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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Of all the things to make you pause, hand on wallet, before shelling out for a movie ticket, try this: a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Adam Sandler. What possible cultural need, one might ask, could be met by such a project? It is thus with a degree of amazement that I find myself nominating "Reign Over Me," written and directed by Mike Binder, as a movie that might be worth your time.
Sandler stars as Charlie Fineman, whose existence is a wild rebuke to his name. Charlie is far from fine. He is a human heap, whining through New York on a small electric scooter, his hearing cut off by a pair of headphones the size of avocados. You might almost think he wanted to be flattened by a truck. He has sheepdog hair, graying to the color of old newsprint. For kicks, he likes to sit in his apartment and play a video game, "Shadow of the Colossus," on a huge screen. Over time, we discover the colossus in whose shadow Charlie lurks and mumbles to himself. He lost a wife and three daughters on September 11, 2001, and then he lost the capacity to admit that he had a wife and three daughters in the first place. Without the will to remember, the movie suggests, there can be no will to live.
That is an unusually gloomy proposition not just for a studio movie but for a society that,...
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