Good and bad art (music, movies, fiction, etc) inspired by 9/11

Great call on The Onion. I remember the "Holy Fucking Shit" and Bruckheimer cover and laughing my ass off.

 

Toby Keith's piece of shit song seemed to be a case of someone trying to capitalize on the tragedy.

I didn't care for the rewritten ending to Spider Man, where the New Yorkers throw stuff at Green Goblin and say "if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us." I walked out of the theater and said that ending is NOT going to hold up well, and it hasn't. There was also an awesome scene (or maybe trailer, I'm not sure) that they cut from the movie where some bank robbers escaping in a helicopter get caught in a web between the Twin Towers. It's unfortunate it was only seen on the internet. It was pretty good.

 

Holy crap does that have thread potential. My money? Locked before the first tower fell.
First post: "Some asshole just took a wrong turn into the World Trade Center."
Last post: "At least the only thing we had to worry about with Clinton were his interns going down."

 

As far as The Rising goes, it's a solid effort, but Bruce isn't that great when he's so on the nose. The general songs about loss -- Mary's Place (a wonderfully written song), Lonesome Day and Waiting on a Sunny Day (which could be about a tragic loss or a broken-up relationship) work better than 9/12 stuff (You're Missing, Into the Fire, the title track).

Bruce approached some of those songs with a grimness of duty (the "we need you now" stuff from the NYT) which isn't his best trait.

The Gawker stuff was horseshit -- some guy saying that his co-author's album was better than Bruce's to raise downloads or You Tube hits.

 

That song definitely wouldn't work as well if it were released now. When it was first written and sung, a couple months after the attacks? Absolutely it works.

Agree, though, on some of the other country songs. Some of Toby Keith's songs, you can tell it's pandering on some level. The "Have You Forgotten" song is kind of in that mold, but like the Alan Jackson song it kind of hits on a moment in time. It was released right around the time we were invading Iraq, and right about the time things were starting to get back to whatever passes for normal in a post-9/11 world.
"Have You Forgotten" touches on one side of that debate. Now, a few years later, it sounds like pandering. In 2003 it was a very pertinent question simply because a lot of people were acting as if they had.

 

"Lonesome Day" is a phenomenal song.

I was listening to Patterson Hood's (main singer for Drive-By Truckers) solo album yesterday and "Pride of the Yankees" came on. That's a nice combination fatherhood/9-11/uncertainty song, even if Hood also suffers from being a little too on-the-nose at times.

 

I'll echo someone earlier about Letterman's first show after 9/11. I especially remember the part where he was discussing the attacks with Regis and asked, "Why are they so angry with us. Is it because they don't have cable?"

"Issac and Ishmael" sucked, but I gave Sorkin credit for throwing together an episode at the last minute.

 

I guess I'm one of the few who thought "The Rising" was a solid effort from beginning to end. I thought "The Rising" and "My City of Ruins" were powerful songs. "Mary's Place" is beautiful and "Nothing Man" always hits me just right.

It's not "Nebraska" or anything, but it's a very good album, in my opinion.

 

"Taking Chance," a movie where Kevin Bacon portrays a soldier who accompanies the body of a dead soldier home, was an incredible movie.

 

And then there's this ...