The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@xxxxxxxxx /--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen Hayes - a husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out. Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ At J.F.K., in Search of 'The Terminal' June 13, 2004 By ANDY NEWMAN I AWOKE at 8:26 a.m. in a vast, red-carpeted room, surrounded by unattractive paintings. Above my head, a pair of English sparrows chittered as they flew by, following the graceful curve of the ceiling. Aside from being sore, filthy, exhausted and bone-cold beneath my corduroy blazer, I felt great. It was a beautiful spring morning, and I had made it through my first night in the International Arrivals Terminal at Kennedy International Airport. In the new Steven Spielberg movie "The Terminal," opening on Friday, Tom Hanks plays a man from an Eastern European country that is plunged into civil war while he is en route to New York, leaving him, effectively, a citizen of nowhere. As a result, he is stuck for a year in the "International Transit Lounge" at Kennedy, where he learns heart-warming lessons in the limitless goodwill of the average American. As happens so often, Mr. Spielberg stole and cheapened my idea. For years, I have been fascinated by the cordoned-off world of the modern airport and wondered what I would find there if I was not distracted by having to catch a flight. My jealous rage stirred me to belated action. As soon as I heard about the movie, I packed a notebook and a toothbrush and set out to spend some quantity time at the International Arrivals Terminal, a building that looks like a cross between a very beautiful airplane hangar and a giant wing. Unlike Mr. Hanks's character, Viktor Navorski, I did not end up making out with Catherine Zeta-Jones or assembling a loyal, lovably multiethnic posse of airport-employee pals. But I gleaned something almost as precious: a glimpse into the rhythms of a place that millions pass through each year but no one ever visits. There is a reason that most people try to spend as little time as possible in airports. At their most innocuous, airports are profoundly neutral environments. Every element of their design - the dull fluorescent glow, the long indistinguishable corridors, the recirculated air - is intended to diffuse and defuse emotion. But airports are also places of coercion, of order enforced not just by security personnel but by the wonderfully named Tensabarriers, those modular post-and-strap building blocks of the two archetypal airport configurations, the queue and the blockade. And by design, airports afford almost no privacy. Nearly every task of daily life - eating, dozing, hugging, talking, arguing - must be performed in public. Notwithstanding the presence of first-class lounges, airports are pretty egalitarian places, much more so than the outside world. We passengers are all reduced to the same class of obedient toddlers. Don't go there. Don't tell jokes. Take off your shoes. Take off your belt. Walk through the scanner. Hold out your arms. Ever mindful of the threat of terrorism, we understand, in a vague way, that this is all For Our Own Good. Hence the oddly bland, bovine expressions on travelers' faces. But as the movie suggests, every place, no matter how seemingly anoxic or antiseptic, no matter how relentlessly surveilled, has a life of its own. I began to recognize this that first night, minutes after the flight I held a ticket on left without me. Nervous at the prospect of being detected and ejected, I repaired to my local watering hole. Shannon's was little more than a counter of artificially aged wood. But the West Indian barman, Trini, had made it his own. On the shelf behind him, beside a leggy philodendron, he kept a bookmark depicting the Last Supper in muted reds and blues. "I just love the way it depicts Jesus and his disciples, showing love, and fellowship, and togetherness," he said. As the terminal emptied of passengers, the crew of a LanChile flight swept in and began photographing one another in their new red and black uniforms. The old ones were standard flight crew blue, like the one Ms. Zeta-Jones is wearing when she first meets Mr. Hanks. "These are better," a stewardess said, "more flattering." To someone passing through, the airport seems like a pretty uneventful place. But if you stick around long enough, you will witness the tense calm periodically shattered. That first night, a few minutes after the last flight of the evening departed, a frustrated, exhausted woman in search of lost luggage tried to storm the gates. A guard leaped up and intercepted her. A brief shouting match ensued and quickly turned obscene. After vanquishing the intruder, the guard, a squat figure with a shaved head and bristly folds in the back of his neck, began walking a fast figure-eight through the two metal detectors, setting off beeps in a soothingly annoying pattern. He continued for six full minutes. It looked like the behavior of a caged animal pacing off stress, though it may have been routine maintenance. It was already four hours past the departure of my flight, so, afraid of being thrown out - and confident that invoking Steven Spielberg's name would not cut any ice with the guards - I decided not to ask. But the incident had put the guard and his partner on heightened alert, and they soon noticed me staring at them. They cast me out of the secure area and directed me to the hotel reservations desk downstairs. I hung a left instead, and entered a zone of shuttered shops, unpeopled escalators and dimly bright corridors, anchored by an oasis called Café Ritazza. Open round the clock to serve the airport's night staff and passengers awaiting early-morning flights, it was at that moment inhabited by a young, hip Japanese couple dressed in modified cowboy gear and a bleached blonde with several empty Buds lined up in front of her. Upstairs, I found a red-carpet area where a small nation of bag people, some with fairly expensive bags, stretched out in chairs or on the floor. In the film version of J.F.K., Viktor manages to build himself a rather sophisticated bed. In my case, I took my place on the carpet and drifted off to sleep, lulled by a soft female voice periodically reminding me to keep my luggage beside me at all times. At 3:13 a.m., we were rousted by an apologetic officer. We all trooped down to the Ritazza, where the cashier, Jenny, was on break reading a romance novel, and where I napped across a row of chairs. When the red-carpet area reopened, I returned there and slept until the sparrows began their morning rounds. At breakfast - eggs and toast in a plastic-foam container - I was joined by the Japanese couple. Susumu, a photographer back home in Tokyo, said that his girlfriend, Natsumi, in a black-mesh cowboy hat, had a toothache: her right rear lower gum was inflated like a tiny red Parker-House roll. Eager to be of service, I went to the nearest newsstand and bought a $2 bottle of Anbesol, for which I was charged $9.79. (Airport living, though Spartan, is not cheap. Over three days and two nights I spent $157 without consuming anything more decadent than a tuna sandwich.) It was Sunday, so I went upstairs to see what was doing on Chapel Row. For a place owned and operated by the secular government, the airport can also be surprisingly spiritual: J.F.K. had four small worship rooms from which to choose. The Catholic chapel, Our Lady of the Skies, had a wooden statue of the Virgin Mother balanced on the nose of an airplane propeller. The International Synagogue was lined with books. The crucifix on the back wall of the Christ for the World Chapel was an airplane standing on end. And the place labeled "multifaith chapel" looked like a mosque, with signs in Arabic and a poster of Mecca facing east. I stopped into the afternoon service at the Christ for the World chapel, the Rev. Patricia Evans presiding. The dozen worshippers introduced themselves and testified briefly. There was Jessie, from North Carolina, a tall girl with a big strong voice. Ms. Evans asked if she'd give us a song. There was Marisol, who worked at the airport and had been passed over several times for promotion, until the Lord finally saw fit to give it to her. Praise the Lord, everyone said. At the end of the hall I met Rabbi Bennett M. Rackman. A tall, good-looking man in his 50's, he touted the diversity of the terminal's religious district. "Out here is a sacred space, a safe space," he said, "where people have to respect each other." Lately, however, there has been controversy over the multifaith chapel. "The Muslims took it over," he said. "They put in the carpet. They put up signs." Then, brightening, he unlocked a blank white door and revealed a reliquary of wonders: a Bible in Hebrew and Latin from 1740, a chalice from which a Pope once drank, a Torah rescued, supposedly, on Kristallnacht and found buried in a cemetery in Germany. It was an incongruous sight, evidence that even amid the anonymous bustle of airports, people reach out for a greater connection. I was touched, but I was also tired. At 3:26 p.m., I was enjoying a red-carpet snooze when I was awakened by a harsh voice and a nudge. "Hey," a Port Authority police officer was saying. "Hey. Is this your bag?" He pointed to a large white canvas sack. It wasn't. The officer radioed for help and cleared the area. Soon a German shepherd came, sniffed the bag, and sat down a few feet away, wagging his tail. Calm descended again upon the terminal, but only until a towheaded 3-year-old named Max wandered off and got stuck in an electronic revolving door. His mother shouted his name and minced over in her high heels. Male onlookers in more sensible shoes rushed over and pried the door open. Max walked out looking bewildered. A few minutes later, he wandered away again from his easily distracted mother. He approached me and looked up. "Daddy?" he asked. "No, I'm sorry," I replied. Paradoxically, airports can sometimes be the easiest places to make a connection. Where else but in an airport bar would I have struck up an immediate friendship with Dave the tire patch guy? Dave, a sturdy Midwesterner in a salmon polo shirt with a company logo on it, was on his way to Munich. At Bar Avion, Dave told me that Goodyear makes a different tire for each of the hundreds of Nascar tracks. Guess what else? Someday soon you will be filling your car tires with compressed nitrogen. "In five or six years," Dave said, "every gas station is going to have a nitrogen generator." That night on the red carpet, when the guard woke the sleepers at 3:11 a.m., I headed straight downstairs to Café Ritazza. Jenny was behind the counter again, her nose buried in a history book. "That's not the same book as yesterday, is it?" I said, startling her. "Oh no," she replied. "I just started this one." Soon the morning travelers began to trickle in. I went back upstairs to sleep off my cranberry muffin. When I was awakened again at 8:49 a.m., it was neither by sparrows nor recorded announcements nor cops. I pulled my hat up from over my eyes to see two nice-looking men with clipboards standing over me. "Are you O.K.?" one of them asked. Yes, I said. "Your phone is out, your money's falling out of your pockets. I don't know if you have a flight later on today, but if you need help we're here. "We're called Volunteers of America." Mortified, I stuffed my phone and my change back in my pants and gathered up my belongings. I had stayed too long. As I headed for the big sliding doors, no Spielbergian line of well-wishers formed to see me off. But I could practically hear a John Williams symphony surging behind me as I headed out into the dazzling sunlight, blinking in new wonder at the outside world, still feeling the tug of the home I was leaving behind. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/movies/13NEWM.html?ex=1088224259&ei=1&en=cf74bc4ceed31a5a --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! 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