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 Do The Right Thing (1989) Directed by Spike Lee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U35MvblI4og Do The Right Thing is a Spike Lee joint about a particularly hot day in Brooklyn, specifically a street in Bed-Stuy. The film centers on multiple people along the street, and uses a confined setting and a wide cast of characters to examine society's views on racism and other strong topics. Often considered one of the best movies ever made about racism, Do The Right Thing was made to challenge almost any preconceived notions about race and class struggle in America, through the lives of several people, and the relatively minor events that can spin out of control. The film focuses strongly on a young man named Mookie (Spike Lee), who works as a delivery boy for a pizzeria run by Sal (Danny Aiello) and his two sons Vito and Pino (Richard Edson and John Turturro). Due to the nature of the job, Mookie runs into many inhabitants of Bed-Stuy, including: Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), an old alcoholic who thinks he has control of the street; Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a friend who boycotts Sal's Pizzeria due to the lack of any African-American celebrities on Sal's "Wall Of Fame"; Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), who has "love" and "hate" brass knuckles, and carries around a boombox constantly playing Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" at loud volumes; Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), a mentally challenged man who draws markers on photos of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; Mister Senor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), the coolest radio DJ around, and many more. Due to tensions brought on by hot weather and the prejudice on display from multiple characters, and more, a series of transgressions builds explosive tension.  "Who told you to step on my sneakers? Who told you to walk on my side of the block? Who told you to be in my neighborhood?" The film is a technical marvel. The script deftly handles all the characters and subplots wonderfully, giving each character the right amount of screentime, developing the characters well, but never sacrificing time at another character's expense. The dialog flows naturally, often taking on a conversational tone, helped in part by some great acting from a wide array of actors. The characters are all well developed, and this, combined with the dialog, helps create a living, breathing world that is fleshed out, and continues on, even though the film is over. The cinematography in the movie is outstanding. Borrowing a technique from 12 Angry Men, another important film about racial tension, it uses facial closeups, lighting, and (moreso than 12 Angry Men) a warm color pallete, mixing them to create one of the sweatiest movies ever. If you can, find an older DVD of this movie, because recent releases have messed with the coloring of the film, lessening its impact. Do The Right Thing focuses heavily on racism, and many of its forms and causes, from general distrust of other races, to economic reasons, to police brutality, and more. The description sounds scattershot, but it all comes together really well, and never feels like Lee is throwing together whatever thoughts he has and hoping it makes sense. He has a very clear idea of his movie says, which mostly comes through in Mookie's actions toward the end of the day, which shouldn't be expounded upon here for fear of spoiling it. The next day, after the devastating climax, life in Bed-Stuy continues on, almost like nothing has happened, but the shadow of what happened the night before looms over the street, and with the characters. The closing of the film, features statements from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X about equality through violence, and what that entails, and strongly encourages the audience to think about what they mean.  "Let me tell you the story of right hand, left hand." Do The Right Thing is a complex, powerful, entertaining movie. It's one of my favorites of all time, not just for its heavy themes, but because it's such a drat well made film. If you've never watched it, grab a copy as fast as possible, and watch it. It's still incredibly relevant now, which shows how great of a film it is, but also shows how little society's views on race relations has advanced. And that's the quintessential truth, Ruth. 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Feb 3, 2015 04:43
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It should be emphasized how entertaining the movie is, because it's really the combination of that and the themes that make it so incredible. It pretty much starts out as a comedy (well, after an incredible intro.) Like, I haven't seen Crash, but from my understanding this is basically the anti-Crash. For anyone who had to sit through some mishandled, overly-didactic treatment of racial tension in high school or college, don't skip out on Do the Right Thing because you're afraid of it being another one of those "message" movies. It has a message, but follows the old adage of "show, don't tell" in that said message flows organically from the characters and situations. Also, gorgeously shot.
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Feb 3, 2015 05:00
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Discount Viscount posted:It should be emphasized how entertaining the movie is, because it's really the combination of that and the themes that make it so incredible. It pretty much starts out as a comedy (well, after an incredible intro.) Crash tries to be Do The Right Thing, with a large cast of intertwining subplots, but it lacks the nuance and characterization of Do The Right Thing, and its overall message about race is simply "be nice to each other" without any sort of introspection or tact.
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Feb 3, 2015 05:09
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I'm so happy for this thread, because Do The Right Thing could possibly be my favourite movie and I immediately judge a person based on whether or not they've seen it. This movie is just a complete triumph, like everything about it is absolutely amazing. Gorgeous cinematography, brilliant performances from pretty much anyone with any lines, emphatic and distinctive characters, searing dialogue and an indescribable sense of the neighbourhood as its own character. Honestly, I could rant and rave about it for hours. If I had to pick just one moment that falls a little short for me, it's (spoiled just in case) Sal screaming racial epithets at Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem in the pizza parlour at the end. It's just an odd moment that I've never been able to rationalise because it seems out-of-character for Sal (who is portrayed as having a huge temper but the film seems to take pains to make it clear he's not a racist), and only seems to happen in order to instigate the riot.. I'm sure it's something I'm missing because I trust the screenplay and Spike Lee's vision, can anyone help a guy out on this? Adrianics fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Feb 4, 2015 |
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Feb 3, 2015 14:28
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Is this available to stream anywhere? If so, is the streaming version the color-corrected version that everyone complains about?
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Feb 3, 2015 15:13
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Adrianics posted:If I had to pick just one moment that falls a little short for me, it's (spoiled just in case) Sal may not be "a racist" in the overt way that Pino is, but he still has some racist attitudes. What Lee is trying to tap into and shake up is our sense that there are two types of people in the world, the racists (bad people who hate black people and want to hurt them!) and non-racists (good people like you and me!). To quote Lee's diary — "This is the tricky thing. Like many people who have racist views, these views are so ingrained, they aren't aware of them. We should see that in Sal. Basically he's a good person, but he feels Black people are inferior." This is a subtle thing. Sal genuinely likes the people in the neighborhood. He's friendly to them as long as they're friendly to him. He has, as he says, "no trouble with these people." His racist attitude is closer to the 'well, white man's burden, frightfully decent chaps but we must civilize the natives' thing than the racist-Southerner-with-a-Confederate-flag-tattoo stereotype. As for the moment you refer to in your spoiler — don't forget, they were offending him first. First of all, they came into the store deliberately making a disturbance and shouting. But, more relevantly, Buggin' Out called Sal a guinea bastard. Guinea doesn't carry the same weight as friend of the family but it's nonetheless a slur against Italians. And of course hot-tempered Sal's reaction when someone calls him a hurtful name is to call that someone a hurtful name back. And this is the tragedy of the film—everyone let their tempers, the heat, the anger of the moment get to them. No one stepped back and said sorry, no one calmed down—one guy offended the other, so the second guy escalated, so the first retaliated and raised again, and so on and so forth. The tragedy of that confrontation is that neither party does the right thing. 
Icon-Cat fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Feb 4, 2015 |
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Feb 3, 2015 19:57
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Adrianics and Icon-Cat, you both have unclosed spoiler tags.
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Feb 3, 2015 21:35
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I apologize. It seems like in BBCode you can't have two spoilers in a post, or maybe you can't have a spoiler in a quote and then another in the rest of the post. I swear I closed my tag, it just wasn't reading at all, the only thing I could do to fix it was no longer quote all the post I was quoting.
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Feb 4, 2015 02:43
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I remember the first time I saw Do the Right Thing I was going to be a sophomore in high school. It was summer, I was inside flipping channels on the T.V. with nothing to do, and I landed on HBO right at the fire hydrant scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAM97wVdmmM I kept watching because I was instantly hooked. The music, the lyrical pacing of the scenes, the hyperrealistic performances... and then I reached the climax and was floored. The very next day I think I went on iTunes and bought Public Enemy's Power to the People and the Beats compilation, and I think I listened to "Fight the Power" just about every day until, like, midterms. Before seeing the film, I don't think I had any cognizance of who Spike Lee was. In fact, I don't thing I had any cognizance of African-Americans in T.V. and film in general outside of the usual suspects roster of suburban influences: The Cosby Show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, on to Chris Rock and Chappelle's Show. But Do the Right Thing was something I had never seen before. I had seen films and T.V. shows with racial subjects, but I had never watched a film that seemed to deal with them so close to reality, where concerns about racism are explicitly stated but also somehow remaining so subtly under the surface of our everyday neuroses and desires and personal idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, I had never seen a film deal with the subject of race, not as the 'social disease' popular in white-created works such as To Kill a Mockingbird, or as the 'outdated' philosophy only harbored by a few of society's intolerant whites... but as this living, evolving, pernicious thing that is still with us and still reinforcing structural inequality. As I grew up, one thing I noticed with any person I knew who watched Do the Right Thing and ended up not liking it (usually in an academic setting), was that when it came time to actually discuss the film, more and more they began to realize that even if they didn't like the film overall as they were first watching it, so many aspects of it stuck with them that they ended up appreciating what a powerful work of cinema it was.
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Feb 7, 2015 18:58
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The bluray version is hosed right? They mutted the colours or smth
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Feb 8, 2015 14:32
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Honest Thief posted:The bluray version is hosed right? They mutted the colours or smth They took the red tint off it.
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Feb 8, 2015 19:24
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X-Ray Pecs posted:
So I love the movie, but the pic above is obviously a reference to The Night of the Hunter (See below) and I never quite understood why exactly Spike makes the reference. It works just fine without that context in the film, but does anybody have any ideas about this? 
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Feb 8, 2015 23:05
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I've always assumed it was just Radio Raheem cannibalizing it from Night of the Hunter, and, as Matthew Dessem points out in his Criterion Contraption essay, comes off as kind of harmless. It's the part of the movie where you think, man, get this kid into community theater, or something. It's the total opposite of Mitchum's creepy-as-hell delivery.
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Feb 9, 2015 00:02
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Raxivace posted:So I love the movie, but the pic above is obviously a reference to The Night of the Hunter (See below) and I never quite understood why exactly Spike makes the reference. It works just fine without that context in the film, but does anybody have any ideas about this? I've simmered over this image in particular, too. The dichotomy between Love and Hate and their relationship in a single person is extremely evocative, but there seems to be a fairly distinct contextual difference between how these ideas are expressed in each film. In Night of the Hunter, Powell's tattoos are evocative of his life as a career criminal and emblematic of his charlatanry. His unflinching pursuit in gratifying his basic, materialist desires is literally written into his body and upon his soul. Though he professes his closeness to God and, indeed, talks to him every day, he is as far from God as any man. In true Hip Hop fashion, Spike Lee 'samples' the imagery of Laughton's film and re-contextualizes it as a statement, not of madness, but of spiritual authenticity. Interestingly, the materialist implications of this imagery of duality between Love and Hate is made explicit in Do the Right Thing: These symbols are literally gold-plated brass knuckles that Radio Raheem necessarily 'takes off' and 'puts on' every day. At the same time, unlike the facetious Powell, Raheem's delivery of a 'sermon' on the eternal battle between Love and Hate is rendered as dynamic and unimpeachable, ending with the character weighing his cultural possessions to decide which hand he will extend to Mookie. So, despite the imagery being explicitly materialistic, and, thus, commoditized and trivialized, Lee presents this as a vivid expression of the fundamental goodness of a man brought closer to God specifically because of his flawed humanity. There's other aspects of Night of the Hunter that probably influenced the atmosphere and character of Lee's film, such the transposition from sultry Southern Gothic to urban romantic, to the threat of vigilante violence that weighs tension on the climax of each film. On the latter point, one could even compare Da Mayor's ushering away Sal and his sons while the community strips his pizzeria to pieces to the police 'rescuing' Powell from the lynch mob, both events weighed with ambiguous connotations of justice and humanity persevering despite the breakdown of order. I think the films are very similar in that they're both about the distinction between expressions of political, social, and cultural values and the nature of people to treat these literally as constructs, that can be picked up and put on and are inextricably linked to the basic decision that Lee sees as people taking, which is to resolve conflict with silence, violence, or something in between.
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Feb 9, 2015 00:23
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Honest Thief posted:The bluray version is hosed right? They mutted the colours or smth The movie is meant to be set on a scorching summer day, but the new release makes it look overcast and a bit grim. In the older release it's as if you can just feel the heat everywhere. It's still a great looking transfer, but it loses something by muting those colours. FilmCrit Hulk wrote this essay on the movie that Lee gave an endorsement too. Yes it's all caps but it's well worth the read. http://badassdigest.com/2014/08/18/hulks-favorite-movies-do-the-right-thing-1989/
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Feb 10, 2015 16:14
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DrVenkman posted:FilmCrit Hulk wrote this essay on the movie that Lee gave an endorsement too. Yes it's all caps but it's well worth the read. I can help! http://convertcase.net/
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Feb 10, 2015 16:53
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I have not watched this movie in at least 10 years, so I really should give it another watch - but I do recall being very upset, frustrated even, when I watched it, that the film made no judgements on certain characters Mookie who explicitly do not do the right thing. It just lays out the situation, and allows the viewer to make their own judgements. At the time I took the film to be an endorsement of these actions as the 'Right Thing' And as K.Waste mentions above, despite my dislike of the movie and its subject matter at the time, I always knew it was a powerful piece of art. I wish I'd been of age to watch it at the cinema, to experience that reaction - to absorb it cleanly without any preconceptions. These days it is such a known work that the reaction is a little lessened.
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Feb 11, 2015 05:28
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I had never seen Do The Right Thing until today and it was as advertised. Truly excellent. I can't even put my thoughts down entirely on the film yet. Been a while since I've seen a film that really digests in thought. Thanks, Spike Lee.
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Feb 11, 2015 09:19
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Moreau posted:I have not watched this movie in at least 10 years, so I really should give it another watch - but I do recall being very upset, frustrated even, when I watched it, that the film made no judgements on certain characters Mookie who explicitly do not do the right thing. I strongly recommend you do not look up anything Spike Lee has said about this scene if you want your enjoyment of it to remain. In the context of the movie, it comes off as perfectly non-judgemental. But Lee's opinon of it is now (or maybe always was) "IF YOU HAVE TO QUESTION IT YOU'RE A RACIST". Although it can also be interpreted it as "the right thing" because he turns the tide so the anger of the crowd is unleashed on property instead of people.
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Feb 11, 2015 12:28
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Moreau posted:I have not watched this movie in at least 10 years, so I really should give it another watch - but I do recall being very upset, frustrated even, when I watched it, that the film made no judgements on certain characters Mookie who explicitly do not do the right thing. The film does endorse that action as the Right Thing, because a black man was just murdered by the cops. In the view of Spike Lee, Mookie's actions are completely justified by the ending quote from Malcolm X. Mookie was committing a violent act, but it was in self-defense as a statement against the violence committed against his own people. Bown posted:I strongly recommend you do not look up anything Spike Lee has said about this scene if you want your enjoyment of it to remain. In the context of the movie, it comes off as perfectly non-judgemental. But Lee's opinon of it is now (or maybe always was) "IF YOU HAVE TO QUESTION IT YOU'RE A RACIST". Lee is defensive about that scene because a lot of people are more willing to question if Mookie did the right thing, rather than questioning why cops killed Radio Raheem.
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Feb 11, 2015 14:51
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That's absolutely fair of him, but I think that's more because the first act you mention is so clearly in the wrong that nobody would question it. The reviews he mentions a lot that mourn the loss of Sal's but don't even mention Raheem's murder are pretty messed-up, though. I'm definitely gonna watch this movie again now. Like many, in this thread and otherwise have said, it's first and foremost just really goddamn entertaining and well-made.
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Feb 11, 2015 16:48
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Personally, I used to put a lot of stock into the interpretation that Mookie's actions, whether intentionally or not, diverted attention away from Sal and his sons towards the pizzaria, but I've increasingly come to question the ethical priorities inherent in that reading similar to bemoaning the loss of a white business over a Black life, as well as its rationale given how impulsive and explicitly driven by "Hate!" Mookie's action is. It also distracts from Da Mayor's decisiveness in going against the mob, as well as Mother Sister's seeming total reversal in the span of only a few minutes, going from "Burn it down!" to wailing "No!" as the night burns on.
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Feb 11, 2015 18:53
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My favorite part of the movie is the little nod at the end that the forecast for tomorrow is even hotter.
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Feb 12, 2015 05:24
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TrixRabbi posted:My favorite part of the movie is the little nod at the end that the forecast for tomorrow is even hotter. It's the darkest joke in the whole movie.
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Feb 12, 2015 06:26
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 How you gonna have no black people up on this mothafuckin wall in a mothafuckin chicken joint?
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Feb 12, 2015 07:55
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Alan Smithee posted:
Buggin' Out accomplished great things it seems once he learned to apply himself.
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Feb 12, 2015 08:07
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Would it make sense to put a blanket spoiler warning on the thread? It's really awkward to discuss this kind of thing when half the post is hidden in black bars.X-Ray Pecs posted:The film does endorse that action as the Right Thing, because a black man was just murdered by the cops. In the view of Spike Lee, Mookie's actions are completely justified by the ending quote from Malcolm X. Mookie was committing a violent act, but it was in self-defense as a statement against the violence committed against his own people. There are two relevant lines from the last few minutes of the film. One is when Mookie reminds Sal that the insurance will pay him back for the damage. The other is when the radio relays the official police statement: they plan to thoroughly investigate what happened... because they won't stand for the senseless destruction of property. I don't think Mookie's actions lacked any meaningful impact, or that he was thinking in some perfectly rational manner and concocting a flawless plan to draw attention to what had just happened. The scene where the neighborhood almost turns on the Korean couple, who have no connection, however tenuous, to Raheem's death, destroys any theory that the film's black characters are meant to be didactically right. But I think those two lines really hammer home that we have vastly bigger issues than "Was throwing a garbage can the most moral thing Mookie could do?" If we want to impugn Mookie's judgment, we don't even need the last half hour; just look at his work ethic and how little he cares for his kid. Mookie's not MLK, and the film's not hagiography. There are easily thirty places in the movie where he doesn't do the right thing. And? Like Film Crit Hulk mentions, the conclusion "If everyone in the film had been angels, things wouldn't have gotten out of hand" isn't really useful and arguably isn't even true. The issue isn't that Sal doesn't have the right pictures on his wall, or that the Korean couple doesn't stock the right beer. The issue is that the businesses in this neighborhood show a constant, conspicuous divide between black patrons and non-black owners, and it feels like there's no hope of anyone starting a business which would represent and understand the people who go there. Likewise, the issue isn't really whether destroying Sal's building was an appropriate response. He'll be paid back. The community won't be. There are a lot of people out there (both in the context of the film and today) who think assuming an unarmed black man posed an imminent threat justifying lethal force is an understandable mistake, or is just the way the world works, but who won't stand for the "violence" of breaking a window. Maybe Mookie was completely justified. Maybe it was reckless escalation. That's an interesting question, and it's not unimportant, but it's not the real issue of the film. I think that's what Lee is getting at when he criticizes how we think about that scene. Quovak fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 09:29
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He'll get paid back and the rest of the neighborhood will be harassed into a thousand little pieces by the police.
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Feb 12, 2015 10:45
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Bown posted:I strongly recommend you do not look up anything Spike Lee has said about this scene if you want your enjoyment of it to remain. In the context of the movie, it comes off as perfectly non-judgemental. But Lee's opinon of it is now (or maybe always was) "IF YOU HAVE TO QUESTION IT YOU'RE A RACIST". It's been said already, but there's a reason Lee says that, and it's because so many people focus on the destruction of Sal's property instead of black people's lives in the film. It's a classic example of the racist notion of valuing white property over black life. I once was a TA for a film class and this very thing happened. It was also the same class of kids that thought Birth of a Nation wasn't racist. There's room for interpretation of the scene (and Lee acknowledges that in the film), but a lot of those interpretations come from a very nasty, racist place. Edit: and I was gonna save this, but might as we'll add it now: there's room for interpretation of that scene, but from a specific perspective. There's a reason that Lee quotes MLK and Malcolm X at the end of the movie. This is a part of a larger debate within the Black community about self-defense and protest against racism. It subtly references the complexity of the debate, and the consequences of each viewpoint. there's a reason Raheem is killed while in handcuffs. He doesn't even have the option of fighting back and is therefore killed. This is something that sometimes comes up when people criticize aspects of non-violent protest. This movie, I think, is a part, and an example, of a larger intra-racial conversation about racism and its consequences. Which makes it all the more sad that this was missed by many critics in interpreting that scene. They were more focused on property and whether black audiences would also "riot" instead of what it had to say about racism affects lower-income communities of color. yoyomama fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 17:38
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Honest Thief posted:The bluray version is hosed right? They mutted the colours or smth "hosed" is a really strong term to use. It's not like the redone version of The Warriors or anything where it actively ruins the movie, the colors are just worse-looking.
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Feb 13, 2015 09:40
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So a character who I feel is rarely talked about, especially in the context of the finale, is Da Mayor. He's been brought up a few times, but I've always been curious about him and never quite able to put a finger on it. Is he symbolic of the older generation, one left in ruins by a lifetime of racism? He's the one who rescues Sal and his sons from the mob, he tries to stand up for what he sees as justice even if nobody will listen to him. What's everyone's take on him?
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Feb 13, 2015 17:51
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Da Mayor is such an interesting character. The scene I most remember him for is in the first half of the movie, when the kids are mocking him. He gives a monologue about how he's lived, and the kids won't understand what it's like to be unable to feed your kids, and how rough life is. Instead of the kids revering him, they instead throw it back at him, calling him an alcoholic slacker who never tried to take care of his family. I think Da Mayor is definitely the symbol of an older generation, and another way the film can explore prejuidices, particularly through age. Da Mayor feels somewhat entitled, because he's one of the oldest people on the block, along with Mother Sister. He expects everyone to treat him with some level of respect, but not many give it to him. Da Mayor is the one that tells Mookie to "always do the right thing," so maybe the part of the finale where he protects Sal, Pino, and Vito is him noticing Mookie's actions, and agreeing with them.
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Feb 14, 2015 02:05
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Was Mookie justified in thinking Sal had designs on his sister? A penny for your thoughts
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Feb 15, 2015 06:03
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Alan Smithee posted:Was Mookie justified in thinking Sal had designs on his sister? That part, along with the graffiti behind Mookie and Jade after that scene ("Tawana told the truth") is a reference to the "alleged" rape and abduction of Tawana Brawley. It's also a more general reference to the rape of black women by white men, which has a specific historical/racial context. Mookie's apprehension is an acknowledgement of that past, and then the responsive defensiveness he has about Sal regarding his sister. Also, I think Sal was extra nice to her in away that I'd also find suspicious, so I get Mookie's concern.
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Feb 16, 2015 01:11
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Is it weird to think that Spike Lee falls flat in comparison to every other actor in this movie?TrixRabbi posted:So a character who I feel is rarely talked about, especially in the context of the finale, is Da Mayor. He's been brought up a few times, but I've always been curious about him and never quite able to put a finger on it. Is he symbolic of the older generation, one left in ruins by a lifetime of racism? He's the one who rescues Sal and his sons from the mob, he tries to stand up for what he sees as justice even if nobody will listen to him. What's everyone's take on him?
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Feb 16, 2015 10:26
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TrixRabbi posted:So a character who I feel is rarely talked about, especially in the context of the finale, is Da Mayor. He's been brought up a few times, but I've always been curious about him and never quite able to put a finger on it. Is he symbolic of the older generation, one left in ruins by a lifetime of racism? He's the one who rescues Sal and his sons from the mob, he tries to stand up for what he sees as justice even if nobody will listen to him. What's everyone's take on him? Da Mayor, to me, serves the role of the archetypical "Fool" character: a bit racist, constantly drunk, but the wisest and most moral character by far in the performance. His buffoonish appearance hides an understanding of the value of human life and the nature of systemic racism that outstrips everyone else's, save for Mookie at the very end. It's the wisdom that he imparts to Mookie near the beginning of the film that eventually leads to the climax, and he lives firmly by his ethical convictions, even at great personal risk.
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Feb 16, 2015 21:48
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yoyomama posted:That part, along with the graffiti behind Mookie and Jade after that scene ("Tawana told the truth") is a reference to the "alleged" rape and abduction of Tawana Brawley. It's also a more general reference to the rape of black women by white men, which has a specific historical/racial context. Mookie's apprehension is an acknowledgement of that past, and then the responsive defensiveness he has about Sal regarding his sister. Also, I think Sal was extra nice to her in away that I'd also find suspicious, so I get Mookie's concern. I think it's also very telling about Sal. I don't think his intentions are malicious, but he seems genuinely infatuated with Mookie's sister. It shows the duality, where Sal can truly care for certain black people, but still harbor racist feelings at the same time, and perhaps the two can be one in the same.
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Feb 17, 2015 04:09
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Vermain posted:Da Mayor, to me, serves the role of the archetypical "Fool" character "You a drunk fool!" "Besides that!" Alan Smithee posted:Was Mookie justified in thinking Sal had designs on his sister? Let's define 'designs'. I think Sal genuinely has a little crush on Jade, in that silly way you might have a crush on a bank teller you see every week or something like that, but he's not gonna DO anything about it. He himself knows he ain't gonna do anything about it. Mookie is being bizarrely paternalistic toward Jade and Jade is right to tell him off. In a sense, Mookie being annoyed about Sal's treatment of Jade is _his_ misplaced overreaction to something, just as Buggin' Out has a misdirected overreaction to the pictures on the wall, which of course Jade calls Buggin' Out on. Jade is in both cases the adult in the room in comparison to these two less mature men: "I'm down, but I'm down for something positive in the community." And how great is that pair of pan shots as both Mookie and Pino, so often in disagreement, are now visually linked in their dislike for Sal's little flirting with Jade.
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Feb 17, 2015 18:31
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i didnt watch this! im not going to watch this movie op! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 21, 2015 05:20
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GrrrlSweatshirt posted:i didnt watch this! im not going to watch this movie op! You're missing out on one of the greatest films of all time then.
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Feb 21, 2015 05:25
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