dMYD DVD
Starring Spike Lee
Y
Like a poemy poem or a book of great short stories it starts out lovely, mishmashing quick vignettes and characters in the same way its neighbourhood mixes races. There’s memorable roles aplenty here, painted with a skilfully brief brush: Spike Lee’s mystifyingly ambiguous Mookie, John Turturro’s pressure-cooker Pizza chef, the three guys who sit on the corner and comment on everything whilst trying to skeev beer from Koreans: keepers all, though nearly upstaged as a group by the amazing Ossie Davis, a man known simply as ‘Da Mayor’ and the sad, worn-out conscience of the whole street. As a Brechtian morality-fable it’s brilliantly structured, following the events of one day and night whilst weaving around a big cast of onlookers and instigators, the sections seeping through each other like a hip-hop themed puzzle box. Lee squirts his lens with a bizarre colour-saturation throughout, melting the whole thing in an early-90s VHS blur of primaries and sun-drenched streets, suggesting contentment and everyday happiness with an undercurrent of rising heat and tension; as night draws on the tone shifts down a bucket of venom, and a night terror begins for most of the characters you’ve fallen in love with that’s depicted in a brutal fashion alien to everything that’s gone before.
Whatever Lee’s politics it’s sad that little’s improved for inner-city communities since, and as such the film’s lost little of its power to incite debate. By staging his drama between the two pillars of Dr King and Mr X, Lee invites you to form your own opinions on the events, the film going out of its way to avoid condemning anyone outright. It’s a commendable effort, showing a sometimes stereotyped world in a succession of different lights and styles, all the better for using rounded characters and believable situations. Well worth watching if you’ve grown up in a poverty-stricken brownstone yourself, but almost essential if you were born on the back of a thoroughbred stallion with a gigantic silver spoon in your mouth, racing at terrifying speeds over acres of grass that inexplicably belongs to your mutant posho family. Yeah, that means you David Cameron, have some HARSH TRUTH and DO THE RIGHT THING. Wow, this blog stinks of the truth… Feels so…. Edgy…
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