Inside Man Blu-ray Movie - Crime Thriller Film with Denzel Washington - Perfect for Movie Nights & Home Theater Entertainment

Screenwriter Russel Gewirtz is an original artist. So, you see, it's not up to him to tell us that his story, "Inside Man", is schooled by over 600 years of Chaucer-on-his-way-to-Canterbury. He's right to leave such correlations to students of literature. The reason that so many reviewers get lost in the film's last few minutes is that they are so sold on their just having seen a really good bank heist film that there's no room for two or more gang members using the heist for vigilante justice. In those last few minutes, Clive Owen's character (heist leader, Dalton Russell) has handed off the prize of the heist--the Cartier diamond, war crimes ring--to a very sharp detective-cop (Denzel Washington). In the proverbial back seat, the Rabbi gang member is devastated. The ring was to have come to him so that a Fortune-500 war criminal could get his justice at Jewish hands revenging the Jewish Holocaust. After all, it was surely his Shoah network that provided the inside information on war criminal Arthur Case, his 1948-built bank, and his Safe Deposit Box 392--in which the Cartier ring and 11 bags of loose diamonds lay waiting. Dalton Russell seemingly knows intuitively--after sounding out the cop thoroughly--that when Russell directs the cop to 'Follow The Ring', there'll be no rest for the cop until knowledge of the war crimes has ruined Arthur Case. How much, the cop asks the war criminal, will all those people approve of you when they know the truth behind this ring? Clearly, in Dalton Russell's (fictious) mind, the cop's path to "Murder will out" will be superior to the Rabbi's path. The Chaucerian tale has one overarching requirement. It must be told successfully from multiple perspectives. The listener-reader-viewer must see distinctly the many perspectives that are at work in the telling of the tale. Such perception is only available when the perspective is true to the teller's character. Any out-of-character stretch and the perspective falls flat. Such artistry cannot be done--in literature--with flat, two-dimensional, stereotypical characters. It only happens in stories such as "Inside Man" because of the author's rich, clarity producing characters. Gewirtz produces the characters who stay inside themselves and tell a hellava tale in the offing. As near as I can determine, Russell Gewirtz is not a Chaucerian scholar--legal scholar yes, Chaucerian scholar no. He probably does not intend for his Vigilante's Tale to take a hallowed place on the list that includes "The Knight's Tale", "Friar's Tale", "Summoner's Tale", or "The Pardoner's Tale"--just to mention a few. From a 2006 interview done by Angela Cranon, Gewirtz is simply driven by originality. However, in this modern day's Black Plague of corporate greed and political corruption driving many vigilante pilgrims on a journey to Cantebury-on-the-Guillotine, there's more than enough reason to honor Gewirtz'"Inside Man" as "The Vigilante's Tale". The class warfare of covering the war criminals' retreat from the Holocaust--their getting help simply because they are the monied elite class standing against the unwashed--should be covered early in this Canteburian journey. "The Vatican Ratlines to benefit the murderous front line of the Fortune 500 is compassionate and praiseworthy, so nobody is guilty" is sophistic hogwash. Too many of the murderous war-crimes guilty were rewarded with cushy, retribution-free lives. Will modern-day corporate greed and political corruption convince the unwashed that the superrich and their puppet governments--who do not enforce laws against cronnies, who in fact break laws; who do not protect citizen rights aganst cronnies, who in fact violate citizen rights-- should be taken all the way to the next revolution's guillotine?While the journey is still being traveled, we should be alive to the many more good vigilante tales. Filmmakers are immitating life across the spectrum of vigilante nuances, while shrouding the vigilante content with marketing department, action-thriller hype. "Inside Man" is hyped as "A heist thriller like you've never seen" and as "A cool, captivating cat-and-mouse game". It's an "intensive and explosive crime thriller", a "perfect bank robbery", and the Wall Street Journal--with skeletons to keep buried--calls it "a heist film that's right on the money". Nobody from marketing or Corporatism wants to point out the vigilante content. The word, 'vigilante', is absent from all the hype. Artists such as Russell Gewirtz can not only illuminate our way, they might very well help us to moderate the coming revolution into something more legal, more reasonable, and less bloody. We might not have to snap, as the French did in the late 1780s, when we suddenly realize that the unwashed are the only producers of the real wealth being massively stolen by the monied elites. From the large number of reviewers who were confused by the ending of "Inside Man", it's fair to conclude that we need lots of pre-revolution illumination and moderation. Orchids and Onions to some of the players. Clive Owen is Dalton Russell and is PERFECT. Denzel Washington owns the role of Det. Keith Frazier. Role ownership seems to be one of Washington's favorite things. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Frazier's partner, Det. Bill Mitchel. He plays his own man and should have been showered in Best Supporting awards. Jodie Foster walked into a brilliantly written role for the power-broker, Madeline White, and turned it into some sort of unreal stump--with her incessant over-grinning and over-wide-smiling. Did she think it made her character more menancing? Kicked me out ot the story almost every time she appeared. I'm happy with her career's success. She deserves it. But this performance was down under the toilet's rim. Christopher Plummer is super-smooth, Chairman-of-the-Board Arthur Case. He's the haunted BG war criminal, trying to cover up the help that he did not give to wealthy Jewish banking friends who were crushed lifeless in Nazi camps--because the Nazis paid him too well. He's PERFECT. Willem Dafoe is police Capt. John Darius and is PERFECT. Big spectrum of command and perception. The contributing minor characters, all of them full-tail after even a few spoken sentences, are too many to list here. They're all what it takes to tell the Chaucerian Tale from multiple perspectives. Right down to the hair-splitting squabble between techies and cops in the Command RV, this Tale gets told from multiple solid realities in the fiction. Bravo, Russell Gewirtz, for the wicked good writing. Bravo to most of the players for taking it up to the next level. Director? Directors are just there to mastermind camera-sound work and to weed the patch, to keep the right plants growing free. Spike Lee did his job well, but let's not get too carried away by Directors. (Admittedly, I did laugh at his choice of American Indian tom-tom music as the cops first sealed up the perimeter around the bank. And near the end, when the gang is driving everybody out onto the street, the echoing trumpets of Patton's reincarnated self looking out over the North African desert, where he'd fought thousands of years before, is a howler. Deja vu all over again. Good job.) BTW, the reviewers who think this is a great bank heist film are full of beans. Legal centerpiece of the story is the kidnapping of 20-30 people--a capital offense. When Dalton Russell dropped the diamond into Detective Frazier's pocket, he tipped off the plan. Frazier could be expected to fess up, turn in the diamond, and crawl through the bank's nooks and crannies until he found the hiding place. Russell is shown not wearing gloves in the hiding place, or when he crawled out. His prints--and probably DNA--would've been all over the place. This year or next, or ten years on, he would've been run down like a dog. Good guys win. Bad guys lose. Even if Frazier is the sort to turn inbetweener, to keep the diamond, and to keep his mouth shut, it's still a surprising storyline hole, coming from legal scholar Gewirtz.--spib, 09 Dec 2011.