And Tuesday's child is full of grace

I watched World Trade Center this weekend. I'd like to share a few thoughts.

• I totally get that it's too soon for some people too watch this. Or that it may never be time. I don't agree that it was too soon to make the film, though. Watching it was difficult, but ultimately uplifting. And for the principal people involved in this particular story from that day, it was time. They want their story told as something positive that came from that day.
  
• It's the best thing Oliver Stone has done in a while. Some critics complained it was too straightforward, a "safe" movie that is surprising coming from Stone. Probably the same critics who call him a whackjob and a conspiracy theorist when he goes off the straight and narrow. I thought the direction was inventive and incredibly well done. It wasn't showy or distracting, though. There was no grandstanding, of which I think Stone's been guilty in the past. He (and the stellar cast) conveyed both the enormity of the event and the claustrophobia of the event.
  
• Sometimes I feel we are too quick to use the word "hero" when often ordinary people, placed in extraordinary circumstances, act as people will. In fact, I think to tag an act as heroic removes it from being human...a part of us. Sometimes it applies, though. There are people that do things many of us wouldn't. What these rescuers did at the WTC site, climbing about in the dark on what amounted to a colossal pile of multi-ton pick-up sticks, and then squirming and digging and squeezing into it to make a rescue, well, I never once felt that I could do the same.
  
• I don't know that I've ever witnessed a movie crowd so silently file out of a theater.
  
• The acting in this really was first rate. I expect it from Nicolas Cage and Maria Bello, but Stephen Dorff? Hats off, brother, cuz you brought it.
• The producers of the film donated 10% of the opening week's profits to charity. You might scoff at the percentage, but that's still three million dollars split between the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and Tuesday's Children.