January 31, 2021

Last night, Mitch and I watched DO THE RIGHT THING. Written and directed by Spike Lee. Neither of us had seen it before. The only Spike Lee movie I had watched was BlacKkKlansman. Now, I've been keeping a movie log (a Mlog) and a book log (a Blog) in addition to this warm-up morning blog. And I am behind on two books and two movies. So I'm just going to write my Mlog on Do the Right Thing here and then copy and paste it into my Mlog, so I can go about my day. 

**SPOILERS**

DO THE RIGHT THING
1989
Directed by: Spike Lee
Written by: Spike Lee
Watched: 1/30/21

        It's hot in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. People hang out in the street and in the open windows of brownstones. Sal, an Italian American, opens his pizza place with his two sons. One of them, Pino, doesn't want to be there. He's upset that his father's restaurant is in a black neighborhood. Mookie, the main character, delivers pizzas for Sal but takes his time doing it. Kids unscrew the fire hydrant and play in the spray. Radio Raheem plays Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" on his enormous boom box. It's the only song he'll play. Vignettes make up the first half of the movie. It feels kind of like a Norman Rockwell painting plus a bunch of cussing. Everything seems to be about race. The latinos on their front stoop want to play their salsa music and get outplayed by Radio Raheem's hip hop. Older men on the corner discuss the new supermarket run by Koreans. They bemoan the fact that all the businesses in Bed-Stuy seem to be run by outsiders. Bugging Out complains that there are no African Americans up on Sal's Wall of Fame. It's his restaurant and he says the wall is for Italian Americans only. Smiley, a young man with a deep stutter, tries to sell his illustrated postcards with photos of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Mookie's girl, Tina, tries to get him to spend time with her and their son. Tina's mom curses Mookie out in Spanish. 

        Eventually these vignettes come together. Sal's had a good day at the restaurant and talks about how he's proud to have been the pizza that the kids in the neighborhood grew up on. He's been there for 25 years. He tells Mookie he's family. They're closed, but Sal lets in one more group of kids for a slice. Then Bugging Out and Radio Raheem bust in. Bugging Out wants to shut down the restaurant until Sal gets some brothers up on the wall. Radio Raheem is mad that Sal made him turn off his boom box earlier. Sal is livid that the boombox is back in his place. He smashes it with a baseball bat. Everybody gets in a fight. Radio Raheem throttles Sal out on the street. Sal's sons try to pull him off but Radio is strong. The police arrive and bust up the fight, but they strangle Radio to death while detaining him. The cops carry a limp Radio into their car and leave. With Radio Raheem's death, the neighborhood tears Sal's pizzeria apart. Mookie leads the way throwing a trashcan through the front window. Smiley sets a match and the place starts to burn. 

        Firefighters try to put out the blaze, but they direct their hoses on the crowd of people as much as they do the building. It's like a sad violent version of the kids playing in the hydrant water earlier. Inside the restaurant, Smiley hangs up one of his Malcolm and Martin postcards on the smoke-blackened wall of fame. 

        I spent so much time on the summary because I think the movie speaks for itself. The admonition of Do The Right Thing is undercut by the impossibility of anything right. Quotes at the end of the movie from Malcolm and Martin seemingly contradict each other in their attitudes towards violence. Radio Raheem's brass knuckles say HATE and LOVE. Sometimes love wins out, sometimes hate. But it seems to say they both go together. Except for the angry and pointedly racist Pino, no character comes off as being a villain. The police feel like as inevitable as fate -- closer to something like blight or famine than people. Everybody's pushing and pulling and loving and hating within the system. And like it says in the beginning, the weather is making this system hot. 

Rating: ★★★★