I saw The Cruise last night, on video, at home. In the background, my wife was taking care of the baby, and I felt guilty.
But at the same time, this was really the movie to see in February 2002. It’s an incredible documentary – an expose about one man’s determination to see the world clearly, through his own eyes, and to admire a nation’s cultural mecca (New York City) in a way all his own. The film is also a mediation on one man, a tour guide on the double-decker buses in NYC, and his anger and discerning of self. He’s brilliant and the film is brilliantly filmed.
It’s not a brilliant film, however, leaving too much to the viewer in fact. But look at the end of this movie, when Bennett goes to the World Trade Center and the camera admiringly floats below those towers, where they spookily hover above, like too-tall ghosts. The WTC towers never looked more beautiful, more sacrosanct, more clean and better architected than they do in this movie. I was at the WTC site (“ground zero” – huh?) the other day to look at it from that odd viewing platform. And all you can see is the towers’ inverse. A huge concrete hole in the ground, where once was all that power and magnificence and subject matter.