it was hit by a discontented American. (Or doesn’t he remember Oklahoma City and a man named Timothy McVeigh.)
On using the September 11th attacks, TVs CSI: New York has as its lead character a man who lost his wife in the attacks and it colors his whole life. Does Nolte hate that show?
bago
Mika Brezinski seems to be kicking some ass. She seems to be rather well at making Joe look silly.
Swishalicious
I’ve never read that clown before, so I don’t know if he’s one of the many 9/11 fetishists who would go as far as to chain and torture animals because OMG9/11!!!oneoneon1!1!
But with that said, when I saw a preview for this movie, I immediately thought it was just exploiting 9/11 for purely commercial purposes. There have been other movies about that day, and of course they were commercial profit-based efforts, but… this just seemed different, as if it was using 9/11 as a hook to sell tickets to what really was an un-related father/son/discovery tale.
Good points are made by other commenters about how 9/11 has been rolled into the plot lines of TV shows, and TBH I haven’t seen them to judge how ham-handed they are (or aren’t). It just seemed to me this movie wasn’t linking in good taste.
TR
@bago:
Really? I gave up on that show a year or so ago, when it seemed like all she would do was smile enthusiastically at whatever “sensible conservative” BS Scarborough tried to roll out.
Jay in Oregon
@PurpleGirl:
An attack perpetrated by a white, (ostensibly) Christian right-wing lunatic?
Those are immediate qualifications for the Conservative Memory Hole.
Wilson Heath
Was the review posted April 1st? It’s getting to be a hard day to tell which, if any, of the pieces out of the conservative house organs are self-parody.
Chris
@PurpleGirl:
Yeah, and that was another time when all the supposed “experts” proved their complete idiocy by all lining up and saying “oh yes, this TOTALLY looks like it came out of the Middle East.”
Use your fucking heads, people. A homegrown islamist cell, yes, I could see that, but no one flies halfway around the world to bomb an obscure FBI office in a random Middle American city that no one back in the Old Country has ever heard of. The location and the identity of the victims alone should’ve told you it was very likely not a Middle Eastern show.
different-church-lady
The real problem here is one of intellectual property: conservatives have trademarked 9/11™ and get all Twitchy™ when someone uses their brand. Especially if that someone is the Evul Librls™.
Jess
I made it halfway through the book, and actually came to similar conclusions about the tiresome “preciousness” of everyone in it. But the 9/11 part didn’t bother me at all, in large part because it returned the tragedy back into the hands of those who actually lost loved ones. What pisses me off the most about the response to 9/11 is how so many people tried to appropriate it to add some tragic drama and gravitas to their own shallow, oblivious lives. Especially the wingnuts, who don’t give a damn about all the Americans who die because of lack of access to healthcare, or from poverty in general.
different-church-lady
I’m a little hard pressed to understand why people who create fiction are supposed to treat one of the biggest events in the history of this country as though it never happened.
bago
@TR: So I put the show on as noise to go to sleep to, when I started streaming the show. However, watching her roll her eyes when Joe says something stupid was more than amusing enough to keep my attention.
Given the fact that she leads off with a narrative when coming back from a commercial break, it seems like she’s taking over the show. Joe will assert monologue authority, from time to time, but only during crosstalk it seems.
Really though, it looks like msnbc has mastered the art of panel discussions,with the boom cam and the lcd walls. Most profitably of course is the promo action, where a segment introduces each participant with a mini-resume of tie in items.
David
Where is the Breitbart toxicology report? What are they hiding?
SenyorDave
OT, but when Sullivan is good, I think he’s very good. And he nails this one.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/04/the-rights-obama.html
Although, I personally think much of this is racism, becasue in the world of some on the right (and most of the far right), a black man simply can’t be smart and accomplished.
xochi
To be fair, Jonathan Safran Foer is an obnoxious, maudlin, and twee writer who deserves whatever contempt he gets. In addition to this novel about a magical manchild who travels through NYC after 9/11 looking for his lost father, he wrote Everything Is Illuminated, an attempt to deal with the holocaust through wacky narrative voices and Wes Anderson-esque melancholia. I don’t have a problem with art dealing with 9/11, but this does strike me as the kind of art that uses tragedy to show off a seriousness that’s simply not there.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
so by this logic, christians explot christmas by making it about jesus and not about opening presents?
SenyorDave
@TR: Sorry, your 9/11 to word ratio is way to low. More cowbells!
Chyron HR
Ooooh, I hate all those precious people in the precious city of New York so much. I wish somebody would destroy some of their precious skyscrapers, that’d show them.
Culture of Truth
They seethe with resentement that 9/11 happened in NYC. You and your precious 9/11 !! It belongs to us!!
Martin
@Chris:
The problem here though is that’s exactly what should have happened. This is basic game theory here. If you go for the highest-value targets, then it’s easy to anticipate where the next attack may come from – just focus on comparably high value targets. Terrorists are better off going for unremarkable FBI offices, random malls, schools and so on – that’s where the terrorism kicks in. It’s relatively easy to avoid the Empire State Building – even as a New Yorker – unless you work in it. It’s fucking impossible to avoid the mall. Or your school. One act terrorizes tens of thousands of people. The other terrorizes hundreds of millions.
We’re a bit too smart for our own good on this, I think. We assume that people that are drawn to terrorism are as smart and competent as the experts on terrorism theory. They’re not. So when the experts go on Fox News or the Daily Show or wherever and talk about terrorism, they paint a picture of pareto optimal terrorism, rather than whatever emotional, personality driven terrorism we get instead. OK City looked like pareto optimal terrorism. It’s precisely what everyone was worried about, but it was really the emotional, personality driven form – but we couldn’t see that for about a day.
Kathy in St. Louis
“Exploits 9/11”? Has this guy heard of Rudy Guiliani? He’s made a real living off that device.
Martin
@Chyron HR:
As a former NYC resident, it’s a comforting to see NY get some of their SF hate back. That the wingnuts hated the most economically successful, free market driven city in the country simply because it was diverse, disliked guns and pickup trucks, and was a (relative) model for the success of mass transit always filled me with a bit of pride.
Carnacki
@beltane: @Cacti: To be fair, they worship American Jesus who said everything they need to know in Leviticus except for the parts there they don’t like either. (And I know Jesus had nothing to do with Leviticus from my Sunday school teaching days, but I wasn’t able to convince the class of that so fuck it.)
Carnacki
@Satanicpanic: Frank Miller?
Martin
@bago:
With such a low bar, it’s often difficult to tell when someone is actively stepping over it, and when they simply don’t see it and walk over accidentally.
danielx
Exploiting 9/11…alrighty then. Republicans pimped the events of 9/11/01 shamelessly. It let G.W. Bush portray himself as a wartime Preznit as opposed to a dimwitted one term corporate tool. Rudy Guiliani’s entire 2008 campaign consisted of a noun, a verb and 9/11, to quote someone whose name I’ve forgotten.
So if I’m understanding this correctly, use of 9/11 as a political tool to whip up enthusiasm for political campaigns, wars and further encroachments on the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments – good, in fact excellent! Use of 9/11 as part of a movie plot – bad bad bad because wingnuts don’t like the movie plot in general and most particularly because film depicts the lead actor, the city of New York and black people sympathetically. Wingnuts of course having no use for the real New York (as opposed to the wingnut ideal 9/11 New York) or for black people either.
Bless their hearts.
Martin
@danielx:
That was courtesy of the always entertaining Joseph Biden, now your Vice President.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
I don’t know anything about the movuie or book but it would be great if the “amateur inventor, Francophile, and pacifist” joined OWS, moved upstate, and single handily stopped a hyrofracking gas company by employing anarchist Earth First! tactics. That would make some heads explode.
jesus h. tapdancing christ
My favorite review of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close:
“Put it this way. The film is so unpleasant and its wee hero so detestable that most people will find themselves wishing [9/11] had been Take Your Child To Work Day.”
http://www.efilmcritic.com/feature.php?feature=3349
That said, John Nolte is still a douchenozzle.
Robert
As someone who saw this film in a room filled with overly emotional film critics and industry people, I can guarantee you the 9/11 content was the only honest part of the film. Everything else was designed to force tears out of your eyes in a denouement of emotion that had nothing to do with the 9/11 scenes. Daldry made sure to not overplay the 9/11 content. Everything else was more melodramatic than Secret Life of the American Teenager.
And where were these knuckleheads when the book the film is based on came out? Oh, right. They don’t read any fiction not written by Ayn Rand.
daveNYC
Wonder what that wanker would have said about 25th Hour, which was a totally excellent 9/11 themed film.
catclub
@Martin: If Al Caida had studied John Alen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo, we would be living in a police state today.
Lucky for us they did not. Speaking of incredibly obtuse.
catclub
@Carnacki: Jesus does refer to ‘all those laws’ occasionally. He also says something about the two greatest laws. It is a somewhat mixed bag on upholding all the laws in Leviticus. I think some interpret ‘be ye perfect’ as a realization that such perfection is impossible without God, rather than an insistence to uphold all 613 commandments.
Southern Beale
Well God forbid this should ever happen again but I actually agree with someone from Breitfart for once. I thought the film was awful, wretched, mawkish … I wanted to punch that movie. I wanted to pull a George Zimmerman and shoot it just to watch it die because movies like that don’t deserve to exist.
Exploiting 9/11 was only the half of it — but I agree, it did do that. The main character, Oscar, was an incredibly unlikeable kid. I did not want to spend two hours with him. I’m sorry for the Asperger’s but there’s a reason I’m not teaching special ed. I don’t have the patience or temperament for it. The mom played by Sandra Bullock pulled off some super-human feat of following her kid around without him ever knowing it and laying the groundwork and we only find out about this at the very end? The whole time I’m going, “NO WAY are people in New York City going to be this nice and welcoming to this kid.” It’s like they tacked that bit on at the end because the whole movie was so fucking unbelievable.
And then it was just this endless awful rambling thing of finding out what this key meant and I. Did. Not. Care. I did not give a shit.
I don’t know why they chose to use 9/11 .. maybe they were making some larger point about how we all have to pull together for national healing. But that didn’t happen. We didn’t do that. We splintered apart in fear and collectively crapped our pants and bombed two countries to oblivion. What that has to do with this Asperger’s kid and the grandfather who doesn’t speak and all that other shit I have no fucking clue. It was a marketing gimmick and it was wrong.
So. That’s my movie review.
Southern Beale
@slippy:
This.
Heartland America wasn’t even important enough to bomb. That’s gotta hurt.
Southern Beale
@jesus h. tapdancing christ:
OW. Oh I shouldn’t laugh but I can’t help myself. Yes.
John M. Burt
Wilson Heath @34, when have you ever known rightroids to engage in self-parody? I doubt they have it in them.
Chris @35, and let’s not forget that the authorities’ frantic search fro someone who fit their received “profile” of what a “real terrorist” looks like almost allowed the real terrorists to escape.
Xochi @42, “magical manchild”? I’d say that is how the child sees himself, rather than as how he is depicted. I haven’t seen the movie (just reserved it at our local public library), but I loved the book for its depiction of an affected and pompous child who finds his affectations and fantasies totally inadequate to dealing with his situation, as I doubtless would have also back when I was a pompous and affected child.
I sure hope Pete Hamill’s Forever gets made into a movie.
It’s a love letter to New York City which climaxes on 9/11 and fixes the city firmly at the center of American history.
Does anybody remember a music video which starts at the northern end of Manhattan when it was almost all wilderness, and shows people walking south through the city’s history until they reach Ground Zero? I really liked it when I saw it but haven’t been able to find it since.
Bubblegum Tate
I’m reminded of a Denis Leary bit:
“Keith Richards says kids should not do drugs. KEITH RICHARDS! Keith, we can’t do any drugs because you already did ’em all. We have to wait until you die, then snort your ashes.”
Betty Cracker
@Southern Beale: Go easy on yourself — you’re not actually agreeing with a Shite-Fartian. Nolte’s point wasn’t that it was mawkish and awful (though it may well be — dunno, haven’t seen it) — it was that it wasn’t mawkish in the correct direction. Nolte actual mentioned that it should have featured the kid putting together care packages for the soldiers “avenging his father’s death.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Betty Cracker:
If our soldiers were actually on a mission to avenge his father’s death, they’d have invaded Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.
Chris
@Martin:
Interesting points. And I agree, somewhat. I’ve long thought that if they really wanted to bring the war to us, they’d be targeting malls, schools, football stadiums, churches and the like, and not just doing it in New York or Washington but everywhere in the country.
But the thing is, most terrorist organizations don’t seem to have the ability to strike that extensively inside the U.S… so if you can only select a limited number of targets, you hit the one that has the most meaning for the war that you’re waging.
Southern Beale
@Betty Cracker:
Okay thanks. Thought hell had frozen over or something.
alex milstein
@xochi:
I kinda liked ‘Everything is Illuminated.’ At least I liked the movie, never read the book. The story appealed to me, a second generation American Jew whose grandparents left the Ukraine back around 1905. And the music from Gogol Bordello was pretty cool, too.
Michele C
@dan: My husband can be easily riled into rambling angrily to the point of near incoherence about this exact thing. They hate us for being New Yorkers and then they scream 9/11, 9/11, 9/11.
Michele C
@Martin: And, recently, thanks to the New Yorker we found out that New York’s crime rate has dropped even more than other places in America either because of or despite the fact that New York jails fewer people. Take that incarceration industrial complex!