——25th Hour——
(C+)
There is a good movie in here somewhere, but what does it have to do with 9/11, Osama Bin Laudin, the World Trade Center or Bruce Springstein? You can imagine my surprise at hearing the Boss play over the end credits in a Spike Lee movie, much less one about a man’s last hours free before he has to go to prison. This story of Ed Norton as a drug dealer repenting his life as he’s about to be locked away for 7 years would really be great if Lee didn’t go off on to so many bizarre tangents. I’m happy that he wanted to make a love letter to his favorite city after 9/11, but was this movie really the right vehicle for that? The references don’t belong, just like the frequent overlapping cuts that don’t really add to the story and only suggest that Spike was trying to add some sort of signature of his own on the movie (about a bunch of white guys). If the movie had stuck more closely to Ed Norton it would have been a whole lot better, but the constant sidetracking of this story just becomes confusing, especially after Bruce picks up on the soundtrack.
——Deconstructing Harry——
(A)
I found just the concept of this film very interesting. Real life overlaps with the writer’s fictional recreations of real life in order to give us a greater understanding into the mindset of our main character. It’s a great movie about how life and art overlap, and at times are the same thing, and I had no problem with the Goddard-like jump cutting when I discovered that it represented the fractured state of his mind and his life, in that at times his characters and stories overlap with the real world in order to tell him things about himself. It’s a movie about the writing process, since he can’t get back to writing straight fiction until he comes to terms with himself and who he is. Until then he is just working out all of his problems on the printed page, but not really dealing with them correctly since he can just change any details he wants in the name of “fiction”, thus never really dealing with what is bothering him. Great movie, and very funny.
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Sheeee-it…
I saw 25th hour a while ago, and I kind of liked it. The 9/11 stuff was a little confusing, but keep in mind, in the months following the attack it was frequently on peoples’ minds – particularly New Yorkers’, I’d imagine.
But damn, Rosario Dawson is hot. Anna Paquin is also hot, but I can’t believe I never realized she had that big gap in her teeth.
The “what if” sequence at the end was kind of interesting. I like it when directors take advantage of the fact that when people see something, they assume it’s true, if only in the context of the story.
Re: Sheeee-it…
I don’t mind if 9/11 is on people’s minds. I don’t care if you incorporate it into your story. But the 9/11 stuff fits in absolutely no way I can possibly tell from what is in the movie. Spike Lee wants to say something about New York after 9/11 which is cool, but he chooses the wrong material to do so. As a friend of mine pointed out, the sequence that is like “I hate all the people in the city, but I love New York” is just a rehash of a sequence that appeared 15 years ago in Do the Right Thing, only there it actually had a significant meaning to push along the story. Here it makes absolutely no sense and distracts from what is actually a pretty interesting story.
No argument that their are some hot girls in it though.