I managed to catch 25th Hour on Saturday evening. Edward Norton is a fine actor, and Rosario Dawson is hot. It seemed to me that the movie was a radically different take on "American values", set against the backdrop of rah-rah-patriotism-inspiring post 9/11 NY. The city is in your face everywhere - the two sets of searchlights that open the film, the firefighters' memorial in a bar and of course the unflinching, almost obscene concentration on Ground Zero from the window of an adjacent apartment, with close-ups of workers, tractors, a solitary flag.

Perhaps mirroring the city, Norton's character is Innocence Lost, a good kid who made crap choices and now has to pay for them according to the American system, by American values. However, his life is in many ways just as American as the system that wants to destroy him. Mother died early. Father was drunk and in debt. The kid sold drugs to preppy white kids to help bail his father out, and the ability of money to fool everyone. To me at least, Norton's character is the personification of the struggle between these contradictions -- his long beat poetry-ish *Fuck You* soliloquy is the best expression of this. In the end though, the audience doesn't really know if he manages to find a way out.

The whole movie feels like a large myth...