From the moment I read the reviews and saw the clips I knew 25th Hour would be a special experience that I had to see. Lee's movie had combined one man's personal story with September 11 - creating something far greater than just another film about a man on the wrong side of the law.
Hoping on a bus I took a seat next to an old man. Immediately I tried to relax and stretched my legs. But when I did so, the old guy, with his legs already spread quite wide (more than 45 degrees) didn�t budge. In fact when I tried to stretch mine by a measly ten degrees he pushed back. Annoyed that he was being a bit greedy and hogging the seat I pushed back. I wasn�t about to give ground to some old geezer who maybe thought that he still had enough puff in his skinny old legs to stand up against a younger and fitter male. We kept this pushing match up for the next five minutes until he got off the bus. When he did he coughed into my hair � perhaps his feeble, �old man� attempt at a reaction to my seat hogging.
I marched into the cinema still seething. This micro-incident seemed to sum up big city living for me: rude, inconsiderate people living in a rude and inconsiderate city (Sydney). I took my seat and watched the opening moments of the movie with their visceral and horrible events suggested at by just a sound track. The cold, inhuman and uncaring treatment of a dog was a good metaphor for the way humans treated each other in the big city.
As the events of the movie began to unfold I continued to think about the old man on the bus and I still felt angry. Fortunately, those feelings sunk sufficiently below the surface of my consciousness not to stop me getting into the story of Spike Lee�s new film.
25th Hour is a hard film to watch. It's violent, aggressive and in your face. But, at the same time, it's also a completly mesmerising film that you can't stop watching. Edward Norton creates a sympathetic New York drug dealer, Monty Brogan, who is about to go to jail for seven years. The movie tracks his last day and his need to tie up lose ends in his personal life.
Some of the most mesmerising scenes deal with Monty's own feelings of anger and despair at a situation completly of his own making. The �fuck you� scene, when he insults a number of minorities, gay men included, in front of a mirror is typical of this mood. The words used might be politically incorrect. But the underlying feelings of anger, frustration and despair are emotions everyone can relate to. And they are feeling easily provoked by the stress and indifference of big city living. They are feeling that are also easily aroused by complete strangers, like the old man on the bus.
But part of living in society, and being considered civilised, means that you have to live with complete strangers and keep your emotions in check. Not keeping your emotions under control can result in something like anger being sparked, like a match to dynamite, by something as trivial as sharing a seat. Not keeping these feelings in check means we run the risk of crossing the dividing line between civilised and uncivil - potentially becoming criminal.
