Just What We Needed: A September 11th ‘Rock Musical’ (VIDEO)

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No matter how good they are, musicals are always pretty cheesy. So how’s the country going to deal with Clear Blue Tuesday? The new rock movie gives the song-and-dance treatment to the most sanctified event in recent American history: 9/11.

The film opens this Friday at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and, well, it seems like the worst kind of turkey–and that’s just based on the trailer (see below). Isn’t the trailer supposed to convince audiences they want to see the movie? Directed by Elizabeth Lucas, the story follows 11 New Yorkers on each anniversary of the terrorist attacks starting in 2002 and shows how the events at the World Trade Center affected all of their lives. It does this with the sort of reverence usually reserved for such memorials–but with production numbers!

The songs sound various and diverse, including one in which a sci-fi junkie sings about marrying an alien (of the intergalactic rather than illegal variety). “I have very little interest, as a director, in naturalism. I find naturalism a little pedestrian,” Lucas explains to the New York Times.

Between that and the fact that all the actors wrote their own music, this sounds more like a really bad film school project than something that we would want to pay money to see in the theater. It’s not that we have a problem with someone making a musical about 9/11, it’s that we have a problem with someone making a really bad musical about… well, just about anything.

The original version of the story appears here.

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