Watching another movie, again about 9/11. This time it's "DC in Crisis," a Showtime production that came out a couple years ago, with actors playing the roles of the administration inner circle. The acting is alternately wooden and ham-fisted, with actors sometimes reading their lines as if cue-cards are placed in front of them. What went wrong with this movie?

Part of an answer is that it was produced by Lionel Chetwynd, a prominent (and rare) Hollywood conservative. The point of the movie seems to be less about aesthetic impact or experience, and more about apologetics (which usually isn't beautiful or even logical). The movie is there to convey a message, that is, and nearly everything else about it is pointless. It's sort of like those afterschool specials that we all used to watch as kids in the 70s: watchable only in an ironic way, laughable, obvious. But this goes back to my question below: wasn't 9/11 too important to be instrumentalized in this way (as a mere means to tell a larger story about the rightness of the neocons)? The work just seems to cheapen a collective trauma.