“Most of us live our whole lives without having an adventure to call our own. What is any life without the pursuit of a dream?”
— Rebecca Dearborn (Tilda Swinton), Vanilla Sky, 2001
Tag Archives: 2001
September 11, 2001.
We were a different country then: wounded, but undivided; scarred, but undeterred; enraged, but not at one another. The America that rallied and unified in the wake of the terror attacks seems as vanished now as the Towers themselves.
We were a nation of neighbors, as though the dust thrust up from a burning New York City had cleared to reveal an even greater Republic. We huddled together under the smoke blowing up from the charnel pit, then reached to lift one another to higher ground. We bolstered one another with whatever words we could find, in the interminable spaces after our dead had fallen silent, after the soot in the emptied streets had muted even our own footfalls.
We rose up as one to retaliate — and struck out across the world with a single fist. We were more than a superpower, more than an aggrieved people. We were these United States.
I want to believe that we can be that country — those people — again.
That is why today, fully two decades later, I will picture who we were. And I will tell myself, never forget.
— Eric Robert Nolan, originally printed in Newsday, September 11, 2021
Never forget.
Photo credit: UpstateNYer, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
2001 DVD Cover for “V” (1983)
NBC.
September 11, 2001
Never forget.
Throwback Thursday: “Dark City” (1998)!
“Dark City” (1998) maybe wasn’t quite as perfect as its most ardent fans make it out to be, but it was still a damned good film — creative, original and caliginously artistic. (It occasionally suffers somewhat in comparison with its spiritual cousin, “The Matrix,” which changed the very medium of movies only a year later.) And what a cast — William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly, Kiefer Sutherland and Rufus Sewell!
I saw this movie on VHS around … 2001, I think. I remember being eager at the time to see the inimitable Hurt — I’d grown up with films like “Gorky Park” (1983) and “The Accidental Tourist” (1988). It was only later in life that I really became a fan of Sewell — after his tour-de-force performance as the Nazi villain in “The Man in the High Castle” (2015-2019).
And how can you beat Connelly as a nightclub crooner? My girlfriend sent me a gem that she found on Youtube — Connelly singing an alternate version of her musical number in the movie, Giovanni Polimeni’s “Sway.” (It’s the second video below.)
By the way, I am linking tonight to Media Graveyard and Polimeni’s Youtube channel.
Poster for “Band of Brothers” (2001)
HBO.
Poster for “Moulin Rouge” (2001)
20th Century Fox.
Never Forget.
September 11, 2001.
Photo credit: By Journalist 1st Class Preston Keres – This image was released by the United States Navy with the ID 010914-N-3995K-026.
Cover to “Andrew Wyeth: Close Friends,” 2001
Mississippi Museum of Art.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 