Race, ethnicity and Hollywood

Steve Sailer:

The comparison of Spike to Woody Allen that was widespread when Spike's first movie came out two decades ago, but that seems to have been forgotten since, remains valid: Like Woody, Spike is broadly if perhaps not deeply talented: he's a funny (if limited) actor, an above-average director, and a good writer of dialogue. Spike might be a more interesting social thinker than Woody -- he's a socially conservative black racist -- but his movies have been undone by several problems.

First, Spike is lousy at constructing plots. For example, despite the sterling cast of his 1991 "Mo' Better Blues" (Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, and Samuel L. Jackson) and its uplifting family values moral, it's just a mess of a storyline.

Second, he's never really been fully honest with himself about his socio-political views, so his movies tend to combine insight with preachy flapdoodle.

Third, unlike Woody, who can keep making movie after movie knowing that his target audience -- smart Jews -- is big enough (although just barely) to support him, Spike has suffered the disillusioning realization that his target audience -- smart blacks -- isn't big enough to let him make movies on the scale he wants. It's quite sad.

But, lacking control of the script in "Inside Man," Spike's talents can be displayed without his usual self-sabotage. In particular, he's the best director at goading New York actors into displays of ethnic animus. Being a world-class hater himself, he's terrific at bringing out the worst in people. Denzel Washington clearly relishes getting a role where he can be a nasty son-of-a-gun of a hero.

You can tell Clive Owen is a bankrobber with a heart of gold because he's not using a British accent like all the really bad guys in movies these days (e.g., Paul Bettany in "Firewall"). I'm not sure exactly what accent he is using -- it sounds pretty mid-Atlantic, like about where the Titanic hit the iceberg -- but it's not the usual evil English aristocrat criminal's accent.

Jodie Foster is perfectly cast as a Fema Superior, a smug super-fixer who takes on ethically delicate jobs for NYC's richest, like getting Osama bin Laden's nephew into an exclusive co-op building. I'm sure Google will send my way lots of inquiries of the "Jodie Foster lesbian" ilk, but this casting finally reflects the "Jodie Foster eugencist" theme in her personality that I pointed out back in 2000.

The subplot by screenwriter Russell Gewirtz -- Christopher Plummer is a billionaire banker trying to cover up the fact that he made his fortune as a Swiss banker in WWII working with the Nazis to steal from Jews -- is the usual Hollywood hokum. Plummer (of the "Sound of Music") is one of the oldest working minor stars, but even he was born in December of either 1927 or 1929 (sources disagree). So in either case he would have been a minor when World War II ended and thus isn't old enough to have made a fortune during WWII.

The only movie I've seen recently that pointed out that the few surviving genuine Nazi war criminals are now well into their dotage was the good Israeli film "Walk on Water." In contrast, New York and London are full of billionaires in their primes who made their fortunes looting Russia in the 1990s, but Hollywood instead seems to prefer Nazi war criminals as villains in movies set in present times. I wonder why?

She Hate Me

Crash

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