Inside Man
September 6th, 2006
Spike Lee’s slick hostage thriller offers a handful of new twists on the genre but doesn’t transcend it. Clive Owen plays the wicked smart criminal who trades the familiar lines with Denzel the negotiator: “You’ll give me exactly what I ask for or I’ll start killing hostages!” etc. Willem Defoe is the SWAT team leader who gets this close to botching it all, and Jodie Foster can’t quite get a handle on her role as supertough mystery woman. The few fresh ideas make the movie worthwhile, and it’s curious to see Lee’s attention to race bleed into a big-budget thriller like this: there’s a Sikh screaming for his turban, a gangster lectures a kid about violent video games, and in my favorite jokey moment, a bunch of cops argue about train connections like only New Yorkers can. At times, the Terence Blanchard soundtrack made this film feel strangely like When the Levees Broke.
When the Levees Broke
August 29th, 2006
Spike Lee’s 4-1/2 hour Katrina documentary is an absolutely essential document, gutwrenchingly sad, surprisingly in-depth even at this length (I didn’t know about Louisiana’s lost most of its oil revenue because the drilling platforms are more than 3 miles out), and–of course–infuriating as all hell.
Some links: Matt Zoller Seitz spends a lot of inches defending the film from the kind of complaints this bullshit New York Times piece raises. Der Spiegel gets it. Denby. Stephen Holden. Brownie talks. The GOP Has More to Rebuild Than New Orleans. And: the Yes Men.
