Film Freak Central

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] - DVD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country's history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we're not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor--and we're glad that he's dead, too.

Babel (2006)

*½/****
starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Kôji Yakusho
screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By this late date, the Magnolia-esque interconnected-lost-souls genre ought to have burned out. The films never meant anything, and when they did move us, it was in such an arbitrary, unfocused way that nothing intelligent could be gleaned from our self-interested pity. But here it is 2006 and I find myself reviewing Babel, which fills the tired bill to a chronologically-fractured T. I'd say that it isn't the worst of the genre, yet figuring out which one is suggests an academic exercise from which I'd rather be excused; suffice it to say that this globalized spin on the old saws is predictably pointless, with the added extra of none of its characters' actions resembling human behaviour even once. Instead of a powerful statement on the loneliness of individuals, we encounter a cavalier attitude towards the non-white and a prurient interest in the damaged sexuality of a teenage girl that destroys whatever patience we might have left.

Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes (2003) - DVD

Image A Sound A Extras A-
"Naked Beach Frenzy," "Stimpy's Pregnant," "Altruists," "Ren Seeks Help," "Fire Dogs, Part 2," "Onward and Upward"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There are, believe it or not, those who miss the days of the Production Code as a tool for making writers try harder to suggest things instead of spelling them out. I never really bought into the argument, but it seems almost sensible to me now that I've seen Ren and Stimpy unleashed and uncensored. To be sure, no loyalist can be without the six adventures contained on Paramount's new-to-DVD "Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes" (only half of which ever reached the airwaves, under the banner "Ren & Stimpy 'Adult Party Cartoon'"), whose scripts were suppressed by Nickelodeon for being too raunchy for kids; and when they're on, they take the formula out of the cage of decency so that it might run around free and unfettered. Alas, the introduction of naked women and actual foul language somehow dampens the charm of the Nickelodeon run. The thrill of "Ren & Stimpy" lies in its childish, anal-stage irresponsibility, with its suppression of the sexual in favour of the scatological--to say nothing of the florid insults ("You bloated sack of protoplasm!") with which mere expletives can't possibly compete.

The Prestige (2006)

***/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on the novel by Christopher Priest
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's possible to say that Christopher Nolan's perplexing chimera of a film, The Prestige, has something on its mind about not only the nasty, zero-sum game of vengeance but also the belief that if you cut one head off a malevolent beast it will, hydra-like, sprout another. It's a costume drama that feels like the world's darkest, dour-est, most inappropriate thriller serial, placing a series of increasingly complicated and unpleasant revenge-scenarios in chronological order and reminding of, if anything, just how bad Nolan's Memento makes you feel. The Prestige shares a heart of darkness, after all, with that film: a belief that men are essentially callow opportunists and liars who will misuse the people in their lives in order to maintain an illusion of command, however tenuous, over entropy. The manipulation of illusion is arguably the auteur mark of Nolan, who played with the idea of the manipulation of fear as a weapon in Batman Begins, the practical purpose of dream sleep in his remake of Insomnia, and of course of identity as fluid, ephemeral, and dangerously malleable in Memento and Following. Matching this director with a strange, campy film about turn-of-the-century magicians engaged in mortal combat makes a lot of sense.

Sealab 2021: Season IV (2004-2005) + Arrested Development: Season Three (2005-2006) - DVDs

SEALAB 2021: SEASON IV
Image C Sound B Extras D
"Isla de Chupacabra," "Joy of Grief," "Green Fever," "Sharko's Machine," "Return of Marko," "Casinko," "Butchslap," "Monkey Banana Raffle," "Shrabster," "Cavemen," "Moby Sick," "No Waterworld," "Legacy of Laughter"

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: SEASON THREE
Image A Sound B Extras B
"The Cabin Show," "For British Eyes Only," "Forget Me Now," "Notapussy," "Mr. F," "The Ocean Walker," "Prison Break-In," "Making a Stand," "S.O.B.s," "Fakin' It," "Family Ties," "Exit Strategy," "Development Arrested"

by Walter Chaw Oh, I get it. It's hostile.

Stella: Season One (2005) - DVD

Image B- Sound A- Extras B
"Pilot," "Campaign," "Office Party," "Coffee Shop," "Paper Route," "Camping," "Meeting Girls," "Novel," "Vegetables," "Amusement Park"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a difference between being smart and being "smart." Smart involves the recombination of concepts into some kind of thesis or analysis; "smart" is the mere name-checking of said concepts and the class trappings they afford. The problems begin when people act "smart" and feel they're actually smart--when the pose of intelligence becomes the real thing. And despite many contortions in a vaguely surrealist direction, the masterminds behind "Stella" clearly belong in the poser category. Although their juxtaposition of overgrown children against a world somewhat less mad than they are is fastidiously groomed and played to the hilt, it's not really smart about anything: by putting these naïf characters next to the supposed intelligence of the people who write their lines, they only reveal their "smarts" in comparison to a very limited test group.

Slither (2006) - DVD

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Rooker, Gregg Henry
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw Paying tribute to his Lloyd Kaufman roots with a shot in which The Toxic Avenger is on TV in the background, James Gunn's Slither is more in line with the hipster revisionism of his screenplay for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. Postmodernism its point, then, drying up the musty cellars somewhat of the films it riffs on, Slither misses when it does only because it has little resonance beyond the basic Cronenbergian sexual-parasites thing and the shopworn idea that Americans are voracious, disgusting, ignorant swine. (In truth, the one moment that really bugs me is a fairly demented rape sequence (involving more infant-menace than anything in the new The Hills Have Eyes) and its played-for-giggles fallout.) In place of useful sociology, it does for redneck archetypes what Shaun of the Dead did for workaday slobs, poking fun at the thin line between slack-jawed yokels (initiating deer season with a barn-busting hoedown) and beef-craving, slug-brained zombies (recalling that NASCAR now boasts its own brand of meat). The biggest surprise is that Gunn appears to have seen and liked Night of the Creeps, and that, like that film, Slither does what it does without sacrificing too much of its good-natured, self-deprecating sense of humour along the way.

Marie Antoinette (2006) + Tideland (2006)

MARIE ANTOINETTE
**½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn
screenplay by Sofia Coppola, based on the novel Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
directed by Sofia Coppola

TIDELAND
***½/****
starring Jodelle Ferland, Jeff Bridges, Brendan Fletcher, Jennifer Tilly
screenplay by Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni, based on the novel by Mitch Cullin
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Walter Chaw In going from The Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation to Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola appears to be charting the arc of her own soft, unstructured dive into the morass of melancholia and regret, discovering her voice along the way in the bell tones of Kirsten Dunst, who plays a fourteen-year-old in The Virgin Suicides and, at the start of Coppola's latest film, a fourteen-year-old again, the Austrian Archduchess Marie Antoinette. Coppola's "Fast Times at Palais Versailles" opens with Marie loping through her Austrian palace, just another sleepy, stupid girl with a tiny dog, one poised to have the fate of two countries riding on her ability to produce a male offspring. Betrothed to nebbish French King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), she's put into a French court ruled by gossip and bloodline (in one of the film's few literal moments, Marie offers that her waking ritual attended by what seems the entire family plot is "ridiculous") and, while crowned with the mantle of governance, thrust into the role of most popular girl in school, sprung fully-grown as the captain of the football team's best girl. It's impossible for me to not see something of Coppola's own premature coronation as the emotional centre of her father's own royal court, the third Godfather film--and to see in the intense media scrutiny afforded her in the wake of that fiasco the source of all these films about lost youth and the pain of hard choices made on her behalf. Marie Antoinette isn't a historical film so much as it's a dress-up picture; and like most any work of honesty, it's autobiographical (as indicated by its selection of '80s punk-influenced pop) and intensely vulnerable--at least for most of its first hour.

Little Children (2006)

*½/****
starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Gregg Edelman
screenplay by Todd Field & Tom Perrotta
directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Kate Winslet is a joy if no longer a revelation, and in Todd Field's Little Children, she demonstrates the kind of courage that has made her the most essential actress of her generation. Aside from Winslet, Little Children feels like a burlesque of deep-feeling pictures: the lesser of two possible sophomore efforts from the guy who brought us In the Bedroom, which was, in 2001, my since-regretted pick for best of the year. (I can be a sucker for well-played big emotions, I guess.) But Little Children is icy, stentorian, and patrician in its staginess and self-consciousness, and its disdain for its subject matter is front and centre. The picture presents its tale of suburban woe as the world's most condescending fairytale, inserting an omniscient narrator in a way that, along with the upcoming Stranger Than Fiction, makes me wonder what it is about unseen movers that is so seductive in the modern conversation. I also wonder how Field and co-screenwriter Tom Perrotta (adapting his own book) could have rationalized the amount of bile mustered in reconfiguring American Beauty to include a raincoat perv (Jackie Earle Haley, the heart and soul of the film--if also its patsy and mule) and a sweaty adultery punctuated fatally by a winking nod to Madame Bovary.

Over the Hedge (2006) [Widescreen] - DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
screenplay by Len Blum and Lorne Cameron & David Hoselton and Karey Kirkpatrick, based on the comic strip by Michael Fry and T Lewis
directed by Tim Johnson & Karey Kirkpatrick

by Walter Chaw It's just a largely inoffensive, vaguely environmentalist (inasmuch as being anti-sprawl is pro-environment) assembly-line animation featuring the usual passel of aging and/or second-run celebrities subbing for trained voice performers as anthropomorphic CGI animal bodies engaged in slapstick, stink jokes, and other interchangeable ephemera for the delight of our toddlers. If you feel as though you've seen Over the Hedge a hundred times already, that's because it's been cobbled together from a hundred other identical pictures; and if you have a little trouble afterwards remembering a thing about it, well, it's only natural that something with no nutritional value would pass right through you. That's not to say there's no fertile ground to be mined here in exploring the line between the natural-natural and the human natural (a line that the Japanese puzzler Pom Poko attempts to describe to similar effect)--safe to say, in fact, that a great satire lies in the suburban morass as viewed through the eyes of the "un-civilized." But Over the Hedge is a slave to the theoretical peanut gallery, resorting to manufacturing a villain and then staging a series of boom/crash operas. Though Pixar's Cars can pretty fairly be described as awful, it's Pixar's legacy of brilliant children's entertainments that DreamWorks has tried to ape with its puerile, art-destroying, post-pop Shrek series, and if Over the Hedge at least resists the scatology that marks Shrek as low entertainment for the lowest common denominator, it still can't quite make that jump from loud noises to real insight and value.

Hard Candy (2006) + The King (2006) - DVDs

HARD CANDY
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Patrick Wilson, Ellen Page, Sandra Oh, Odessa Rae
screenplay by Brian Nelson
directed by David Slade

THE KING
*½/**** Image B+ Sound C+ Extras C+
starring Gael García Bernal, Laura Harring, Paul Dano, William Hurt
screenplay by Milo Addica & James Marsh
directed by James Marsh

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Arriving on DVD with its cult status in the bag, Hard Candy was inspired by a Japanese crimewave that found underage girls posing as prostitutes to bait wealthy businessmen they subsequently drugged, robbed, and in some cases tortured. I think I'd rather see that movie--in dealing more with entrapment than with vigilantism, it probably wouldn't want for integrity like this one does. Hard Candy pulls its punches too often for its own good (mainly, it would appear, in the interest of sustaining momentum, pendulum-like), and its literalmindedness only makes things worse. The picture's chiaroscuro tableaux brazenly paraphrase Edward Hopper, for instance, and lest there be any doubt about artistic intentionality, the two lost souls at the centre of this chamber piece arrange to meet at Nighthawks Diner. But then a T-shirt with Hopper's seminal "Nighthawks" silkscreened onto it turns up as part of the narrative, which is overkill and self-defeating besides, as in reducing Hopper to a decal, Hard Candy itself becomes kitsch.

Shogun Assassin (1980) - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Masahiro Tomikawa, Kayo Matsuo, Minoru Ohki
screenplay by Kazuo Koike, Robert Houston & David Weisman
directed by Robert Houston and Kenji Misumi

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Timing is everything when it comes to certain movies. Had I been one of the many who paid to see Shogun Assassin in 1980 or thrilled to it on video for years afterward, I might, too, have a cult attachment to its slick camerawork and delightfully bloodthirsty nature. But as it turns out, I saw the films from which it was culled--the Lone Wolf and Cub epics Sword of Vengeance and Baby Cart at the River Styx--first: no matter how expertly distilled is Robert Houston's scratch remix version, it was never going to match the elegance of construction of those Kenji Misumi classics. If you find yourself in a hurry and can only squeeze in one film with a pudgy ronin and his small, indestructible son, then Shogun Assassin is the one you want; and it immediately gains half a star if you aren't familiar with the originals. But for those with time, patience, and a love of arterial spray, the main event is probably the better bet. Which is not to say that Shogun Assassin is without its virtues.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) + Shock Treatment (1981) [Bodice-Ripping Fabulous 3-Disc Set] - DVD

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW 
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O'Brien
screenplay by Jim Sharman and Richard O'Brien
directed by Jim Sharman

SHOCK TREATMENT
**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Jessica Harper, Cliff De Young, Patricia Quinn, Richard O'Brien
screenplay by Richard O'Brien and Jim Sharman
directed by Jim Sharman

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I have never attended an actual theatrical showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and for the longest time, I doubted that I was completely receptive to every significant nuance and intricacy of the film, what with its name dropping of Michael Rennie and the presence of a performer called "Little Nell" who wears Mickey Mouse ears during the "Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me" number. The picture's esoteric quotient has always eluded my radar, preventing me from fully identifying with it, much less condescending to it. This idea of familiarity with extra-textual elements or training in a specific method of watching as essential in the evaluation process is a perennial issue in film criticism for me. My default position is that the two things don't have that much to do with each other: Learning more about a film can deepen an appreciation that was already there, but the initial call of yea or nay is one that every king, scholar, and prole is equally qualified to make. Beautiful idea, I think--it helps me sleep at night and keeps me from being too scared to see and write about films outside my realm of experience. So why is it that I am so intimidated by this movie?

Feast (2006) [Unrated] + The Woods (2006) - DVDs

FEAST
**/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins, Navi Rawat, Clu Gulager
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by John Gulager

THE WOODS
***½/**** Image A Sound A+
starring Agnes Bruckner, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel Nichols, Bruce Campbell
screenplay by David Ross
directed by Lucky McKee

by Walter Chaw I'm surprised that more great films aren't shuttled to the direct-to-video twilight zone, seeing as how mainstream taste-makers, particularly in regards to genre pictures, seem primarily invested in churning out the same pre-masticated gruel. At the very least, prefab garbage like School for Scoundrels might as well have been dumped on the home market without a ripple in the fabric of daily life. (Something like Liliana Cavani's Ripley's Game, on the other hand, deserved a theatrical release: Disguised as a dtv unload, it's the best thriller in years.) Between their low budgets, how they perform without bankable leads, and how they pretty much guarantee a healthy return on their investments, it's almost inexplicable that horror movies get exiled to Blockbuster as often as they do. You can learn a lot about a people from the mythologies they construct to frighten and warn, although because horror films are bankable product (and always were), they fall prey to the same venal, filthy lucre-inspired pitfalls of formula drudgery. Still, I like to refer to them as the "indicator species" of our cultural swamp in that they're not only ugly, dirty, bottom-feeding, what have you, but also the first species of entertainment to reflect the elements polluting the spirit of this exact moment in our social history. If you can find the pulse of it, a horror movie will tell you a lot about that quickening in your own chest when you watch the evening news.

The Departed (2006)

***/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg
screenplay by William Monahan
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese's The Departed is his funniest--and most nihilistic--film since After Hours, which remains for me the most enjoyable of his pictures, not the least for its travelogue of the Wasteland, complete with a gallery of freaks and grotesque statuary. It's a bleak, Kirkegaardian thing more oppressive as fraught cityscape than Travis Bickle's New York, seeing as how there's no filter of the unreasonable to buffer against the assertion that scum does, indeed, need to be washed off those mean streets. That city finds a doppelgänger in the blasted, depressed Boston of The Departed, whose set-pieces unfurl inside dives, abandoned warehouses, and condemned buildings, and in which we find the only relationship worth saving is between a brilliantly profane Massachusetts State Trooper Sergeant, Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), and his captain in the Special Investigations Unit, Queenan (Martin Sheen). The brutality with which that relationship is preserved, in fact, ultimately delineates this as a rare comedy (in the traditional sense) among Scorsese's long legacy of American tragedies, albeit one that's laced with poison and the unmistakable taint of a post-millennial/post-apocalyptic stench.

All the King's Men (1949) - DVD

**½/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Broderick Crawford, John Ireland, Joanne Dru, John Derek
screenplay by Robert Rossen, based on the book by Robert Penn
directed by Robert Rossen

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover All the King's Men is an entertainingly blunt-witted exploration of Hollywood's favourite activist cause: Corruption Bad. Taken from Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winner (the inspiration for the current remake, recently trounced by our own Walter Chaw), it finds a juicy if pointless target in Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), the Huey Long stand-in who rises from earnest, clueless nobody to governor of the state, leaving a trail of graft and destruction in his wake. Nobody ever stops to consider what cynical lessons we're learning about the futility of social change and the corruptibility of the individual: as its paragons of decency are a wealthy blueblood family with political ties, it's not exactly a Marxist/Leninist extravaganza. But no matter, as it allows a collection of people to sound off with the kind of melodramatic bull that only Tinseltown can provide.

Weeds: Season One (2005) - DVD

Image A Sound B Extras C
"You Can't Miss the Bear," "Free Goat," "Good Shit Lollipop," "Fashion of the Christ," "Lude Awakening," "Dead in the Nethers," "Higher Education," "The Punishment Light," "The Punishment Lighter," "The Godmother"

by Walter Chaw Showtime Entertainment chief Roger Greenblatt told the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER in August of this year that he was surprised "Weeds", the pay channel's latest attempt to catch the HBO original series tiger by the tail, had generated no controversy whatsoever. The ongoing saga of a soccer mom, recently widowed, selling pot to her friends and neighbours, "Weeds" has apparently aroused no ire from the traditionally prickly right-wing groups that make it their stock and trade to get their panties in a bunch over this sort of thing. Credit "Weeds"' decidedly non-controversial make-up and storylines for its complete inconsequence; its weak writing and suffocating air of self-congratulation very quickly metastasizes into a lump of middlebrow prestige. Seen by many as the blue-state response to the red-state Stepford conformity of the allegedly subversive "Desperate Housewives", "Weeds" is more accurately a comedy that uses the very same neo-conservative fear-mongering and race-baiting its satirical targets use but re-deploys them to ostensibly satirical effect. Yet there's so little weight to its happy serial horseshit that what's probably meant as smarty-pants sociology comes off as limp and pandering. I see "Weeds" as an Ayn Rand piece, its straw men stuffed with dolled-up ganja and its slack grasp on the legitimately subversive hidden under a pile of insubstantial, terrified condescension.

Alien Nation: The Complete Series (1989-1990) + Doctor Who: The Complete First Series (2005) - DVDs

ALIEN NATION: THE COMPLETE SERIES
Image C Sound C Extras C
"Alien Nation: The TV Movie (Pilot)," "Fountain of Youth," "Little Lost Lamb," "Fifteen with Wanda," "The Takeover," "The First Cigar," "Night of the Screams," "Contact," "Three to Tango," "The Game," "Chains of Love," "The Red Room," "The Spirit of '95," "Generation to Generation," "Eyewitness News," "Partners," "Real Men," "Crossing the Line," "Rebirth," "Gimme, Gimme," "The Touch," "Green Eyes"

DOCTOR WHO: THE COMPLETE FIRST SERIES
Image A Sound B Extras B
"Rose," "The End of the World," "The Unquiet Dead," "Aliens of London," "World War Three," "Dalek," "The Long Game," "Father's Day," "The Empty Child," "The Doctor Dances," "Boom Town," "Bad Wolf," "The Parting of the Ways"

by Walter Chaw I'm a fan of Graham Baker's dreadful Alien Nation from 1988. Run the words of the title together and you get a not-terribly-clever yet not-entirely-awful summary of what the film is getting at when it's not busy being a ludicrous high-concept buddy cop flick pairing your typical crusty old vet with an earnest rookie who happens to be an alien with a spotted pate instead of a hilarious racial minority. (Shades of Dead Heat, where Joe Piscopo played a bug-eyed zombie.) It's a schlocky B-concept, granted, but the parallax view suggests that lurking in Alien Nation is a neat parable about the Chinese-American experience in San Francisco around the turn of the century and on through to the modern day.

Inside Man (2006) [Widescreen] + Thank You for Smoking (2006) [Widescreen] - DVDs

INSIDE MAN
***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by Russell Gewirtz
directed by Spike Lee

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Adam Brody, Sam Elliott
screenplay by Jason Reitman, based on the novel by Christopher Buckley
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw You make mistakes as a film critic sometimes and, unlike a lot of professions, when you flub, you do it for the record. I underestimated Spike Lee's 25^th Hour badly upon its release a few years ago, misunderstanding it, fearing it, seeing it as a mediocre film when, in fact, subsequent viewings have revealed it as possibly Lee's tonal masterpiece. My inclination, then, is to overcompensate with Inside Man by offering it every benefit of the doubt beforehand, during, and now--by trying hard to overlook the first bad Jodie Foster performance I can remember as well as a mishandled denouement that stretches the picture past the point of recoil. But even with a jaundiced eye, Inside Man cements Lee as one of the few filmmakers with the brass ones to comment on the race schism, and to shoot (with assistance from ace cinematographer Matthew Libatique) a post-9/11 New York with the gravity of a heart attack. In his individualism, though, that almost-shrill dedication to pumping fists up familiar channels, Lee raises a few eyebrows (and elicits a couple of grins) for posing his Nazi villain in various desktop-photo tableaux with other twentieth century, profiteering, conservative ogres like George and Barbara Bush and Margaret Thatcher. It's an interesting companion piece to V for Vendetta in that way, at once a melodramatic throwback and a progressive scalpel. It's blaxploitation, Seventies paranoia, and the latest Spike Lee Joint from Ground Zero.