MovieChat Forums > 11'09''01 - September 11 (2002) Discussion > The best and the worst segments

The best and the worst segments

posted 16 years ago by b1lskirnir
3 replies | jump to latest

While this has been argued on other threads, there are two things that I don't understand. My personal favorite skit is the Israeli one and my least favorite is the Mexican one. Why do other peoples' views tend to be generally the opposite?

Here's my take on it.

The Mexico skit was as horribly cliched and artificial as it could've possibly been. I've seen public service announcements more intelligent and thought-provoking. From cross-cutting news media clips over a black screen to exploiting footage of people jumping out of buildings in jump cuts, it's clear Innaritu has no idea what he's doing. Then we get the "Does God's light guide or blind us?" message which sounds taken straight off of a Volkswagen bumper sticker. I have no idea why anyone appointed to work on this project would do a skit like this. If anything, for a director as prolific and internationally successful as Innaritu, I'd probably be afraid that every other skit was going to be exactly like this. Ultimately it means nothing, just an attempt to tug peoples' heartstrings with no greater goal.

The Israeli skit it seems most people find to be Zionist propaganda. First off, I'd like to say that I was impressed by this segment because of how apolitical and unbiased I found it, coming from Israel. The female reporter constantly asks, "Was this a terrorist attack?" and no one answers her, frankly because it's totally unimportant. Everyone should know that it is, but everyone's so concerned with getting their own piece. The reporters want to get the event on the air, but they can't. Why? Because rather than informing the people (which is their duty as representatives of the people) they're exploiting the event to try to get ratings. Not only that, but the attacks are going on in New York, which are infinitely more important, but no one in Israel cares because they have their own problems.

I thought this was a fantastic analogy to the United States. We bomb the crap out of other countries and sponsor coups against civilians' wills (see Ken Loach's very good segment for reference) and then when the most powerful country in the world gets attacked, everyone forgets about it and we only care about ourselves. In Israel, the victims couldn't give less of a crap about the U.S.' problems in the middle of their bombing, while we on the other side of the world couldn't care less about them. There's so much more to this segment that I won't bother getting into, but if nothing else, you have to admit that the fact that it was done in one take was also incredible (I was secretly hoping one of the directors chose to do that when I started watching, also).

So that's my take on it. I hope you guys can appreciate this viewpoint.

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[–] wrathofachilles 16 years ago

The best ones were the Iranian and French ones. The Burkina-Faso segment was good too.

The worst ones were the Mexican and Japanese segments. Neither tried to made any sort of statement about the terrorist attacks beyond the most general cliches, they take up space, and the film runs too long because of them. It would have been better not to include these and to have 9 films of 11 minutes.

[–] happiness_is_easy 16 years ago

To the original poster:
While I respect your opinion, I totally diagree with your conclusions about those those two films. I thought the Mexico film was brilliant and the Israel segment was tedious. My thoughts on the two films:
The Mexico film took an iconic image namely people jumping from buildings, that I believe has been exploited by the media and used in a rather exploitative/voyeuristic manner and turned it on its head. But shutting off the visual (ie the dark screen) we are FORCED to listen to the sounds of terror and heartache; rather than be visually stimulated. In the darkness, that film gave me time to think about the absolute desperation and horror those people faced to make them jump from a high building. It was a deeply affecting segment (for me).
On the other hand, the Israeli segment was one viewpoint stretched to what seemed like forever, namely: We get it tough too. Why do you get all the attention while us "innocent" Israeli's get attacked as well?
That's what I got from that film and its "message" certainly didn't wash with me. This is from a country that practices overkill to the extreme: a couple of soldiers get taken hostage so let's destroy Lebanon!
On a lighter note, I thought that Burkina-Faso film was wonderful also.

[–] nicos21 11 years ago

Ken Loach's and Mira Nair's were important as we're the Iranian and African one. To be honest I thought they were all technically different in a good way and well crafted. I can see some people have missed the point in the Japanese film.