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Do the Right ThingRating:
Release Date: 01 April, 2003 Retail Price: $19.98 Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: Complete Cast (21 total) |
Do the Right Thing Reviews
Racial Tension/Racial Stereotype.
The problem of racial tension is one of those problems that nobody has a solution for but which also just won't go away. All people, being predisposed towards judgment and classification, struggle to imagine a world that is colorless either in equality or inequality, but in equality making sure to preserve color. Whitewash everything so you get every color put together but none stands out, or whitewash everything so that no color remains at all.
Spike Lee focuses most of his energies as a filmmaker into problems of racial tension, and in this, one of his truly breakout films, he analyzes the duality of violence and civic disobedience (and other dualities such as love/hate) and tries to show how they can or cannot be used. In the best of "objective" ways, the actually solution is open-ended and unclear: we are left with only the picture of Martin Luther King Jr shaking hands and grinning with Malcolm X, in the famous photo which is the only known one of the two activists together.
So what do we have to explore this theme with? Well, we have a radio DJ connecting everyone through media self-consciously, as most movies dealing with racial dilemmas tend to include; we have various stereotypes ranging from the old drunk to the ho to the AYE-tahl-lee-ins; and we have a main character named Mookie, played by Spike Lee himself, who is the only self-actualized person in the film and, as a result, is a pompous jerk.
Thus, while the heat rises (signifying increasing tension), we have all the fun and revelatory speculation of watching a bunch of stereotypes yell at each other, only occasionally taking a moment to let Mookie give in a word otherwise while he basically abuses them passive aggressively and always gets what he wants, which what he wants is unclear, all until it culminates in the most materialistic of the characters getting together and doing something really, really stupid.
Of course it's all very revealing of the state of social tension and the difficulties imposed by multivarious ethnic identities all conglomerated into a whole and attempting to find identity while cutting in to each other to "fight the power" on their way to self-destruction, and if you don't get that the first ten times the movie says it, it's all summed up in quotes at the end. Or it's just banal. I'm pretty sure most people think of this movie in terms of the former, so I'll just leave it at that to keep an open-ended, objective outlook on it. Have a nice day.
--PolarisDiB
Hard not to like
A great movie with a simple setting but a serious theme. What makes it so great is the dialogue and characters. They really seem as colorfull as the street they live on. The whole story takes place in two days I think, but really gives you a sense of how different groups of people all gotta live day to day. Spike Lee is very talented, and a true director to be admired by amateurs.
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