The seminal if also controversial dissertation of the pandemic racial tension and violence in America, a Spike Lee joint, DO THE RIGHT THING was released 30 years ago and still today, its impact has remained incredibly relatable. Curtailed the time-frame exclusively within one sweltering day of a brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood with mostly African-American denizens, Lee corrals a large ensemble in its specific loci, and he plays Mookie, a pizza-delivery average guy working in the local pizzeria owned by Sal (Aiello), where will become the key location of a pending crepuscular mêlée, while irrational rage and frustration are incubated by the rising temperature. Innovatively utilizing wide-angle lens, Dutch angles and panning shots to frame the various interactions between characters and dull the edge of its monotonous street-view environs ,DO THE RIGHT THING offers a microcosm of the racial bigotry so ingrained in the multi-cultural society (powerfully encapsulated by a spate of racial stereotypes raps enunciated by ethnically specific individuals in close-ups), and what is more extraordinary is Lee's level-headed perception of his own race and culture, there is no-holds-barred in his portrayal of the listlessness and insolence permeating the black community, it seems that everybody just aimlessly spends their Saturday passing by on the streets multiply, especially the ultimate tragic figure, the ghetto blaster-toting, Public Enemy-blasting Radio Raheem (Nunn) and the restless instigator b-boy Buggin' Out (Esposito), a friend of Mookie's,whose unconscionable demand of exhorting Sal to put some pictures of black celebrities on the pizzeria's Italian-Americans-only wall of fame triggers the sorry incident, Sal has been peacefully served and co-existed with his clientele for 25 years, why on this very day , their reconcilable, irrepressible rage reaches its boiling point? Let's blame it on the weather, anyway. Sedulously shifting Sal in the pestered corner, Lee doesn't shy away from the diametrical prospectives among white folks through Sal's two sons, the inveterate racist Pino ( Turturro) and the soft-centered Vito (Edson), who befriends Mookie and is often bullied by his elder brother. As this reviewer sees it, the controversial move to allow audience feel sympathetic for the predominant race cornered by the minority one is the game -changer here,a bold declaration of pointing up the complexity of the omnipresent hostility resided in humanity towards those who are different, the pathology that surpasses the ostensible racial signpost, a case is flagged up by the grudge held by the Africans to the Asians. So when the ultimate evil materializes in the form of the life-snuffing police brutality, what Lee vehemently reprimands is not the racism per se (which as he indicates, is ubiquitous), but the detrimental abusing of violence by those armed enforcers, Radio Raheem might not be everyone's friend, but the bottom line is no one should be killed simply because you don't like him or her, that is the kernel of Lee's kaleidoscopic street-view symphony, as his two heroes Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. promulgate against the basest vice is to resort to violence to harm.As the nominal lead, Lee's Mookie concatenates the sprawling happenstances with an air of coolth that dials down the blistering heat. Although prima facie, it is odd to see among the cast, it is Danny Aiello who gets an Oscar nomination over his darker-skinned fellow performers, but truth to be told, Aiello is phenomenal to behold in mediating an ordinary white man's balancing art between the goody-goody surface and the deep-rooted indignation. Other cracking choices including Esposito's fantastic outburst of a kooky firebrand with a scruffy haircut , retrospectively speaking, a total about-face to his recent screen presences in his mature years; on paper, Turturro has an odious character to play, but he moulds him with utter facility and even empathy; while Ossie Davis papers over Da Mayor's buried sadness with a beaming amicability,his real-life spouse Ruby Dee can launch a heart-rending wail even viewers might not instantly understand why as Mookie's mother, an observer of everything but leaves her own misery opaque, finally, Rosie Perez debuts as Tina, Mookie's girlfriend and the mother of his child, whose bodily kinetics and voluptuousness might outdo her embodiment of a young mother's exasperation being stuck with a ne'er-do-well, who, during the pizzeria tumult, at first does nothing, then in the wake of the flagrant inequity, smashes the shop window with a trash bin, an action can be construed in either ways: a cunning conduit transferring the multitude's rage from the human targets to their property, or unconsciously, his knee-jerking, reckless reaction that exemplifies someone who is finally done with suppressed ire, either way,Lee's masterpiece strikes a trenchant chord with resounding fervor and savvy, a cardinal food for thought that is deathless to us all. referential entries: Lee's BLACKKKLANSMAN (2018, 7.0/10); Charles Burnett's TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990, 7.4/10)
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