I was listening to the Cinemagic on the XM Radio this afternoon. They played all of Leonardo DiCaprio's about-to-sink-beneath-the-water speech to Kate Winslet from Titanic, and then they played some music from the soundtrack.

And I was thinking, "man, that movie's a big cliche now, but James Cameron really knows how to hit the pathos buttons. I mean, the poor kid says 'winning that ticket was the best thing that ever happened to me' and he's freezing and about to drown. I'm not given to sentimentality, but it even got to me a little bit."

And then I got to thinking about movies about tragedies. The Titanic, Pearl Harbor...how far away from a bold, sweeping 9/11 epic are we? Say, a handsome young courier drops off an early morning package on the one-hundred and eighth floor of one of the towers, where he meets the attractive new female employee. He makes it back down to the ground floor just when the plane hits above him. He makes it back to her, somehow, but sacrifices himself so she can have the last spot on the one working elevator.