At the movies

I saw Spike Lee's Inside Man over the weekend and was thinking of writing something about it, but then I read Steve Sailer's review:

Good movie. It's a heist flick with Clive Owen playing the genius bankrobber who takes 50 hostages, Denzel Washington as the NYPD negotiator who slowly figures out the bankrobber has memorized the police manual that he's been working from, and Jodie Foster in a supporting role as a shady fix-it lady for the rich powerful who is hired by the owner of the bank (Christopher Plummer) to prevent the bankrobbers from getting incriminating documents in the vault. Meanwhile, every ethnicity in New York is barking amusing insults at each other. My wife says, "It's 'Crash' with a plot." More

Since Steve raised the comparison between Spike Lee and Woody Allen, let me just add that critics of the first have accused the black New Yorker of highlighting negative streotypes of Jews in some of his movies (notably the Jewish characters in Mo' Better Blues), while others complained that the Jewish New Yorker hasn't included any leading black characters in his films. So I suppose that after Inside Man where blacks and Jews are allied in an effort to uncover plots by rich WASPS with ties to Nazis and following Woody Allen'sMelinda and Melinda where Chewital Ejiofor plays an an interesting (and complex) black character we could expect the two working together on a co-production (Not!).