Nathan Rabin's Happy Cast

Film critic and author Jason Bailey (Fun City Cinema) hops on the Amtrak Acela Express with us, as we bounce between the Big Apple and Baltimore for a decidedly cacophonous double feature! First up is Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, which trades in Stone’s signature conspiratorial thinking for an earnest, if narratively stagnant, disaster movie about the real-life tale of two Port Authority police officers (Nic Cage and Michael Peña) trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Cage does a lot with a little, treating the film as an acting exercise, but it’s as po-faced as something made so soon after the tragedies probably would be. Still, it’s an interesting, if heavy, glimpse at how we were processing such an historical horror through cinema. Don’t worry, we’ve got a nice pastel palate-cleanser to follow in the form of Adam Shankman’s breezy, bright adaptation of the Broadway musical Hairspray! A re-do of John Waters’ most accessible picture, now filtered through Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittma