"Wake up! Wake up! Up you wake!"

I had this on my watch-list for quite a while now since I joined this site, because when it comes to movies labelled as classic are often the hardest for me to truly tackle, but with everything that's been going on recently, I thought the time is right to watch Spike Lee's masterpiece. I know logging this in isn't anything new with everyone else doing the same, but you also have to keep in mind the reasons why a movie that explores the struggles of American racism, police brutality, and racial stereotyping still hits close to our lives, especially 30 years after its release.

The hottest day of the year in the neighborhood of Brooklyn - where heat, frustration, and tension quickly rises up to the surface in extreme temperatures, where the intensity is felt. A clash of cultures with African American, Latino, East Asian and Italian American that drives the story forward.

I am honestly blown away by this movie.

What I loved about 'Do the Right Thing' is how all the characters in the movie are not the most moral people and would commit questionable acts, which have sparked debates from audiences over the years. However, it is less about understanding them or finding redeemable qualities, but more to do with recognising their anger. The movie does not ask you to pick a side, but just to observer how both sides can be wrong sometimes. We are shown how everyone is talking negatively about the other race, so you should not always take it too seriously, and that you’re not always the victim. The only voice of reason in the whole movie is the character Da Mayor, played beautifully by the late Ossie Davis. He does what the title of the movie is saying, and yet no one takes any notices of him. The movie displays different viewpoints from variety of voices.

There’s a great scene where one person of each race group talks shit about the other race in a racist statement. Spike Lee intentional filmed the scene to identify how racism in different forms of colour are all equal. Lee shot every racial statement in the scene identical from the other ones. The message becomes loud and clear, which is that if you’re a racist, you’re a racist, no matter what colour skin you are.

Still, racial themes aside, there is still some humorous scenes that made me chuckle. The conversations between characters were both funny and yet intriguing to listen, which was apparently improvised by some of the actors. I said this once and I will say it again, I like it when the director lets actors work freely on set.

The performances from everyone were all excellent and all the characters are defined through the actor’s portrayal, which makes every single one of them memorable.

Danny Aiello is brilliant as the sweaty and tough Sal, who works hard at his business at the Pizzeria. Sal is respectful to everyone if you do not push his buttons. Even Spike Lee who is not only the director, writer, and producer of the movie, but also stars in the movie as well. Lee is a solid actor and adds a lot of depth to his character through his performance. His character Mookie is a young and tired looking delivery man who works for Sal’s pizzeria.

The character Radio Raheem played by Bill Nunn is the most interesting character in the movie. His character gives the audience a clear perspective of his frustration for us to identify. This is best examined when he shows Mookie (Spike Lee) his new rings and tells him the story of "Love and Hate", because we as people are constantly battling both negative and positive sides of ourselves.

Giancarlo Esposito who plays Buggin Out, a lively character who causes the most trouble in the movie, and attempts to start a boycott on Sal’s pizza parlor after realising there’s no African-Americans on Sal wall of frame, despite coming in three times a day until he finally notices. I love the satire of an African-American walking into an Italian pizza place asking why there's no Malcolm X pictures. I also didn’t recognise Esposito at first, because I couldn’t believe this is the same man who played the sinister villain in Breaking Bad. Terrific actor.

The cinematography features a lot of bizarre perspectives and camera angles, which are used to great effect and shows us the characters point of view of the world. The colour palette of the movie is fantastic and gives the urban streets a vibrant feel. The opening credits is one of the best I've seen in a while and the best definition of attitude.

I can see why people have labelled this as Spike Lee’s best work, and it deserves that title.

Overall rating: The current situation of police brutality globally, not just in the US, still cries out for justice and change in the corrupt system. In 2020, you would think that things have changed for the better, but it seems that we still have a long way to go. The movie was not just a head of its time, but present of its time, and how it is still present with us today.

In my opinion it carries a contradictory massage and broadcasts bad reputation of the black community. Moreover, I have ultimately emphatized with _Sal_ becasue of the ruin of his life's work, but obviously the creator's intention was black people are still in the late 80's (and nowadays as well) being suppressed and are the victims of police brutality.
I loved how the camera work was shown the big fish-little fish dynamic. I mean the camera has shown the ones who are in a dominant position over and the ones who are in the submissive position under.
The movie holds a stong statement that black people can't live freely even in their neighbourhood, becasue the police could raid them down any time like when _Radio Raheem_ got strangled by white policemen.
But why I ultimately could emphatize _Sal_ at the end? Beacuse if we take into consideration who are working in that neighbouthood and how many of them black people I could count only two, _Mookie_ and _Senor Love Daddy_. All the others just hanging around on the streets and doing nothing useful. _Sal_ is the one who has built a pizzeria and an existence in the middle of a black neighbourhood, because he saw a market gap.
And okay, I understand they are bothered by the absence of black celebrities' pictures on the wall, wich represented to them they do not matter, but it's nonsense to me that it's worthy to start a sort of gang war against an old pizza guy. They are frustated the way they being treated every day for sure but this move is not the solution. I mean the gang war against _Sal_.
Furthermore, policemen's behaviour was unacceptable how they handled the fight between _Sal_ and _Radio Raheem_, and how they killed the latter. However, the answer which was given, violence to brutality was not the right thing to do, beacuse the broad audience's opinion remains the same or gets worse if they seeing such demolition which the black people are pulled off.

[8.7/10] It’s there in the beginning and the end. It permeates the very soul of the film. The dichotomy at play. There’s the picture of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X side-by-side turned from a running gag into a powerful statement. There’s the two men’s dueling quotes on the utility of violence. There’s Mookie and Sal, standing face-to-face on opposing sides of the frame. There is love, and there is hate, in equal measure.

Those are the symbols for the two forces at play in one living, breathing stretch of Brooklyn, New York captured on celluloid by writer/producer/director/star Spike Lee. On the one hand, Bed-Stuy is a melting pot, where people of different races and backgrounds and ages and histories break bread with one another, do business with one another, and form bonds with one another. It is the neighborhood where Lee’s Mookie has a child with Tina, where he’s friends with Vito, where Sal declares him “like a son.” It’s a place where working class folk live together in a fragile but functional harmony.

On the other, it is a place where Sal’s son, Pino, feels lesser for having to make his living serving black people. It’s a place where ML complains about the Korean grocery store that opened on the block. It’s a place where, in one of the film’s signature sequences, a quintet of people of different ethnicities hurl an assortment racial and ethnic invectives directly into the camera, insulting Italians, Black People, Latinos, Koreans, and Jews. These moments highlight how tenuous this peace is, how that laudable cross-pollination of different cultures and peoples is likewise freighted with tensions that exist barely an inch below the surface and explode out in particularly fraught moments.

But those affections and resentments exist within the people who make up this community, and perhaps the greatest achievement in the film is how real they, and by extension, it quickly feel. Lee constructs this ecosystem, where everybody’s role and place and hopes and anger within it make sense.

We see how Mookie intersects with so many different facets of the neighborhood. We see Sal and the two sons who represent his best and worst side. We see Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem and Smiley, a holy trinity of characters who walk up and down the sidewalks. We see the Korean bodega-owners having timid or aggressive interactions with the rest of the community. We see the trio of gabbers who diagnose and assess all the world’s problems from their umbrellas across the street.

We see Mother Sister keeping the world in line from the window of her brownstone. We see a quarter of teenagers beating the heat and making mischief. We see Da Mayor trying to work his way into the good graces of the former and earn the respect of the latter. We see Tina, the mother of Mookie’s son, trying to get the time of day from him. We see Mookie’s sister challenging him to get his life together. We see Latino communities sitting on the stoop, and police making their presence felt, and radio deejays surveying it all.

While all of these introductions and interactions build to a clear inflection point, Lee could have left the movie as a slice of life picture, just bouncing back and forth between these disparate interests and intersecting personalities, and still have made a bravura film. He spends so much of his time weaving the web that connects each of them, and it pays off when the film reaches its climax.

He also uses his camera as the ultimate tool in that regard. *Do the Right Thing* feels like the cinematography of Old Hollywood, with sweeping shots that pull out of windows and shift onto the street, or capture the widespread chaos in a moment of unraveling. He crafts striking tableaus, with his various characters arranged within the frame in ways that subconsciously communicate their relationships to the audience. And he also uses his most potent technique -- shooting so many of his characters head on, using dutch angles or other ways to skew the perspective -- which makes their insults or challenges or explanations seem more direct and immediate, when it seems as though they’re talking directly to the audience. It’s when he shifts from that elegant, classical style to the more straight-up blocking and shooting that sells how easily the shaky harmony of the neighborhood can turn to discord.

That is the heaven and hell of *Do the Right Thing*’s depiction of Bed-Stuy. One minute, Da Mayor is received warmly by Mother Sister for his good deeds. One minute, Mister Señor Love Daddy is speaking the good words to all of his listeners. One minute, Sal is talking about planning to stay in this neighborhood forever, how Mookie will always have a place here, and letting in a pack of boisterous teenagers from the neighborhood even though he’s closed.

The next he’s railing against Radio Raheem’s “jungle music.” The next there’s racist taunts hurled back and forth over the restaurant's “Wall of Fame.” The next Sal is brandishing a bat and using it to destroy the treasured object his contentious would-be patron can hardly live without.

And then, not long after, the restaurant is gone and Radio Raheem is dead.

What cuts so deeply about *Do the Right Thing* is not just the violence that ensues in these moments, the sense of peace disrupted, the hopes and dreams on both sides of the divide gone up in flames. It’s how quickly it all deteriorates, how rapidly that delicate peace crumples, how fast that tinderbox of racial resentments and longstanding prejudices ignites.

There’s an unspoken, WASP-y shadow cast over all of this -- as the traditional wielders of power in the city are the one major presence in this movie that is keenly felt but hardly seen. Instead, Lee invokes the police as their proxy, one more accelerant thrown onto the conflagration, an outside force exerting itself on a broken community. The fire starts from an argument over a picture, one that represents both the racial tensions in Bed-Stuy and the conflicting ideologies that run through it.

The picture becomes the radio. The radio becomes the bat. The bat becomes the brawl. The brawl becomes the nightstick. The nightstick becomes the trash can. The trash can becomes the riot. The riot becomes the flame. The flame becomes the fire hoses. The fire hoses become another avenue for violence. And that violence becomes one more deep wound inflicted on this neglected corner of the world.

Lee spends so much of *Do the Right Thing* setting the terms of Bed-Stuy, establishing the tangles of love and hate that run through it, that by the end of the film, that terrible chain of cause and effect feels as earned as it does horrific. In two hours, we know these people; we understand why they do what they do, and we understand the pity and pathos of why it all came to this.

In short, we understand that frail balance -- between understanding and resentment, between acceptance and rejection, between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing -- so easily disrupted and tilted from one side to another. What makes *Do the Right Thing*, and the block of Brooklyn it vivifies, feel so alive is the way those two conflicting elements pulse through it all times, in every interaction great and small.

Those two forces, on Lee’s account, are destined to do battle forever: in fractious communities, in diverse neighborhoods, and even in the hearts of humble delivery boys and their employers. The movie offers little hope that the conflict could end anytime soon, only the certainty that there’ll be more skirmishes, and more casualties.

_**When someone does the wrong thing and others react the wrong way**_

On a hot summer day in a predominantly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, one person makes the wrong decision and sets off a chain of events that results in havoc. Rosie Perez is a highlight on the feminine front.

“Do the Right Thing” was Spike Lee’s breakthrough film that he made when he was 31. It’s a stylish and spirited account of a mostly black community in New York City that’s well-rounded with drama, humor, entertainment, honesty and tragedy.

On the one hand, this neighborhood seems like a pleasant enough place to live, if you don’t mind the big city. The characters are not painted as one-dimensional, generally speaking; they have both attributes and faults. Yet it’s a relatively peaceable environment with the various races/ethnicities getting along just fine with only minor (and amusing) altercations. Nevertheless, it’s a tinderbox that doesn’t take much to set aflame.

The last act leaves a bad taste. I can’t believe Lee had the gonads to be this honest, but he shows why most people don’t want to live or do business in black neighborhoods, including many blacks.

While people debate who’s right and who’s wrong, it’s simple to figure out: Buggin Out taking offense about something immaterial at Sal’s pizzeria is unjustified. If he thinks it’s that big of a deal he doesn’t have to dine there, plus he can start his own restaurant and decorate it however he wishes. At the same time, it could be argued that Sal should’ve reacted in a wiser way that turned away Buggin Out’s curious anger, rather than augment it. Meanwhile Radio Raheem makes a foolish decision by allowing Buggin Out to negatively influence him. Why can’t they just do the right thing? It’s frustrating.

This is a well-made classic and worthy of its iconic status, it’s just not exactly my cup of tea due to the exasperating last act that’s too brutally honest. How about doing the right thing by making art that inspires hope, unity and healing for inner city communities? This piece points to the problem, inspires questions & debates, but offers no solutions except… move away from black neighborhoods.

The film runs 2 hours and was shot in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

GRADE: B-