Cathy and I went and saw Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour the other night. It’s the first and perhaps only mainstream film to be released in the U.S. that confronts 9/11 head on. It’s not that such a stance is courageous, but given that numerous films made prior to 9/11 and released after (Serendipity and Zoolander) quietly airbrushed out the twin towers to avoid any icky reminder that yes, indeed, a couple airliners really did plow right into those buildings and they consequently plunged to the ground and took close to 3000 people with them, Lee’s incorporation of the void at Ground Zero into his film seemed both refreshingly honest and heartbreakingly blunt. Lee wants us to know that his story, while not implicitly about 9/11, is, like everything and everybody else living in NYC, tainted by it.