World Trade Center': Reviews and Insight

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5630627

August 9, 2006 - Reviewers at the New York Times and Newsweek hailed it. So did Gene Shalit at Today. Our reviewer, Ken Turan, dissed it. As you must have heard by now, there are no neutral reactions to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, which debuts nationally today. And you'll hear more opinions this afternoon on Talk of the Nation.

One of the best-known "9/11 widows," Lorie Van Auken, tells me that she went to see a comedy recently. She settled into her seat, waiting to laugh -- and then the trailer for Stone's movie exploded across the screen. "And I see people trapped under the rubble and I start crying and running hysterically out of the theater," Lorie says.

Her husband, Kenneth, worked on top of the North Tower, in the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Lorie and other family survivors played a key role in pressuring Congress and the federal commission to investigate Sept. 11. "I am not going to see the movie," she says. "I've spent five years imagining a million different ways of how my husband was trapped and died, and I've seen a lot of them in my nightmares. I can't handle going to a theater and watching them."

Lorie says she doesn't begrudge Stone for making the film, but says "If I had made it, I would have made it a lot more political and investigative. There are still so many questions about Sept. 11 that the government has never answered."