Fight the Power

Alright, watching Do The Right Thing right now. My quest to re-watch this started a year ago when that Spike Lee dissed Driving Miss Daisy and big upped his own movie. I've written about the film on and off for the past year and was passively searching for it around HK.

Couldn't find it. And I was content on waiting...but then a few things happened to make my urge for Do The Right Thing go up tenfolds: First there was this random out-of-the-blue review in SCMP, then a friend blogged about how rad Public Enemy was in Japan and how it turned her into a hip hop head, and I suddenly realized that this film could add an extra dimension to my hip hop culture in HK feature for Muse magazine, cause this is a seminal piece of work on racial divide, black culture, and the power of hip hop (film reviewers screened it in 89 and protested the film shouldn't open because they feared it would cause a riot in the Black community. Spike then pulled the race card and claimed the White reviewers were making negative assumptions about Black folks) So yeah... I knew I had to see it. No more passively searching Mongkok DVD stores, I went and downloaded the damn thing.

A few notable shots:

1: Opening intro--Rosie Perez doing her fly girl thing to Public Enemy's Fight The Power.

(Now that I think about it, Rosie Perez is in the two hippest urban film from the East and West coast. Aside from DTRT she's in White Men Can't Jump, which takes place in Venice Beach and features Wesley Snipes and his ugly jumper. That final scene of Woody Harrelson dunking off a lob is the biggest stretch of logic in the history of American cinema.

2: Buggin' Out making a scene cause a White man (in a Bird jersey no less) steps on his Air Jordans. Then he takes out a toothbrush and cleans it. HA I did that too when I first got my AJs. Anyway, this film was accused of jumpstarting the Air Jordan-related crimes when kids in the hood were robbing others for their Jordans.

Anyway, Air Jordans set the benchmark for consumer products being marketed by a minority, caused controversy with the NBA (banned for the colors) and indirectly raised awareness into the youth crimes in the ghettos. All that he meant off the court still can't hold a candle to his dominance and excellence on the court. That's why he's the GOAT.

Bob Dylan said it best in Like A Rolling Stone, "you can't let someone get your kicks for you"

3: Sam Jackson as the smooooooth DJ. Think this film established his "cool". Cause before that, he was playing robbers in Coming To America and that other film with that one dude from that TV show.

4: Radio Raheem...cult icon now, idiot in the movie.

He's an idiot not because he gets killed, or because he gets angry over his radio being smashed. He's an idiot because he was minding his own business on the sidewalk listening to some PE when he let Buggin' Out talk him into doing something. He was content with love, but he was talked into hate. It's okay to hate, but only on your own terms.

5: The contradictory quotes by Malcom X and Martin Luther King at the end is the main struggle, and I say I gotta side with Malcom.