Watch This
There’s nothing like the movies. It’s the whole cinematic experience - the surround sound, the darkened hall, the larger than life visuals, being truly engrossed in the story unfolding before your eyes…It’s really not the same when you watch a movie at home on your 29" Panasonic. Not for me, at least.
I get interrupted only about 72 times during a movie at home. The dog will start whimpering for a walk. The phone will ring. The doorbell will ring. The DVD will skip. The mom will yell about how we’re out of dish detergent.
And the spell of concentration is broken the moment you have to hit the pause button.
Yet I don’t go to the movies as much as I used to which is a great, big, crying shame.
But last weekend, I did go to catch Inside Man. For those of you who don’t know what the movie’s about (where have you been - hiding out with Osama in his cave?), it’s about how Clive Owen plans the seemingly perfect bank robbery, then plays a game of one-upmanship with detective Denzel so-famous-I-don’t-need-to-mention-his-last-name.
Stellar powerhouse cast. Good premise. Many touches of low-key humour. (There’s one scene where Clive’s character says money isn’t everything and a deadpan Denzel says dryly, "Why, thank you, Mr. Bank Robber.") And it had more twists than a pretzel.
There’s a great buildup of tension that you know will lead to the Big Payoff. But when it comes, it’s neither very shocking nor very plausible. I kind of guessed it halfway through the movie (but then I have this eerie kind of ESP when it comes to film plotlines so just ignore me). And Jodie Foster’s character seemed to have been created just to chew up the scenery. Not that she wasn’t any good. I mean, c’mon, it’s Jodie Foster! She could play a doormat and still steal the show.
It’s not just the big names who shine in the movie though. Spike Lee has peopled his film with an ethnically diverse cast that is truly representative of modern-day New York City. Having stayed in Brooklyn (the most populous of the five boroughs of NYC) every autumn as a child, I can tell you that many of the taxi drivers spoke with foreign accents and on almost every street corner, I could have sworn there was some Korean grocery store.
But I’ll save my New York stories for some other time and place.
Overall, Inside Man is solid entertainment. A good ol’ crime caper that is helped along by the ever-reliable Clive Owen. This man is hot and I don’t really mean in a physical sort of way - although I suppose his dark, brutish looks aren’t too hard on the eyes. But he’s got this commanding, enigmatic kind of presence that I find irresistable in a man. Plus, have you seen how cool he was in those BMW film shorts? Go download them. Now.
Moving along to the small screen, I haven’t really watched anything interesting lately except…umm, ahh, it’s sort of my guilty little pleasure…America’s Next Top Model. I’m always going on about how reality shows suck and anything that pits a bunch of conniving humans against each other is stupid, blah blah blah…And look at what I’m tuning into devotedly every week.
But goddammit, it’s interesting! It’s funny to see how Tyra Banks and her judging panel eliminate girls based on their characters and attitudes. If this is how supermodels get selected, then Naomi Campbell would have never seen the dawn of her career. She would have been kicked off on the very first episode for beating up one of the other contestants with her cell phone or something.
And it was also funny to see how the girls performed when they were asked to read from a teleprompter in one episode. Few of them could barely read the word ‘charismatic’. Almost all of them made painful attempts at pronouncing ‘magenta’.
This is the kind of show that makes my anti-American friend sneer, "Stupid Yanks."
Maybe I should start being a selective viewer and watch more CNN or something. *snorts* Yeah, right.
If I’m gonna be watching George W. Bush mangle the English language, I’d rather just see a bunch of beautiful girls doing pretty much the same thing.
Same difference.
