Lost Highway / Inside Man

Lost Highway – August 14, 2007

I guess every director has to do a film noir just like they have to do a bank heist picture. One could say that Kyle MacLachlan's detective work in "Blue Velvet" was noir, but it was Nancy Drew compared to "Lost Highway." But even this is atypical; it's not the cynical, mechanical wiseacre mysteries of the forties which were legitimized by the love story at the center - "Lost Highway" is a modern shmuck's hallucinations tempered by old movies. It's Lynch using familiar old clichés to translate his perpetual Freudian urges. It's somewhat limiting, but perhaps necessary - unlike with "Blue Velvet" (or even "Eraserhead"), the nightmare here is not merely cryptic, but altogether incomprehensible. His next film, "Mulholland Drive," didn't need that genre crux and it had Lynch's sanity-maintaining humor and lucid originality. "Lost Highway" is more like someone trying to put last night's bad dream to paper before he forgets it entirely; the pieces don't fit no matter how much you cram them together with your therapist. But beside the underwritten main characters and overblown side ones (Robert Loggia) or their insistence on being amorphous, there's an eerie mood that's heightened; this ain't your daddy's Lynchian. Milquetoast Bill Pullman/Balthazar Getty's home is penetrated, girl is untrustworthy, their loved ones disappear in edits and their own lives have giant blank spaces in them. The cautious freshman criminals of the old noirs question their identity here and become terribly vulnerable - pawns in sex, at home and at work. It's existential, metaphysical bullshit, but one's illogical center finds itself captive to the four AM mood. And with Robert Blake as he is here, this has the most dread-filled (NOT dreadful) horror film feel since "The Shining."

Inside Man – August 10, 2007

Spike Lee's long but satisfying bank heist thriller is, if not as good as "Dog Day Afternoon" (which it may very well be), a deserving follower of its tradition. This time it's anti-establishment not because the robbers become populist heroes, but because it's the Wall Street stuffed-shirts and corrupt players - embodied by smarmy Jodie Foster and iffy Christopher Plummer - as bad guys. The movie's a big jigsaw puzzle - chronology and semantics and even movie references are mixed around in a soup of obfuscation swam in by flavorful characters played at the height of their actors' careers. The only piece that’s glaringly absent is the bank robber (Clive Owen) whose motivation and background are uncertain. How did he know of the movie's core mystery? Not even detective Denzel tries very hard to figure that out. One should have a little difficulty accepting him as simply a vigilante super-genius. Despite that flaw and though there may be nothing particularly novel about this film, which is one of many in a seemingly immortal genre, "Inside Man" is nevertheless an excellent and intelligent pastime.