New York, New York
I humbly await the verdict of Commonweal’s Richard Alleva but for the time being I recommend Inside Man. It’s the sort of movie that I prefer on my annual trip to an actual theater: stylish, funny and mindless. A bit like The Usual Suspects, not quite as good as The Fugitive.
Except. Spike Lee directed Inside Man and manages to deftly strew sociological observations of one sort or another across the screen even as the plot (a bank heist, an ex-Nazi, a mysterious Jodi Foster) hurtles along. Lee’s fixation is the increasingly cosmopolitan flavor of New York, with two African-American policeman, a Latino beat cop, a Sikh mistaken for an Arab, and many others jostling for screen attention. The emergence — for better and for worse — of that New York, a global capital in which native born African-Americans and whites leave the city, especially Manhattan, while a stream of afflluent and not so affluent newcomers replace them, is surely connected to the massive parish closings recently announced by the Archdiocese of New York.
Okay John. I think I’ll go this afternoon–I’ll let you know.
However, I’d like to point out that our parish Palm Sunday seems to be doing fine with the global crowd you describe in the movie.
“Inside Man” has a decided New York look. Was it shot in Toronto?
Well worth seeing. Denzel Washington is terrific; the hostages and the robbers are great. The cops are good. The true villain and Jodie Foster seem to be dropped in without real plot development.
One of the best scenes: the hostage who is accused of being an Arab. No, no I am a Sikh he screams as his turban is unraveled in the search for weapons.
Questioned by the cops, he asks Why do people always pick on me? or reject me?
The cop: I bet you don’t have any trouble getting a cab! gotcha! Lots of Sikh cabbies in New York.
Only one Irish looking cop and one Italian… a new look for New York movies, but not for New York.
In Brooklyn (the borough Spike Lee abandoned for Manhattan), we’ve also seen church/school closings where gentrification occurred. In the early 1990s, NY Newsday did a Gallup Poll on religious attitudes, and did a breakout by borough. In Manhattan, 17 percent were non-believers. In the Bronx, it was 1 percent. Manhattanization means more than building tall.
It seems that even in a cops and robbers film, Lee is adept at showing social distinctions. One thing I found interesting was that Lee seems to make it understandable for the cops to brutalize and bully the innocent hostages who are released. Not acceptable, but understandable.