Friday, September 08, 2006

We Suck

Stepping back for a moment from the bias and factual errors, I'm struck by what an odd movie this is for a major network to show on the 5th year anniversary of 9/11. I'm not sure how a watching a catalog of failures - real and extra made up ones just for fun - really fits with how people want to spend the anniversary of that day.

It's really an odd choice.

The reviews are coming in (although the reviewers have tremendous audacity to review their review copies even though the movie isn't finished [/snark]) and they aren't too pretty.

This is the most anticlimactic, tension-free movie in the history of terrorist TV.

It's hard to fathom a brouhaha brewed over such a bore. ABC has received tens of thousands of letters -- including one from Bill Clinton's office -- insisting "Path" is wildly inaccurate and should not air. But ABC still plans to air the two-part movie.

Controversy could boost viewership, except "Path" is the dullest, worst-shot TV movie since ABC's disastrous "Ten Commandments" remake. It substitutes shaky handheld cameras and dumb dialogue for craftsmanship. It could not be more amateurish or poorly constructed unless someone had forgotten to light the sets.

An appalling secondary concern is the tone makes almost every pre-9/11 American look like a fool.

Look, there's a security guard yawning while terrorists plant the 1993 bomb at the World Trade Center. How dare a security guard work while tired.

Oh, hey, there's an airline agent checking in a 9/11 terrorist even though he has a carry-on bag. Stupid airline agents.

Excuse us all, writer Cyrus Nowrasteh and director David L. Cunningham, for not acting like Hitler Youth in the glory days before ordinary Americans knew commercial planes could be turned into missiles.

Idiots.

Cheap emotions are on orange alert. Of all the people who died in the 1993 attack, who does the camera focus on? Ding-ding-ding, you are a winner if you said "a pregnant woman rubbing her belly."