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Läst 4930 ggr
charlie
3/22/06, 11:06 PM

Inside Man

Första stora filmen av Spike Lee på åratal. Filmen om bankrånet där inget är som det ser ut på ytan.

Det var ett tag sedan jag sist såg en film av Spike Lee. Ni kanske kommer ihåg filmerna 25th hour, Malcom X, Jungle Fever eller den mer kända Do the right thing. Spike Lees filmer har alltid handlat om motsättningar mellan olika grupperingar i New York.  Det var hans filmer som introducerade mig för svart, förlåt afroamerikansk musik. Utan “Do the right thing” hade jag aldrig upptäckt Hip Hop och band som Public Enemy under mina tonårsår.

Därför var det väldigt intressant när, som jag trodde han gett sig in i ett mer kommersiellt segment den nu så gångbara gangster genren. Men saker är inte alltid som man tror, till och med devisen för filmen är “… But you can't judge a crime by its cover

Filmen inleds med att man finner Dalton Russel, spelad av den briljante Clive Owen (King Arthur, Closer) instängd i ett mycket trångt utrymme. Känns lite som en typisk bankrånarfilm med en så komplicerad plan att Tomtens schackfärg på Julafton känns som ytterst genomförbart. Sedan brakar filmen igång Dalton kliver in på en Manhattan bank iförd en målarklädsel för att sedan brutalt men effektivt ta kontroll över situationen. Tar alla personer i banken som gisslan, klär av dem och sätter på alla likadana kläder samt hinner visa sin humana sida genom att låta det lilla barnet i gisslan behålla sitt TV-spel.

Denzel Washington, spelar gisslanförhandlaren så som så många andra poliser i filmer har han problem med internutredningsavdelningen och får chansen att bevisa sig själv. Till råga på allt så utspelas det sedvanliga slaget mellan förhandlaren och insatsstyrkan. Rollen känns kanske stereotyp men Denzel spelar bra som alltid.

Filmens innehåll tar ganska snabbt en vändning och man inser snabbt att det inte handlar om ett vanlig bankrån. Bankens ägare är intresserad att rädda något som finns inne i banken och tar hjälp av Madeleine White spelad av Jodie Foster. Madeleine är en “fixare” som löser problem åt sina kunder, Jodie Foster spelar övertygande och har alltid något slugt i blicken.


Jag vet inte om det är bara jag, men allt eftersom filmen utspelas verkar det som om Lee inte kan hålla tillbaka, att låta bli att visa underliggande konflikter mellan olika rasgrupper. Han gör det på ett mer subtilt och skickligt sätt än Crash:s bombastiska.

Det mest irriterande med filmen är att man använder skakande foto för att understryka tumultartade situationer. För mig känns det mest som att åka hem i en  taxibil efter en sen utekväll man blir bara illamående.  Bästa med filmen är Spike Lees förmåga att lirka fram komedi i dialogen, och de fantastiska skådespelarna.  

Skulle jag betala för att gå och se den på Bio? Troligen, om man har två timmar så är den underhållande. Det är ingen film som kommer vinna priser men en perfekt film till första dejten kanske? Inget stötande action och inte sliskigt romantisk, garanterat så kommer det finnas ämnen att diskutera efter filmen.

Skulle jag köpa denna filmen på DVD? Troligen inte, det är en film som inte passar att ses på ett mindre format.
Om jag skulle sätta ett betyg på Inside Man så skulle jag sätta en 3a eller möjligtvis en 3+ för alla de bra skådespelarna.
 

Relaterade länkar

Av: charlie

Datum för publicering

  • 2006-03-22

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Annons:
Linda
3/23/06, 9:59 AM
#1

Förstår inte dig, enligt mig så fick den 4+ nästan 5- tyckte den var super bra!

-Spänningen låg på topp hela filmen, de rullande kamrorna gjorde det verkligt och man kunde riktigt leva sig in när filmens olika tidzoner spelades in, vilket klimat det var osv..

-Kanske en häftig rulle för brudar som vill se bad boys?

Cartman
3/23/06, 5:43 PM
#2

Tack för utmärkt recension. Apropå skakkameror kan jag inte med dom heller, huvudskälet till att jag sett max 0.5 avsnitt av NYPD. Hursomhelst fick recensionen mig att plocka fram gamla Cinemania 97 (synd att den gått i graven) där jag visste att en "tour" med blaxploitationrullar fanns med. Nu är Lee nåt decennium senare men tillhör väl genren varför jag tog med denna i slutet på inlägget. Först lite info om Spike Lee.

Spike Lee

(1956 -     )

Biography from Baseline

Occupation:                 Director, screenwriter, producer

Also:                 Actor

Born As:                 Shelton Jackson Lee

Born:                 March 20, 1956, Atlanta, GA

Education:                 Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA (communications); Institute of Film and TV, New York University, New York, NY

Spike Lee burst onto the movie scene in 1986, immediately establishing himself as one of the most important young American filmmakers and a controversial figure in African-American culture.

A Brooklynite, a third-generation alumnus of Atlanta's Morehouse College and a graduate of New York University's film school, Lee won immediate acclaim for his commercial debut, SHE'S GOTTA HAVE It (1986). This independently produced, stylish, black-and-white (and partly color) feature did surprising box-office business and garnered critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the film's sharp, witty direction impressed critics, Lee's portrayal of the comic streetwise hustler Mars Blackmon (and his trademark litany, "please, baby, please, baby, please, baby, please, baby") proved to be the most compelling element of the production.

Between film projects Lee directed himself as Mars in an Anita Baker music video ("No One in the World"), a short made for "Saturday Night Live" ("Horn of Plenty") and, most notably, in two Nike Air Jordan television commercials ("Hangtime" and "Cover") in which Mars Blackmon appears with basketball star Michael Jordan.

Television work, in fact, has been a much more frequent outlet for Lee's creative energies, as he battles to make uncompromising yet commercial films about the black experience within Hollywood's white-dominated financing, production and distribution system. Following the success of SHE'S GOTTA HAVE It, a number of black musical artists- including Miles Davis, Brandford Marsalis, Steel Pulse and Grandmaster Flash-have sought Lee to direct their music videos. With a film production team that includes editor Barry Brown and the gifted cinematographer (and neophyte director) Ernest Dickerson, Lee completed not only a number of videos, but also five one-minute spots for MTV, another series of Nike commercials, and ads for Jesse Jackson's campaign in the 1988 New York Presidential primary.

These projects have all supplemented Spike Lee's driving ambition, the production of feature films for his company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. After the self-described "guerrilla filmmaking" techniques employed to produce the low-budget SHE'S GOTTA HAVE It, as well as his earlier NYU thesis film, JOE'S BED-STUY BARBER SHOP: WE CUT HEADS (1982), Lee's second feature, SCHOOL DAZE (1988), was partly financed by Columbia Pictures. Despite Columbia's underfinancing (Lee was given only a third of the usual Hollywood budget), SCHOOL DAZE remained true to his provocative vision. And despite the studio's poor promotion efforts and unenthusiastic reviews, the film grossed more than twice its cost. With an all-black ensemble cast, the film satirically addresses, in the form of a musical-comedy, class and color divisions within the student body at a black college: affluent, light-skinned "gammas" clash with underclass, dark-skinned "jigaboos." In the face of production problems (Morehouse, Lee's alma mater, refused cooperation just before shooting began), SCHOOL DAZE was a notable achievement on two counts. Spike Lee became perhaps the first black director given complete control by Hollywood over his film, and SCHOOL DAZE, as one critic wrote, established that a vehicle which "puts real African American people on the screen" could succeed-redeeming a history of stereotyped screen images by speaking and acting from authentic experience.

Lee's next film, DO THE RIGHT THING (1989), enlarged upon his successes on several levels-commercially, artistically and thematically. Based on several real-life racially motivated acts of violence in New York City, Lee's politically charged and polemical drama stirred controversy even before its release. The finished film was widely praised for its exciting and flamboyant visual craftsmanship. Like his other films, DO THE RIGHT THING presents a slice-of-life look at a predominantly black environment, in this case a block of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Lee's portrait is both celebratory and critical: the "mise-en-scene," music and dialogue are rich in allusions to African-American cultural history (a deejay's litany of black musical stars mixes with the score written by the director's father, jazz bassist Bill Lee), and, as in SCHOOL DAZE, Lee also unflinchingly presents the divisions within the black community by centering the film on a photograph of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and ending It with seemingly opposing quotations from both men. More importantly, DO THE RIGHT THING focuses its tense drama on the interracial violence that occurs between Bed-Stuy's black underclass and the white family that runs the local pizzeria. Climaxing with the killing of a black youth at the hands of white policemen and a fiery street riot, Lee's film offers no resolution for the racial violence which has plagued the city.

In presenting both the inter- and intra-racial problems that have marked recent American history, Spike Lee's films collectively call for an awakening of consciousness. A sleeping character in JOE'S BED-STUY BARBER SHOP (1982) is hailed with the line, "Wake up. The black man has been asleep for 400 years." SCHOOL DAZE'S problematic climax features warring factions greeting a sunrise with the cry, "Wake up!" DO THE RIGHT THING continues the plea, as the same refrain introduces both the film and Lee's Mookie character.

Lee's next two films failed to live up to the dramatic promise of DO THE RIGHT THING, though both boasted strong performances, increasingly showy camerawork and colorful, stylized imagery. Inevitably, a critical backlash began to develop against the cannily self-promoting filmmaker.

MO' BETTER BLUES (1990) was Lee's first collaboration with charismatic leading man Denzel Washington, who portrays a self-absorbed jazz trumpeter forced to wake up and open his eyes and heart to the needs of those around him. The film intensified the ongoing criticism of Lee for his shallow characterization of female characters. The director also fielded charges of anti-Semitism for his scathing depiction of a pair of Jewish night club owners. In interviews Lee had decried the inauthenticity of jazz films by white filmmakers-Clint Eastwood's BIRD (1988) was a favorite target-claiming that, as the son of a genuine jazz musician, he was better qualified to depict that milieu. Most reviewers, however, deemed the film slight and overlong.

JUNGLE FEVER (1991) again courted controversy for its depiction of a lusty affair between a black married professional man and his Italian-American working-class secretary. Despite some powerful scenes and performances, the film is sadly underwritten. The central relationship is neither adequately explained nor realistically depicted, with the film emitting much heat but little illumination on race relations, Black self-hatred, or the allure of sex with the Other.

Lee's next project would prove to be both his most ambitious and most controversial-indeed, the intensity of the controversy that surrounded MALCOLM X (1992) even before shooting began made the completed film something of an anti-climax. The press gleefully related tales of Lee intimidating non-Black director Norman Jewison into relinquishing the project to him. Lee persuasively argued that only a Black filmmaker could tell this story, while some Black intellectuals, notably poet/activist Amiri Baraka, publicly doubted that he was the man for the job: Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a revered historical document of a hero more important to black culture than any "Spike Lee Joint." Undaunted, Lee took on the monumental project.

When the film's backers balked at escalating production costs, Lee turned to such Black entertainment luminaries as Bill Cosby, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, who gave him the money to complete the film as he envisioned It. The final product was a three-and-a-half hour, surprisingly traditional biopic that swiftly covers a great deal of material before culminating in an emotionally devastating climax. Though a huge production, the film remains "A Spike Lee Joint," encompassing everything from gangster action, flashy costumes and a big dance number, to location shooting in Mecca, with many jaunty directorial flourishes along the way. Most impressive, however, was Denzel Washington's towering performance as the charismatic Black Muslim leader. Almost inevitably for a mainstream project about such a complex and controversial figure, MALCOLM X has its flaws and omissions. Malcolm's early delinquent phase, in particular, is cleaned up for mass consumption. Nor is the extent of his later radicalism, and the controversy It provoked among both whites and Blacks, adequately addressed. The Hollywood blockbuster has never been a congenial medium for overtly political filmmaking but, in the final analysis, MALCOLM X must be viewed as the triumph of Spike Lee's will.

Lee's 1994 film CROOKLYN was a loosely structured story of a jazz musician, his wife and their children in Brooklyn of the 70s. Packed with the sounds of the seventies, and with little narrative, CROOKLYN could be viewed as Lee's return to the kind of depictions of neighborhood, family and characters he delivered with such adeptness in DO THE RIGHT THING and SHE'S GOTTA HAVE It. Co-scripted by sister Joie Lee, CROOKLYN, unlike prior Lee-helmed features, emphasized a female protagonist-here the only girl child among the Carmichael's five. Reportedly the film's brightly and loudly nostalgic family romance was only loosely based on the Lee's own youth. Alternately sloppy and shrewd, wise and idiosyncratic, the film met with an extremely mixed critical reception and poor box office.

Lee was reportedly reluctant to direct CLOCKERS (1995), a much anticipated adaptation of Richard Price's acclaimed 1991 novel about the world of low-level street crack dealers in Jersey City. He felt that audiences, both Black and white, were tired of the spate of grim rap-driven urban crime pictures of the preceding half decade or so. Those in the know had high hopes for CLOCKERS as, originally, the august director-star team of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro were attached to the project. Lee came aboard after they bowed out and proceeded to transform Price's screenplay into "A Spike Lee Joint." He shifted the locale to his beloved Brooklyn and rewrote the script to de-emphasize the white cop protagonist's angst in favor of focusing in the African-American victims and dispensers of violence. Working with neophyte feature cinematographer Malik Sayeed, Lee painted a gritty canvas of urban life far more dark and "realistic" (though still highly stylized) than in his previous films. He placed another newcomer, first-time actor Mekhi Phifer, centerstage as the tormented young drug dealer Strike. Some reviewers quibbled over Lee's deviations from Price's admired original but many more hailed It as the best work of his career.

Blaxploitation films

The term blaxploitation was coined in the early '70s to describe a type of exploitation film of the period aimed at a primarily black, urban audience. These were sex-and-violence-packed inner-city crime pictures-frequently anti-establishment revenge fantasies-starring and often written or directed by African-Americans, and populated with streetwise superstud detectives, primping pimps in outlandish fedoras and platform shoes, buxom prostitutes, strung-out junkies and sleazy drug dealers. The defiantly proud black heroes and heroines were almost always rebels of some sort, functioning outside traditional bourgeois American values.

Some critics, black and white, found blaxploitation films to be morally bankrupt and claimed they presented negative and degrading images of African-Americans, while others saw these movies as empowering expressions of righteous anger against the racist Establishment.

Melvin Van Peebles' astonishing SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971) was perhaps the precursor of the BLAXPLOITATION movie, a sexually explicit (then X-rated) modern legend about a black stud named Sweetback (played by Van Peebles himself), raised in a whorehouse, who grows up to become a pimp and exacts a violent revenge (literally and figuratively) against Whitey. Van Peebles told Newsweek at the time that his picture was the undiluted expression of a uniquely African-American sensibility: "In my film, the black audience finally gets a chance to see some of their own fantasies acted out-about rising out of the mud and kicking ass."

Although some were angered by its overtly sexist slant and its perpetuation (even glorification) of the myth of the black superstud, Black Panther leader Huey Newton called It "a great revolutionary document." Indeed, the movie ended with a warning that White America had better watch out, because Sweetback would be back to take what was his.

But the quintessential blaxploitation movies-and the first big hits-were probably SHAFT (1971) and SUPERFLY (1972). SHAFT, directed by Gordon Parks, Sr., was the slickly told story of (as Isaac Hayes' Oscar-winning title song put it) "a black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks." The unexpectedly huge success of SHAFT helped keep the ailing MGM alive and made a star of Richard Roundtree, who reprised his role in two sequels, SHAFT'S BIG SCORE! (1972) and SHAFT IN AFRICA (1973), and a CBS television series (1973-74).

SUPERFLY (1972), directed by Parks' son, Gordon Parks, Jr., was a more explosive and provocative hit with another excellent score, this one by Curtis Mayfield, which produced two hit singles, the title tune and "Freddy's Dead." It centered on a super-cool Harlem cocaine dealer (Ron O'Neal) who schemes to grab all he can from "The Man"-the white drug-syndicate overlords who supply and control him-and Get Out of the trade. Although the film was criticized for lionizing its romantic, drug-pushing hero (who made a point of selling dope specifically to whites), It set the tone (and the plot) for many blaxploitation films to come, and generated the sequels SUPERFLY T.N.T. (1973) and THE RETURN OF SUPERFLY (1990).

Blaxploitation queen Pam Grier had her biggest hit with COFFY (1973), another violent revenge drama, as a busty nurse-turned-vigilante who goes after the drug dealers who've made a junkie of her little sister. Pam Grier threw herself into the role (and out of her blouse) with such single-minded conviction that she rose above the material as "The baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad that ever hit town!" (according to the movie's poster). Grier followed with similar roles in the likes of FOXY BROWN (1974), where she goes after a drug ring that killed her lover, and BUCKTOWN (1975), about a microcosmic war between the races in a dissolute Southern city. Grier has sustained her career (she was far and away the best thing in the initial Steven Seagal vehicle, ABOVE THE LAW, 1988) and is considered an icon of tough, black womanhood in some circles. (She was also the subject of an admiring discussion between the pop-culture-obsessed-white-bank robbers in Quentin Tarantino's RESERVOIR DOGS, 1992).

The blaxploitation movement (or fad, if you prefer) was spoofed by Keenen Ivory Wayans in his 1988 comedy I'M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA.

Linda
3/24/06, 9:57 AM
#3

Det var inte skak filmat utan med rullande kamror, dvs inte stativ filmat hela filmen.

charlie
3/24/06, 11:29 AM
#4

Det var gott om skakiga scener.

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Oskar
8/8/06, 12:52 PM
#5

Spännande film tycker jag. Alltid kul när någon lyckas göra ett välkänt filmtema (bankrån med gisslan) på ett nytt sätt. För den här filmen hade en hel del kul vändningar och annolrlunda upplägg. Och det "skakiga" filmsättet störde inte alltför mycket tyckte jag. Kan nog ge den betyget 4 av 5 möjliga.

Oskar

Anken
3/23/09, 9:59 PM
#6

Älskar den här filmen, kan inte sluta kolla på den. Helt fantastikt smart gjort tycker jag, inget jag skulle kunna komma på. För er som också gillar den här filmen, så kan jag säga till er att 2010 så kommer en uppföljare, Inside Man 2.

 Hoppas den är lika bra nu! Glad

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