Author: Ben Popper

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Film Features Film/TV

Steve Buscemi’s dark indie treads familiar territory.

There is one important element missing from Lonesome Jim, Steve Buscemi’s second film as a director: Buscemi himself. The film is suffused with its director’s morose humor, desperate character, and schmo’s pathos. Sadly, these elements fail to come to a boil, mostly because of the lackluster acting and cardboard dialogue between the film’s two leads, second-degree-celebrity duo Casey Affleck and Liv Tyler.

The story follows Jim (Affleck), a depressed, near-suicidal writer who has returned from a failed stay in New York to his parents’ house in the Midwest. He has retreated to this bleak milieu in order to, in his words, “have some kind of nervous breakdown.” Buscemi’s movie toys with art-film techniques: unusual framing, anti-heroes, etc., and, in its rather unambitious way, the film succeeds at this.

In fact, as long as everything is going downhill, the film is enjoyable if a bit dark. The family dynamic is humorous and natural, with comic relief coming mostly from Jim’s erstwhile uncle Evil (Mark Boone Junior), who slacks off during his job at the family-owned plant and deals drugs on the side. Jim meets Anika (Tyler), a nurse and single mother, with whom he begins a classic Buscemi-esque romance. “How’s your brother,” Anika asks him shortly after their first date. “Good,” Jim replies. “He’s in a coma.”

The major problem lies not with Buscemi but with writer James C. Strouse, who doesn’t seem to know how to transition between the stylized world of indie doom and gloom, where his humor and plotting make sense, and the moments where Hollywood pokes its hopeful head into the picture. The romance between Jim and Anika only works as a failure. When the two come together for a gushing confession or predictable romantic hurdle, the dialogue curdles and the actors show the strain.

The pleasant exception to this is Jim’s overbearing and ebullient mother Sally, played by Mary Kay Place. Her earnest determination to connect with her sons and aid them in their crumbling, solipsistic lives is not a narrative revelation, but Place plays the part brilliantly. She subtly allows the audience in on the fact that that upbeat attitude is an act of will, not ignorance, and comes away with the best performance in the film.

If you are a fan of dark, “honest” indie fare — any Bright Eyes fans in the mood for a movie? — then I’d recommend Lonesome Jim. Otherwise, I would wait this one out.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Breaking Barriers

On Tuesday nights the rubber floors at the New Ballet Ensemble (NBE) dance studio are rolled up and carefully stored beneath the bars, safe from the scuff of flashing sneaker soles. Trickling in alone or in pairs, young Memphians start stretching and joking. Some sit at a table comparing graffiti styles in homemade books. Soon a CD is popped in, and suddenly the room explodes in movement.

For the past six months, an informal breakdancing session has taken place every Tuesday at the NBE’s Midtown dance studio on Central. The attendance varies, usually somewhere between 10 and 12. The dancers are from all parts of Memphis and range in age from 18 to 27.

“Man, you can’t just go out there and breakdance. You have to learn the fundamentals. You have to learn what it means to dance on the break!” scolds Andres Replin, aka B-boy Phobic. A Chicago native who has been breaking for 12 years, Andres is one of the more experienced dancers at the session. He now lives in Cordova. “I met up with these True Head cats a couple years ago. It feels great to be able to get down with a whole different style, a Southern thing.”

True Heads is a crew organized by Memphians that focuses on using the four elements of hip-hop: breaking, rapping, DJing, and graffiti. J.D. Gray and Brandon Marshall are breakers from that crew. “Hip-hop is about uplifting the community, about using the four elements for the greater good. It’s not that garbage you hear on the radio about killing fools,” says Gray.

The breaking session actually grew out of a dispute between True Heads and the New Ballet Ensemble, a conflict that has since grown into a mutually beneficial partnership.

Marshall, aka B-boy Nosey, recounts the way he first met the dancers of NBE. “One of our friends, Adam Smith, aka Kodak, was having a show with John Lee at the Brooks. That was the beginning of last summer. We saw on the flyer it said ‘professional hip-hop dance.'”

The performance upset Nosey and his friends. “It was a bunch of choreographed You Got Served-style moves to an Usher song,” Nosey remembers. “This is our lives. I mean, we don’t have anything else, so when someone disrespects us or doesn’t give an accurate portrayal of what we do. We take it to heart. We take it personal.”

The crew began to heckle the performers. “Everyone was staring at us like we were a bunch of hoodlums,” Nosey says. “Afterward, I went up to the guy who supposedly choreographed the whole thing. His name was Max, and I asked him, ‘Are you a b-boy?’ ‘Yeah I’m a b-boy,’ he said. So I said, ‘All right, let’s battle right now.’ He was like ‘nah nah,’ but I just started breaking in the lobby. I taunted him and so he tried some stuff, but we just smoked him.”

The dancers were then approached by Katie Smythe, director of the New Ballet Ensemble. The dispute remained heated, but Nosey went later that week to see Smythe at the studio. “I came to the studio to talk to her. I said, ‘How would you like it if we took 10 strippers and thugs, put them in tights, and called it ballet?’ She seemed to see my point, and she invited us up here.”

At the time, Nosey was practicing at a small church in Lakeland with only three other dancers. “Once we came here, word started to spread, and there have been as many as 30 people at the sessions — just a lot of dancing and peace, which is what hip-hop should be about. In return for using the studio, we have done some choreography for [Smythe] as well as performing.”

The breakers performed with NBE last Christmas in their presentation of the Nut-Remix, and Nosey will be dancing with them again.

The breakdancing session has become a regular occurrence. While breakers like Nosey and Phobic have years of experience, the scene on Central is far from intimidating. There are breakers of all levels practicing and learning from one another. DJs and graffiti writers are encouraged to come, and some folks are just there to watch the dancers and artists at work.

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Music Music Features

Down-Home Blues

Clarksdale, Mississippi, gets plenty of tourist traffic thanks to its rich history as a center for Delta blues, but this weekend the blues on display will be as much for area residents as out-of-towners.

“We wanted to do something a little different, something that would bring out the locals to celebrate spring and inspire pride in our hometown,” says Roger Stole, a local record-store owner and co-organizer of the third annual Juke Joint Festival.

“We’ve already got a ton of blues festivals in the area,” Stole notes. “So we decided to do something distinctively Clarksdale.” Along with local entrepreneur Bubba “O’Keefe” Kinchen, Stole organized a festival that celebrates the local venues that have incubated the Delta blues for decades and the artists who have made these places their home.

The juke joint is a Southern phenomenon, born in the days following Emancipation when working African Americans needed a place to relax after the workday. Segregation meant that blacks had to create their own venues for entertainment, and the term “juke” joint was perhaps based on the Gullah word joog, meaning to get rowdy and loose.

The blues played in jukes is often an up-tempo style, and dancing, drinking, and getting rowdy is half the fun. “You could put any of these local artists, a Big T or a Super Chikan, on a festival stage in the North and get a great show,” says Stole. “That is absolutely not the same experience as having them perform in the juke joint that is their home. The comfort level is beyond anything you could get at a concert.”

Comfort is a big part of the juke-joint experience. The feeling is akin to going to Wild Bill’s here in Memphis, a juke joint in its own right. There is a house band and a full complement of regulars, but out-of-town guests are made to feel at home and encouraged to participate.

“A lot of times the things Bubba does, like myself, aren’t the wisest business decisions. But if you really look at the motivations they make perfect sense — just not dollars and cents,” Stole says, adding that the secret mission of the festival is to encourage locals and tourists who otherwise might never meet to mix and mingle. “There are a lot of locals here who might avoid the larger tourist festivals.”

Of course, until you can interact with the regulars, you’re not getting the full experience. “Wesley Jefferson is the house band at Red’s Lounge, and seeing him there you can really soak up the ambience,” Stole says. “Wesley will start philosophizing and then Red will shout something back at him from behind the bar, and the place is just packed with regulars who love this music.”

During the day at the Juke Joint Festival, there will be four outdoor stages. At night, 10 venues will be open, varying in size from Morgan Freeman’s large Ground Zero Blues Club, with its high ceiling and actual stage, to Red’s Lounge, where dancers and musicians can move bumper to bumper.

“We have almost exclusively local talent,” says Stole, “except for a couple of acts that begged to come and play.” The local line-up includes Big T, Wesley Jefferson, Super Chikan, Razorblade, Sam Carr, and Bill Abel.

“The few out-of-town acts, like Reverend Paton’s Big Damn Band, from Indianapolis … they just love coming down here,” says Stole. “They will play for free or for the door.”

Music is not the only thing the Juke Joint Festival has to offer. “During the daytime we have those four outdoor stages, so you can see music all day long, and if that gets boring you can just check out the racing pigs,” says Stole. And if the pigs get boring, you can always check the sheep-herding monkeys from nearby Pontotoc, Mississippi. “It’s really the dogs they’re riding that do the herding. Those monkeys are just holding on.”

The idea is to intermingle a music festival with a country fair, showcasing all types of entertainment and encouraging a diverse audience of locals and blues lovers from across the nation to make the most out of downtown Clarksdale. A $10 wristband gets you a seat on the daytime historical tour of Clarksdale, a ticket to the blues documentary Lightning in a Bottle, entrance to all venues, and a ride on the Blues Bus between the venues and local accommodations.

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Film Features Film/TV

Absurdist Western a rough but rewarding ride

I can imagine a lyric from a country song about Don’t Come Knocking, the new film by Wim Wenders: “Hollywood will just go on faking it/And you and I, we’ll just keep on taking it.” There is a bitter, ironic beauty to the mastery with which Wenders employs the stunning visuals and narrative hopefulness of the Western genre, all the while juxtaposing it to the cruelty and dysfunction of modern life.

The best way to get a handle on Wenders’ sprawling Don’t Come Knocking is by comparing it to another Wenders film, the seminal 1984 Paris, Texas. Both films were written in collaboration with American playwright Sam Shepard, who also stars in this one, and the two films cover similar ground both thematically and cinematically.

The films focus on the return of a father figure — in the new film’s case, an over-the-hill actor named Howard Spence (Shepard) who is estranged from his family and to a large degree from his own past. In Paris, Texas, Wenders gave us a protagonist who could have wandered out of a Western film; here he gives us Howard, who has literally just escaped on horseback from the set of his latest production.

Martin Scorsese once said that film fills the spiritual need of people to share a common memory. What gives the Wenders/Shepard collaborations their energy is that they begin in a condition of near amnesia. As the estranged characters struggle to reconcile with their long separation, cinema itself functions as a form of memory. In Paris, Texas, it was home footage that tied the characters together. Here the vestiges of Howard’s movie stardom serve that purpose, while Wenders uses the landscape of the American Southwest as a tool to comment on the struggle to maintain that reunion.

The dialogue and plot both draw heavily on absurdist theater, which is a powerful but dangerous technique. The exchanges among the film’s experienced actors — Shepard, Jessica Lange as his wife, and the phenomenal Tim Roth as the studio Pinkerton — work in conjunction with the film’s stilted narrative in a weird, wonderful way. When the same kind of dialogue is delivered by Howard’s son Earl (Gabriel Mann), on the other hand, it is almost unbearable.

This film is not quite as strong as Paris, Texas. But this is a profound work, principally for the way in which Wenders wields the Western as double-edged sword. Here genre is a lens and a mask, a tool through which the filmmaker can comment and behind which the characters can hide. Sadly, the characters’ awareness of their roles makes it harder to be simultaneously enthralled by Don’t Come Knocking‘s layered commentary and immersed in these characters’ struggles as well.

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News The Fly-By

Roadshow and Tell

“August 2nd, 2005, the day before my first shot of T,” says a female voice.

“August 31st, the day before my third shot,” says the voice again, slightly rougher this time, as though the speaker has a cold. With “November 10th, the day of my eighth shot of T,” the voice has dropped to that of a pubescent boy. By “my 16th shot of T,” the voice is now recognizably male.

The “T” is a shot of testosterone, and the voice belongs to Kelly Shortandqueer, a transgender performer and one of the founders of the Tranny Roadshow, a group of traveling transsexuals who perform across the United States.

I watched the group perform last week at the Media Co-op. The tour has visited cities as far away as Toronto, although they don’t get much farther South than Memphis.

Shortandqueer, along with fellow transsexual Jamez Terry, organized the show on a whim.

“I just wanted to be able to perform,” says Terry. He posted on a few Web forums and sent e-mails to a few friends. “Within a week, I had gotten hundreds of e-mails,” says Terry.

The Roadshow’s performances vary from monologues to songs.

“The show is not explicitly political. A lot of the acts don’t even deal directly with gender, but a lot of the art is very identity-based,” says Terry. “I think it’s hard to break into the mainstream art community, so we had to make our own space.”

Shortandqueer opens the show with a monologue about the high and low points of changing gender, while trying to deal with colleagues and customers at OfficeMax.

“I hate it when my co-workers try and over-correct,” he says during his performance. “‘Oh, Kelly, you would look great in that blue shirt, because you’re a boy!'”

“Passing,” slang for someone appearing as their chosen gender without others suspecting, is a topic of both interest and pride.

I was clueless about the Roadshow founders’ sex, even after they tried to guide me with several prominent pronouns. Finally, Terry, who works as a dog trainer in Alaska, said in an offhanded way, “I’m not even out at my job. As far as they know, I was born male, and I’m happy to let them think that.”

But wait, I thought Terry was born male. I guess that’s part of the beauty of the Roadshow: I wasn’t sure where everyone was going, and I certainly didn’t know where they had been.

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News The Fly-By

On Location

Drawing on the local film scene’s unparalleled success, a coalition of officials is trying to enact state legislation to attract an array of visual media projects.

“The legislators were primed to do something,” says David Bennett, executive director of the state’s Film, Entertainment & Music Commission. “We just felt like it was imprudent to walk away this year with all the momentum we had.”

Last year, a group of lawmakers worked on a proposal that would reward production companies with a transferable tax credit similar to the successful model used in Louisiana, a form familiar to Hollywood. But the idea faced stiff competition from the State Revenue Commission, in large part because Tennessee has no state income tax.

The Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commission and the Memphis Music Foundation commissioned a study — released last week — to study possible film incentives. The study projected that the new incentives could mean an economic impact of $400 million statewide and create over 6,000 jobs.

“We decided, let’s start fresh,” says Linn Sitler, Memphis & Shelby County Film Commissioner.

Members of the Tennessee film and television coalition — including Sitler, Bennett, and East Tennessee film commissioner Mike Barnes — decided to push for a 16-month pilot program. The program, which would use $19 million in one-time funds approved by the state, would be the first of its kind in the nation.

“These are incentives at the same level we originally discussed, just not funded through the revenue department,” says Bennett.

Not all the details are set, but Bennett says the proposed legislation will include criteria for both local and national projects.

“There would be, for out-of-state projects, a minimum $500,000 expenditure in Tennessee. There would be additional funding given for using Tennessee music, cast and crew, and for a minority interest in the movies, which is unique to our program,” he says.

The affirmative action component is designed to combat the cronyism and vestiges of institutional bias in the entertainment industry.

“I’ve talked to a lot of minority workers, especially in the technical fields, who have a lot of trouble making it through the doors. This is an effort to help change that,” Bennett says.

The group is working on considerations for local projects as well.

“This is serious money, not with the key goal of funding the arts but rather of creating jobs and cranking the economic engine,” says Bennett. “The resulting product, of course, is film and television, which is a good way for commerce and art to get together.”

A possible addition to the bill would allow private local investors to add to the pilot program as a nonprofit and receive a tax credit, thus enabling them to fund local/independent projects.

The bill, which is sponsored by John DeBerry in the House and Mark Norris in the Senate, will begin in committees this week.

“We’ve gone light years ahead in the process this year,” says Bennett. “We’re living in the middle of seismic change in the way people take their entertainment and media, and we want to make sure Tennessee is part of that. This bill will encourage local production of everything from film, to music videos, to what you watch on your cell phone.”

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News The Fly-By

The Church and Change

On April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he was in Memphis to support the sanitation workers’ strike at the request of local ministers.

“King believed the next phase of the civil rights movement was economic justice,” said African-American, Ethnic, and Labor Studies professor Michael Honey. “When he died, there was no one of his stature to weave together those issues.”

The University of Washington professor was in Memphis last week as part of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change’s new campaign of cooperation between civil rights activists, the church, and organized labor. Honey has written several books on labor and race, including Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers, published in 1993.

The Hooks Institute is also partnering with Word and World, a theological program committed to social transformation, to hold a faith and labor conference later this summer.

“These days you have no community base to challenge business and political powers on issues of labor,” said J. Herbert Nelson, associate director of the Hooks Institute. “Ultimately, what the Hooks Institute and others will contend is that the role of the church be about economic justice.”

According to Honey, Memphis and Tennessee had a stronger labor movement than most of the South. “In the 1930s, when Boss Crump was in charge behind the scenes, the powers that be didn’t want to see organized labor,” Honey explained. During WWII however, Memphis became a center for wartime factories, which catalyzed organized labor here.

“Crump couldn’t stop it anymore, because it became a national concern,” Honey said.

The emergence of McCarthyism in the 1950s, however, caused many civil rights leaders, especially on a local level, to try and distance themselves from organized labor.

“Dr. King was always pretty farsighted, and it was no different when it came to the issue of labor,” said Honey. “When he started to emerge as a leader, he was always pro-union, and during the Montgomery boycott he became very connected with the national unions.”

King’s campaign for economic justice took him to Chicago, emboldened him to speak out against the Vietnam War, and culminated tragically in Memphis.

“It’s great that the Hooks Institute is doing this, because that is really where Dr. King left off — trying to join economic-justice issues to the church community and get the middle class, the working class, and the working poor on the same page,” said Honey.

Both Honey and Nelson agree this is a particularly important issue for workers in the South. “The major dilemma was that as the labor movement became more political, it stopped organizing,” said Nelson.

At the height of the national labor movement, about 35 percent of U.S. workers were organized. That number is now at about 9 percent.

“Now what you are looking at, especially throughout the South, is a workforce that is largely unorganized. In Mississippi, something like 3 percent of the workforce is organized,” said Nelson.

Both men hope that Honey’s lecture and the National Faith Labor Conference, scheduled to take place at the U of M July 22-29, will show Memphians how churches and unions worked together in the past and the importance of a continued alliance in the future.

“I think that we have probably seen the Dr. King we’re going to see in my lifetime,” said Nelson. “We need to begin to look at the possibility of community unionism. I think there is historical standing for worker-justice issues in the church, a standard that Dr. King brings to bear.”

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News The Fly-By

Q and A: Glen Fenter

West Memphis was in high spirits during last week’s dedication of Mid-South Community College’s Workforce Technology Center. The new $7 million center, part of a four-school consortium that includes Mid-South, Arkansas Northeastern College, East Arkansas Community College, and Phillips Community College, includes multimedia classrooms, automotive manufacturing training areas, and diesel maintenance technology equipment. The schools have joined forces to stimulate large-scale growth in Arkansas’ manufacturing sector, as well as the more immediate goal of training workers for the Hino Motors plant in Marion. We asked Mid-South president Glen Fenter why the group, known as ADTEC (Arkansas Delta Training and Education Consortium), is so important.

— By Ben Popper

Flyer: How did this consortium of colleges begin?

Fenter: Necessity is the mother of invention. When we started having conversations locally with the Hino Motors officials, we came to understand very rapidly that in order to maximize the opportunities of Hino and other foreign investors, one community college would not be enough to provide the wealth of workforce programs we would need for the region. So we began to communicate with our other members as to the rationale of commingling our efforts. The formalization of that effort really was a large part of the Department of Labor’s recent decision to give us a $5.9 million grant. Automotive manufacturing represents a huge opportunity for growth in our region, and we want to make sure we’re prepared for that.

At the dedication, Mike Beebe, the attorney general of Arkansas, spoke about adapting the curriculum to the needs of industry. Does tailoring yourself to one company limit your ability to grow in the future?

As we develop our school, we are allowing dozens of different kinds of industry to have input, not just automotive. The end result of this curriculum is to be prepared for all manufacturing areas.

What is the central goal of your facility?

To be successful in creating a workforce. That is our only true goal. This isn’t about growing enrollment; our goal is to make eastern Arkansas the absolute best location for industry to choose in North America. The equation that we use is “world-class geography plus world-class infrastructure plus world-class education equals world-class economy.” We have the interstates, airports, and intermodal facilities. We have the river, flat, cheap land, and are located in the center of the country. We have a population that, when educated, could meet any workforce demand.

What does your student body look like?

There are several populations. The first is the unemployed, and we have everything from literacy to adult education and work-based learning for those who may have missed some of their educational background. Then you start targeting the underemployed, those who want better jobs, so we will have night and weekend programs. The group missing from that is our kids. How do we capture and excite them? We are going to aggressively add programs to the public schools here to encourage our kids to consider this opportunity.

When and how did you make connections with industry in Japan?

The first model we had for creating this training consortium was based on distribution, warehousing, and logistics. We knew that was a big part of our economy and all those geographic variables are important to us. When a Hino location appeared here, we knew we would be shifting our focus from distribution and logistics into the manufacturing arena. We went to Japan in September of 2005 and began to establish relations with the Hino training models so we would be able to make as much progress as possible in terms of making them comfortable. While there, we saw the Hino High School, which is a great opportunity to see how they handle education. We saw their factories and the level of technological intensity there. A lot of what we saw in Japan reinforced what we already had in play.

Has there been any formal study of the center’s economic impact on the region?

There have been a number of projections. We’ve seen some estimates for the initial hiring at the new plants. The cumulative estimates are 1,000 new jobs, and that’s conservative. More aggressive estimates look to see that number grow many times over if these companies are as successful as we want to make them.

At one point, the Japanese auto industry was considered a threat to American jobs. Was there any negative reaction to foreign investors in Arkansas?

I think people are happy to see great education, job opportunity, and economy. It is something our citizens have longed for. I don’t think it matters to them who the company is. If they are willing to invest, we want to support them and grow them, as long as they are putting people in eastern Arkansas to work. We are offering classes today and have been training workers for the Hino plant for months.

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News The Fly-By

Bridging the Gap

Talk about a war of the sexes.

A recent proposal to protect women’s rights to equal pay in Tennessee has divided legislators between those protecting the interests of women and those protecting the interests of business. And so far, outspoken combatants on both sides have been female.

“I was in the government operations committee the other day, and one of the young Republican women just picked the bill to pieces,” says Representative Beverly Marrero from Memphis. “She seemed to be more concerned with how it might affect business and whether they were going to be happy with it. I guess that’s why I’m a Democrat and she’s a Republican.”

The bill was introduced by state senator Kim McMillan and is opposed by the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce and Industry, headed by President Deb Wooley. Both women acknowledge the existence of a wage gap — women earn about 75 cents on the dollar in the same job as men — but are split over the effects of the new bill.

The law currently protects against wage differences based on factors other than education, training, and experience. A 2004 law dictates that employers found to have knowingly violated equal pay statutes must make up the difference to their employee. The second time, employers must pay double; the third time, triple. But the proposed legislation would allow women to sue for punitive damages beyond the wage difference.

“The current legislation, in my opinion, doesn’t have this kind of teeth in it,” McMillan says. “I think this bill will encourage individuals who feel they have been the victims of wage discrimination to seek redress.”

For Tennessee chamber president Wooley, the bill’s punitive damages are part of the problem.

“This bill creates a new cause for class-action lawsuits,” says Wooley. “At the same time, we’re really trying to get court reform under control because we recognize that it is not good for the economy. While it sounds good in an election year to talk about doing something for gender equality, it’s a disguise for what this bill will really do. What it will end up doing is being counterproductive.”

McMillan argues that the bill does more than increase the punishment for wage discrimination. “The bill deals with the issue of retaliation,” she says. “You want people to be able to find out if they are being discriminated against without worrying that they might be fired.”

She says the bill also discourages litigation by creating an amnesty program for companies.

“We have a part of the bill which gives companies the chance to step up voluntarily and say audit my business and make sure I’m not doing anything wrong, intentionally or otherwise. If they do that, they cannot be held liable, so long as they volunteer for the audit and make the requisite changes.”

But Wooley contends that the current legislation, if employed forcefully, is enough. “I think the bill would dramatically expand and alter the government’s power in terms of defining the market. I don’t want to sound like I’m ignoring it [the wage gap], but it takes time,” says Wooley.

Marrero sees things differently.

“This is kind of the carrot and the stick approach.” And as for waiting for the wage gap to close naturally, she says, “It’s 2006. I’m 67 years old. And I’ve been waiting my whole lifetime to get fair and equal treatment. I just hope it happens before I die.”

The bill still has to go through several legislative committees. The final vote is expected within four or five weeks.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Inside Job

Prior to last week’s opening of their latest film, Inside Man director Spike Lee and star Denzel Washington conducted a joint television interview on BET, a lively discussion of their experiences making films together. On the surface, Lee and Washington’s current collaboration — a big-budget Hollywood genre movie — would seem to be the most impersonal film in the director’s filmography, but like so many great studio movies in the past, Lee has used an ostensibly standard genre flick to explore more personal concerns, a strategy Lee and Washington’s interview underscored.

Inside Man is essentially a heist movie, though the bank job at the center of the film is much more than a simple robbery. There are hostages and there is the charismatic hostage negotiator (Washington), a man with a tarnished (noirish) reputation looking for redemption. Washington revels in a part that exchanges the angst he’s typically saddled with for attitude and one-liners.

At $50 million, this is Lee’s biggest budget and most commercial plot. Yet the film still pumps with the lifeblood of New York, which for Lee has always owed to the city’s wonderful diversity. In his televised conversation with Washington, Lee discussed the moment when he decided to become a filmmaker. Home from Morehouse College for the infamous “Summer of Sam,” Lee recalled how he spent his break letting his new Super 8 camera capture the tension and release of the city.

And this feel for the city, this attention to detail and character, enlivens the movie’s procedural staples — the bank takeover, police preparation, etc. In Inside Man, unlike most contemporary studio thrillers, the cops aren’t just cops. They’re identifiable New York cops — racist, dedicated, yet ultimately lovable. When it comes time to translate the cryptic recording of the robbers inside the bank, the police don’t use the Albanian consulate. They just get the ex-wife of the construction worker from around the corner.

Inside Man works for several reasons. The script is wonderful, both for plot and dialogue, and stands out not only for its quality but also its confidence. Lee is in command of the camera, the action is always clear, and there are several nontraditional shots that work wonderfully. Washington’s gift of gab is on full display.

In the end, though, the real success of the film is in its latent message. This robbery is about the circles of power that surround any institution and the wages of sin that you pay to enter. The film, after all, might be Lee’s metaphor for Hollywood. Forget a robbery that isn’t all it seems. What about a major motion picture that ends with ambiguity?

“I want to become a gatekeeper,” Lee told Washington during their talk, bemoaning the fact that even as a major director, he lacked any real studio clout.

Inside Man succeeds as a bid for major-league status, and the movie as a product stays true to the message of the film: To succeed you have to get your hands dirty, but that doesn’t mean you have to compromise.